Netherlands Consulate General to visit NWACC

NorthWest Arkansas Community College (NWACC) will host the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Skadi Tirpak, and two other faculty members from Netherland’s Regional Community College on Oct. 17 -18 to discuss NWACC’s bicycle assembly and repair tech program.

“The Netherlands is known as a cycling nation. We seemingly bike everywhere thanks to safe infrastructure and inter-modal connectivity, and we keep developing and innovating to ensure it keeps improving,” said Tirpak. “When we learned that NWACC had launched a bicycle technician program in the United States and was interested in learning how the Netherlands does it, we reached out to ROC van Twente to invite them to share their knowledge with NWACC.”

ROC van Twente, the community college in the Netherlands, is a regional training center for vocational education and training and adult education in the Netherlands and offers a bicycle technician program. Tirpak said he will be joined by faculty members Jordy Luisman and Rene Lammers in Bentonville to discuss the bicycle tech program. The timing of their trip to Bentonville also coincides with the SHIFT’22 conference that will take place Oct. 18-20.

“NWACC has made history by being one of the first community college bicycle technician programs in the nation. That said, countries like the Netherlands have had well developed bicycle technician programs for a long time, and both cycling and bicycle technician training are worked into the infrastructure of Dutch transportation and logistics and supported by the government. We are grateful for the opportunity to learn from these experts and let them experience our beautiful bike tech lab,” said Dr. Megan Bolinder, NWACC dean of workforce & economic development.