Prospective students, community invited to first carnival open house at Lakes Region Community College

BELMONT — To showcase the campus for potential students, Lakes Region Community College is hosting a carnival-style open house on Saturday, May 6, from noon to 4 p.m.

“It’s an outdoor event for the community and to build enrollment,” explained Katie Sweet, marketing and public relations manager for LRCC. “We’ll have the Eric Grant Band here, which is big for the area. We’re going to have program stations throughout our grounds outside. Each one is going to do an interactive carnival activity that relates directly to their program.”

For example, those interested in the arts can go to a face-painting booth, while the automotive program will host a tire-changing contest. Those interested in early-childhood education can participate in an adult tricycle race.

“Liberal arts will do balloon trivia, where people pop balloons with darts and have to answer trivia questions,” Sweet said. “There will be cash vaults that have a bunch of cash you try to grab, that’s going to be business and accounting.”

In addition to the 15 program-themed games, the college will host a bouncy house and sell carnival food crafted by culinary students.

“We’re just trying to bring families and the community together, and offer tours of our programs and buildings, which admissions is going to be here to do," Sweet said.

This carnival-style tour is the first of its kind for LRCC, and was born out of a recruitment necessity.

“This is taking the place of our normal open house events where people come and tour our buildings,” Sweet explained. “We feel like the attendance has been less and less on those, so we’re trying to break out of those traditional events and do something bigger that just attracts people.”

Sweet said she wasn’t sure why attendance for traditional tours and open house events was in decline at LRCC.

“I don’t know if it’s just a lack of interest, that if people just don’t want to do in-person things anymore, or if they feel like it’s not engaging enough. So we’re trying to do new things that are a little bit out of the box, but still promoting our programs," Sweet said.

Despite the dwindling interest in traditional tours, Sweet said LRCC has maintained stable enrollment over the past few years. The top three programs at the college are currently fire science, nursing and automotive.

Interested parties can RSVP to the May 6 event at lrccc.edu/festival. Attendance is free.