If you live in rural Maine, it could soon be easier and cheaper for you to get a college degree.

Maine Community College System officials on Wednesday announced a five-part plan to train and educate more Mainers who live in rural parts of the state, an effort to lower poverty rates, lower unemployment rates and fill employers’ needs for a skilled work force in the least-populated parts of the state. The plan includes:

• New scholarships dedicated to students from rural areas

• Rotating degree programs taught in rural areas

• More distance learning opportunities

• Hundreds of additional free and low-cost college courses for rural high school students.

System officials have not yet defined “rural,” so there’s no way to say where students would have to live to qualify for the new scholarships and classes. But Central Maine Community College President Scott Knapp said Franklin, Oxford and Lincoln counties will likely be included.

“I hope that more people in rural areas are able to access higher education. And if that’s ‘access higher education’ by taking courses there and then maybe even going to another college, that’s fine. If it’s taking some of our courses in the rural areas and then transferring to a main campus, that’s fine,” said Knapp, whose CMMC campus is based in Auburn. “And if we can figure out ways of bringing whole degree programs to them, that’s even better.”

Work on the initiative started earlier this year when system President John Fitzsimmons and other officials toured the state and asked Mainers how community colleges could better serve them. Employers, Fitzsimmons said, often complained that they couldn’t find skilled workers in rural areas, and they needed the community colleges to help with training. Rural residents often said they either couldn’t afford the cost of college or couldn’t attend classes because the closest college was too far away, though they knew they needed higher education to meet their career goals.

“They said ‘How can you help us get going where we know we need to go?'” Fitzsimmons said in a press conference Wednesday.

With input from nearly 400 people, the community college system created the five-part initiative. The first part addresses the financial barrier to college by creating a $5 million scholarship fund. The fund will offer $1,000 scholarships to 250 to 300 rural students a year. Central Maine Community College expects to give out 46 of those scholarships. Another $150,000 in scholarships will be set aside to help with child care costs.

The system will also increase access to two-year degrees by offering full degree programs – not just individual classes – in rural areas. Those programs will be rotated throughout the state. The system will start in the fall with five health care degree programs, offering courses at, for example, local vocational centers, so students don’t have to drive to a main campus. The $750,000 project will help 50 to 75 students a year.

The community college system will also offer more distance learning opportunities by spending $245,000 to provide live, interactive TV services at each of the seven campuses. The portable units will allow the college to broadcast fully-interactive classes to students at a local community center or school, saving them the commute to a main college campus. The ITV system is expected to serve 200 to 300 people a year.

In an effort to get more high school students interested in college, the community college system will more than double the number of free and low-cost classes open to high-schoolers, from 400 this year to 900 next year. Of those additional 500 classes, half will be earmarked specifically for rural students.

And in an effort to help businesses, college officials will recommend that the Community College System’s Board of Trustees expand its Maine Quality Centers Program, which helps train workers for companies that are locating in Maine or adding employees.

The entire five-part initiative will cost about $6.2 million, all of it from grants, donations and reallocation of services. The system will not ask the state for money to fund the project.

Officials expect to define “rural” and determine where students would have to live to qualify for the new scholarships and classes over the next month. The scholarships and classes are expected to begin in the fall.