The Corbin Center is a crown jewel, needs to remain a community center

Trent Knuckles is publisher of The News Journal.

For several years now, the Corbin Independent School System has managed The Corbin Center for Technology and Community Activities — which they renamed, for sake of simplicity, THE CORBIN CENTER.

For those who aren’t familiar, it’s the building right below the arena next to Tri-County Cineplex.

Recently, the school system notified the city of Corbin — the owner of the facility — that they would no longer being overseeing The Corbin Center after mid-August.

In my opinion, The Corbin Center is a crown jewel in our town. There are very few facilities quite like it in this area. I’d wager that just about everyone that lives in the city of Corbin has reason to visit The Corbin Center at some point during the year. It’s truly our community center.

I want to give the school system credit for doing an excellent job of making sure the building was used often. It’s busy! Just about any day or night of the week you can drive by and see cars there for some event. Proms are held there. Meetings, trainings, weddings, receptions, funerals, parties, luncheons, concerts, birthday parties, Christmas parties, reunions … I could go on forever about the things that happen there. They even play ping pong there regularly!

There was some talk about possibly making it a trade school and giving it to the school system. This is an enticing idea. It would benefit many. Like everything else our school system does, I’m sure it would be first-rate.

But there really is nothing else like The Corbin Center in our area. All these events held there now, where would they go? I’m not sure there’s another good option.
Leaders from the city and tourism commission will meet today to come up with a plan to run the center. I sincerely hope it can be a smooth transition. I believe it will be.