College of the Sequoias (COS) is a public two-year community college located in Visalia in Tulare County, in California's San Joaquin Valley. The current enrollment of COS is 13,000 students, and the college offers a variety of transfer, vocational, and community-based classes, including the fire/police academies for Tulare and Kings counties. The college is named for the Giant Sequoia trees native to the nearby Sierra Nevada mountain range. College of the Sequoias was originally established in 1926 as Visalia Junior College as a department in the city high school. Its mission at that time was to provide inexpensive, lower-division college education to local high school graduates who intended to transfer to a traditional four-year college. Visalia Junior College was later expanded and a campus was built in 1938. The campus was built on what is still the college grounds. In 1949, it expanded further and formed the College of the Sequoias Community College District. College of the Sequoias is currently being expanded and renovated. The latest addition to the main campus is the John Muir building, a state of the art science wing. Currently, COS offers classes on several campuses.