If you work at a community college that teaches cybersecurity, it pays to be located in the backyard of a spy agency. Just don't ask Kelly A. Koermer, administrator of the Anne Arundel Community College, what's inside those dark towers at Fort Meade. She points out other highlights of the restricted region: an employees-only exit off the highway, a sign that warns of military dogs, a large ball-shaped device that she figures is for radar signals. And another area that "must be really important, judging by the barbed wire," says Ms. Koermer, director of computer technologies at the college. Community colleges like Anne Arundel want to train people to reach the other side of that fence--legitimately, as workers. With Barack Obama stressing the importance of such colleges and a new White House cybersecurity push that points to a need for work-force training, some experts foresee an increasing role for two-year colleges that can supply government agencies and private companies with workers steeped in cybersecurity. But the colleges face a fire wall of obstacles as they attempt to educate those cybergrunts, most seriously the struggle to train and retain qualified teachers. Nine area colleges have adopted some or all of a curriculum that a CyberWatch member, Anne Arundel Community College, developed with a group of advisers that included representatives from the NSA. The agency, charged with gathering intelligence from foreign communications and protecting national-security information, is best known in recent years for the controversy over the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping. But to Anne Arundel's information-systems-security program, the NSA is a different kind of big brother: a helpful source of curriculum advice, adjuncts, and retirees who teach full time.