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Clovis Unified will pump more than $18 million into preparing students for jobs straight out of high school, joining several other districts in the central San Joaquin Valley in landing hefty grants for vocational education.

The state Department of Education on Thursday announced $198 million in career-training grants for schools throughout the state.

Districts will be able to teach thousands more students to be auto mechanics, construction workers and nursing assistants, infusing nearly dead vocational ed programs with new life.

"I think there's a whole segment of kids we are struggling to reach, that will be put in a setting where they're working with their hands, applying academic theories in a practical way," said Walt Byrd, assistant superintendent for facility services in the Clovis Unified School District. "They'll just light up over this."

Clovis Unified landed $9.8 million in grants out of $12.7 million awarded to schools in the Valley. Using the grants and required matching district funds, Clovis Unified will this summer launch new construction and renovations at its five high schools.

The state awarded the district $2.7 million to start a construction and building trades program at Clovis High School, $2.8 million to expand the agricultural mechanics program at Clovis East High School and $2.6 million to outfit part of Buchanan High School with energy-producing wind turbines and solar panels as part of a program schooling students in alternative energy.

Clovis Unified also landed a $555,386 grant to convert an existing lab at Clovis North High School into a medical lab and establish a health science and medical technology program, and a $530,808 grant to expand the auto shop at Clovis West High School so that students can be certified mechanics by the time they graduate.

The medical lab should be completed by the fall, but the bigger projects won't be ready until the start of school in 2009, Byrd said.

The district is designing new curriculum to pair with the expanded vocational training programs that incorporates language arts, math and other basic areas of study. Students will still be prepared for college, but they may have honed their reading skills using technical manuals or their math skills by making calculations necessary to build a house.

"It's blending academic rigor with practical application. It's a whole different approach," Byrd said.

He said the grants are the biggest infusion of money into vocational education in at least 25 years, noting that with the statewide emphasis on raising test scores in core areas like math and English, technical training has largely been eliminated.

The grants were funded through the passage of Proposition 1D in November 2006.