Highway Patrol, MGCCC partner for training program to recruit new state troopers

GULFPORT, Miss. (WLOX) - Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell is taking action to expand a training program in an effort to recruit new state troopers. The Highway Patrol is still facing a statewide shortage.

Despite graduating new troopers each year, Mississippi Highway Patrol is short of Tindell’s long-term goal of having 650 men and women in uniform.

Tindell and Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College President Mary Graham signed an agreement to offer something called CORE, Candidates on Rapid Entry, which will educate students on what it takes to become a law enforcer. The program will begin in the fall.

“It’s a great entryway, a pathway if you will, for our students to experience,” Graham said. “It doesn’t limit them in terms of only working for the highway patrol, but it does give them a little bit of information and little bit of that experience so that they can understand what life in the highway patrol would be like.”

Students studying Criminal Justice Technology will be eligible for the CORE training. MGCCC is the third community college to offer this program following Itawamba Community College and Hinds Community College.

“It typically goes on the entire year,” Tindell said. “Once they’re finished with that year, they will have graduated from the CORE program. Then they’ll be able to proceed on to a trooper school in the future. It’s not an everyday thing, but it’s something they’ll be able to do weekly and be a part of.”

The partnership is another example of how the community college is working to train people to fill employee shortages.

“We can be the venue, if you will, with the opportunity to fill that void for the workforce,” Graham said. “That’s what a community college should be doing. We need to train workers to fill all the vacancies along the Mississippi Gulf Coast.”

For more information on the CORE program, visit https://mgccc.edu/

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