CEDAR, Inc. - Future of Work in Appalachia

10/02/2026

CEDAR was at The Bridge, Pikeville Medical Center's college and career fair at the Appalachian Wireless Arena.

Our booth covered the three ways the CEDAR Education Initiative engages K-12 students in shaping the future of work in Appalachia: innovation and entrepreneurship, coal, and health care careers.

Thank you to Pikeville Medical Center for hosting, and to everyone who stopped by.

10/01/2026

The surgical team is bigger than the surgeon.

A surgical technologist works under medical supervision to keep an operation safe — part of the team in the operating room, and in outpatient clinics and medical offices too.

Big Sandy, Hazard and Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical Colleges all offer the Associate in Applied Science in Surgical Technology.

It is a selective program with limited seats. Most colleges ask applicants to attend a pre-admission conference first. Every course needs a C or better, and CPR certification is required before the first skills practicum. Graduates sit the national certifying exam.

Sources: KCTCS; Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College.

09/29/2026

Steelmaking does not run on coal. It runs on coke — coal baked without oxygen until it is hard, porous and carbon-rich.

Not every coal can become coke. It has to be low in sulfur, low in ash, and carry volatile matter inside a narrow band. Several Eastern Kentucky seams clear the sulfur and ash thresholds but run mid-to-high 30s on volatile matter, above the prime coking range.

So they get blended with low-volatile coal, and the mix makes a better coke than either seam would alone.

Sources: Kentucky Geological Survey; USGS Circular 891.

09/24/2026

There is a meeting you have to go to before you can apply.

Every respiratory care program in the KCTCS system requires applicants to attend a pre-admission conference. The colleges hold it once a year, and an application is not considered without it.

Three courses come first: BIO 137 Anatomy and Physiology, ENG 101, and MAT 150 or MAT 146, each with a C or better. Then twelve credit hours of general education, a 2.0 cumulative GPA, and a 2.5 across those general education courses.

Applying to the college is not the same as applying to the program. The program wants a letter of application to the Program Director and official transcripts from everywhere you have studied.

Big Sandy Community and Technical College runs the program, accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Respiratory Care. Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College runs one at Whitesburg.

Admission is selective. Graduates sit the national registry exams.

Sources: KCTCS Faculty Senate Rules 3.11; Big Sandy Community and Technical College; Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College.

09/22/2026

Most coal is banded. You can see the layers in it.

Cannel coal is not. It is the same the whole way through, and it breaks with a conchoidal fracture — the way flint does, or glass.

In 1904 Kentucky's mineral exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair included an arch built of it.

Sources: Kentucky Geological Survey; Kentucky at the World's Fair, St. Louis, 1904.

09/21/2026

Telling the story of coal in Eastern Kentucky is patient work, and John Justice has been at it a long time.

Congratulations to John, named 2026 Citizen of the Year by the Southeast Kentucky Chamber of Commerce.

Southeast Kentucky Chamber Annual Awards 2026Congratulations once ...

09/19/2026

Everybody in these hills knows the name. Almost nobody knows the story that was actually told here.

CEDAR Seasonal Stories starts this week — a Saturday series running all year, with the season setting the subject.

09/17/2026

Three classes, then two years, then a hospital job.

Hazard Community and Technical College and Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College run the Regional Radiography Program together — one program shared between two colleges, so a region this size can sustain it. Labs are in Hazard and Whitesburg, and instruction runs to both at once, so you attend at whichever campus is closer to home.

Start with BIO 137 and BIO 139 Anatomy and Physiology, and MAT 150 College Algebra or higher. Those come before any imaging course. Admission is selective and points-based, so grades in them count, and you need a 2.5 cumulative GPA.

Credentials have to be on file before April 1.

Two things worth planning for: you provide your own transportation to clinical sites across Eastern Kentucky and southwest Virginia, and you pay for the background check and drug screen.

Sources: Hazard Community and Technical College; Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College.

09/15/2026

Kentucky used to sit on the equator.

Its coal began as peat — dead plants piling up in standing water faster than they could rot. That was the Pennsylvanian Period, which began about 323 million years ago, and the climate here was much like modern Indonesia's. The swamps were scale trees, giant horsetails and tree ferns. No flowering plants existed yet — they were still a hundred million years away.

Shallow seas advanced and withdrew across the state more than fifty times. Each time a swamp was drowned and buried under mud and sand, and a new one grew on top of it.

Eastern Kentucky has forty-five to fifty major coal beds. Every one of them is a buried swamp.

Source: Kentucky Geological Survey.

06/20/2026

From all of us at CEDAR, thank you for a successful 2026 Fair — our 33rd. For thirty-three years students have woven coal, community development, and Appalachian life into every subject area, and we are already looking ahead to next year. If you want to be involved in the 2027 Coal Fair as a school, judge, or sponsor, send us a message.