Dante Powell arrived at Allen Community College this week, keen on getting a new Commercial Driver’s License (CDL) class up and going, perhaps as early as October.
He’s starting with barely more than nothing.
He doesn’t have a single truck, or even a simulator, at his disposal — yet.
His classroom, at the moment, is a former storage area from the old maintenance office, made available when the new maintenance facility was opened last year.
What he does have is a team of administrators and trustees eager to see a new CDL program excel, particularly at a time when colleges such as Allen are placing an added emphasis on career-based education and workforce development.
The stakes are high. Allen is hardly alone in seeking ways to reverse recent enrollment trends that have a nasty way of snow-balling, and subsequently costing the college in terms of state aid and other funding sources.
So, yeah, launching a new CDL program from scratch might seem a bit daunting for anyone, especially a 39-year-old college dropout whose pastime includes a successful career as a professional comedian.
But here’s the thing.
Powell comes to Allen having done exactly that — starting up a thriving CDL program at a community college in Iowa — before being hired at Allen this summer.
“I don’t know if my confidence is there yet,” he laughed. “I wish it was. But the excitement is absolutely there.”
POWELL, a Louisiana native, dropped out of college in 2009, and in need of a career, got his CDL and began working as an over-the-road truck driver.
For the next six years, he drove first as a coast-to-coast driver, then shifted gears to focus on more regional routes, and finally ended up doing local runs, when family life and other demands persuaded him that being home was more preferable than living full-time in a truck.
In 2015, he began working for a CDL training company in Des Moines, a job he held until being hired at Southwestern in 2023.
By then, trucking wasn’t the only career to take him across the country.
Powell also had built a steady career in comedy, booking shows 40-plus weekends a year, from New York to Los Angeles, in between his part-time job at SWICC.
In fact, it was between comedy gigs in a hotel room that Powell sat down and drew up a curriculum for a full-scale CDL program at the college.
