With the help of a $500,000 grant from the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, six Governor's Career and Technical Academies are slated to open by next fall. Designed to produce students who graduate prepared to work in technical fields right out of high school, Virginia's Governor Kaine hopes to eliminate the stigma students sometimes face when they opt for a technical vocational school rather than attending a four-year college. I think it is interesting because my husband entered the IT workforce without a technical school degree or a college degree. As a self-taught network engineer, he has expressed that he would have benefited from a college degree but after a semester at a school that didn't offer his line of technical expertise, Linux operating systems, and finding that the professors that students at this particular school were not up to his skill level, he opted out. Also finances did not enable him at the time to reapply elsewhere. It's worked out for him but for others, this new set of technical schools could help the next generation of technically-inclined students have less trial and error in their quest to find appropriate education and career opportunities.