While President Donald Trump pays a visit to first-in-the-nation primary state New Hampshire on Monday, Ivanka Trump has another early-voting state covered, traveling to Iowa as part of a push on workforce development.
The White House staffer and first daughter hit the road earlier this year to pitch tax reform and the child-tax credit but is now focusing her attention on workforce development and skills-based education as the White House and Congress turn to infrastructure.
Visiting the Waukee Innovation and Learning Center’s APEX program with Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, Trump toured the facility, meeting with students and faculty, and discussing skills-based training and tech education.
The senior adviser to the President viewed a robotics lab classroom, helped students collect samples of “vape juice” used in e-cigarettes to test the nicotine content, and studied a zebrafish embryo under a microscope, per pool reports from the Des Moines Register.
“This is an unbelievable example of innovation in education and pairing the skills being taught in the classroom environment with the jobs in demand in modern economies,” she said of APEX.
Last year, the President launched a task force on apprenticeships and instructed the Department of Education to make STEM a priority in the nation’s classrooms with a $200 million grant. On Monday, Ivanka Trump touted the administration’s workforce development initiatives, stressing the importance of involving women and girls in STEM fields.
“As we embark on the fourth industrial revolution, it’s critical that that trajectory changes and that more women and girls get involved in these important, lucrative, high-paying fields of the future,” she said.
She told participants that Apple CEO Tim Cook suggested she visit the facility after he toured it himself last August.
“He had just left Iowa and must have sent me a note from the plane,” she said. “He said, ‘You have to go visit this facility in Iowa’ because the tour blew him away.”