Resurrecting an old mall, a forgotten industry, and the aspirations of Henrico adults who always wanted to ‘do more’

Henrico’s new Regency Center is unconventional.

It’s an adult education facility, but it’s not located in a school, or a church, or even an office building. It’s located inside a shopping mall.

Not only that, but it’s practically a mini shopping mall itself. The center is one long hallway inside flanked by different storefronts – but instead of showcasing shoes or dresses, each storefront represents a different industry that’s hiring and a potential job offer.

“Here, you’re shopping for opportunities,” Mac Beaton, Henrico’s Career and Technical Education Director, said.

Inside one glass display are mannequins dressed as sheriffs, police officers, and firefighters next to a sign that reads “JoinHenricoPolice.com.” Across the hallway is a storefront with a large sign that reads “Become A Life Saver,” advertising fire sprinkler jobs. And next to that is the nursing wing, which displays hospital beds with mannequin patients and medical equipment behind the big glass windows.

The storefronts send a message to adult students, Beaton said: here, not only can you get your GED, you can get a job. You can get job training from the adult center classes or from industry professionals that will operate the storefronts, and you could be hired by contractors who are desperately looking for new recruits.

“It is re-envisioning adult education,” Beaton said. “You don’t have to go back to the school you dropped out of and try to fit into your tiny old desk. It is much more attractive to an adult.”

Instead of storefronts, the newly redesigned lower section of Regency Mall now houses adult education opportunities. (Liana Hardy/Henrico Citizen)

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The center, which opened just last week on the bottom floor of Regency Mall in the Near West End, will serve about 3,000 to 6,000 adults each year – not just from Henrico, but throughout the region. Beaton said that adults of all ages have signed up for classes, with the youngest being 18 and the oldest being an 86-year-old working to earn her GED.

Transforming 48,000 square feet in only 10 months, Beaton and the CTE team (which included CTE high school students) worked to shift the underutilized mall space into a facility that echoed a college or community college environment. Classrooms are sleek and modern, with SMART boards and comfy rolling chairs. In the middle of the entrance hallway are chairs and sofas for students to take a break and socialize.

Beaton insists the center isn’t a community college, however. It’s an “in between” space for adults to figure out their ‘what’ and their ‘why’ – what they want to do with their future, and why they want to do it.

“How do you help that adult who may be working at McDonald’s or Wawa, sitting there saying, ‘I want to do more, but I can’t,’” Beaton said. “You need your GED to move forward, obviously. But move forward into what? This is to help them see what that ‘what’ is and how to get there.”

One of the most defining aspects of the new center is that the CTE world is interwoven throughout. From the beginning of construction, trades companies such as VSC Fire & Security, Howell’s Heating & Air, and F. Richard Wilton Contracting donated time and resources to help flip the mall space into classroom space.

Jeff Lewis, vice president of inspections at VSC Fire & Security, said that 10 companies belonging to the American Fire Sprinkler Association participated in the Regency project, with three companies donating design time to relocate 216 sprinklers – $65,000 worth of donated work.

But with that donated work came a new prospect for these companies: potential employees. Lewis said he hopes that the presence of VSC Fire & Security at the center, whether through the visibility of their storefront or the trainings they will hold there, will bring more people into the fire safety industry.

“The biggest thing for us is just getting the word out, because the joke about our industry is you bump into it or fall into it,” he said. “Very few people set out and say, ‘I’m going into that industry.’ So this is now hopefully going to change our trajectory. When people actually see it and it’s visible.”

Twice as many people are retiring from the trades than entering them, said Tracy Parrish, the service manager of Howell’s Heating & Air. Companies are struggling to fill trade labor positions, and with a shortage of experienced skilled workers, many contractors are beginning to recruit recent high school graduates and put them through training.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re 18 or 48. If you’re looking for a career, we’re gonna train you,” Parrish said. “We carry at least two if not three apprentices all the time and train them, because that experience level may not be there, but we have guys that are retirement age. And if I can slip somebody into a truck and keep that truck on the road, it’s huge.”

The nursing wing at Regency Center includes hospital beds with mannequin patients and medical equipment. (Liana Hardy/Henrico Citizen)

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Along with GED and English as a Second Language classes, Regency Center will offer CTE classes such as Practical Nursing and Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning. As with the CTE programs in Henrico high schools, Beaton wants these classes to combat stereotypes about the trades and illustrate how dynamic and technologically advanced the industry has become.

“We’ve always been about how do you rewrite the narrative about what people think about the CTE world,” Beaton said. “Because it used to be, ‘that’s for ‘those’ kids,’ kids that weren’t gonna be successful – you stick them over there, maybe they can do something with their hands. But that's not the way it is anymore.”

The center already has enticed people to explore CTE and take classes. Almost 100 people came to Regency to sign up for ESL classes on Aug. 16. And when the American Fire Sprinkler Association held a career fair at Regency, hundreds of students came – a huge increase from when the group held its first career fair in Henrico before the project began.

“Our initial career fair, we invited nine school districts and had 12 kids come. I’ll be honest with you, I was a bit demoralized over that,” Lewis said. “And if you would have told me from that date, roll the clock 13 months forward, that we would have completed this project and had a career fair here that attracted over 200 students, I would have been sending someone for a drug test.”

The key to attracting new students is the physical space itself, Beaton said. The Regency Center is in a central area in Henrico, right on the GRTC bus line, and its location inside a mall provides an inviting atmosphere for adults, according to Beaton.

Incorporating the storefronts into the education center was another major component. Not only does the storefront design hark back to the nostalgia of when the mall used to be a “happenin’ place” back in the 1980s, Beaton said, it allows the center to showcase some of the best opportunities it offers its students.

“Why do car dealers rotate their fancy new cars up to the front of the line? So that you go back and turn your head and eventually you’re gonna pull into that car lot. Same thing with the storefronts,” he said. “You might walk by that nursing wing every single day and then one day you’ll think, ‘I need to go there and check it out.’ Next thing you know, you’re putting on one of those scrubs and joining a LPN program.”

Among those with a "storefront" at the new Regency Center are Henrico agencies, including the Henrico Sheriff's Office. (Liana Hardy/Henrico Citizen)

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Before Henrico’s adult education program moved to the new Regency Center, it was located in Mount Vernon Baptist Church on West Broad Street. The Southern Baptist church had older, eight-person classrooms where the adult classes were held, Beaton said, and was not as suitable for adult learning.

“It’s a whole different world,” he said. “When you walked in, it felt like a church. The bathrooms – 18-inch doors, you have to turn sideways to wiggle in. What’s inviting about that? It just wasn’t the place to be. So this was about building a place that would draw adults in.”

The center’s Aug. 23 grand opening was attended by all five Henrico School Board members, Superintendent Amy Cashwell, State Senator Siobhan Dunnavant, CTE leaders, students, and industry professionals. Beginning the project in June 2022 with the help of high school students from their summer programs, the CTE team finished work this past year with students from their school year CTE classes.

Student involvement was another achievement of the project, Beaton said. CTE students helped build new walls, set up fire sprinklers, redesign bathrooms, and worked alongside industry professionals during the entire process.

“How often would a kid, a high school student, ever be able to say, ‘Not only do I go there, I helped build that place,’” Beaton said.

The value of the project was about $4.8 million in total, but the school system spent only a fourth of that projected cost because both CTE students and business partners donated their work throughout the process, according to Beaton. Several other Virginia counties have approached Henrico about the project, interested in replicating the center and refurbishing their own old malls for education space.

“You’re talking about a mall revitalized,” Taylor Brannan, executive vice president at F. Richard Wilton Contracting, said. “I mean, how many empty mall spaces are there around the country? This idea is totally scalable.”

Adult education has also been revitalized with the new center, Beaton said. With Regency, Henrico will foster the same ambitions and opportunities in its students that it does in K-12 schools.

“We want our high school students to graduate with a plan – to go to college, go to work, or go into the military,” he said. “So you want to know what your ‘why’ is Same thing should be true for adults. Why are you here? And what are you gonna do with it after you get it?”

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Liana Hardy is the Citizen’s Report for America Corps member and education reporter. Her position is dependent upon reader support; make a tax-deductible contribution to the Citizen through RFA here.