Six Picket School, Seek Refunds for Course

Worried that they are learning from an obsolete system and will not find jobs, six students from a technical school in Anaheim picketed the school Wednesday and demanded their money back.

Officials at Associated Technical College on South Anaheim Boulevard said the charges are absurd. With about a month remaining in the six-month telephone installation and maintenance course the six students are taking, it is too late to ask for a refund, college director Robert Ebersol said. The course cost $3,602.

Student Chris Herbstritt complained that the telephone system on which the class is being taught is obsolete, that equipment often is not working and that instructors are teaching fewer hours than are specified in the course contract.

“We just want our money back,” Herbstritt said. “We were misled, and we are getting cheated.”

Dean Wingo, 22, said he and several other students had begun looking for employment and “found out that the jobs for what we were trained in are not there.”

Older Equipment

AT&T; spokesman Tim Alban said the system Associated Technical students are trained on is older but that it is “still being used today.”

Alban would not say what the students’ chances for employment with AT&T; would be, but he did say that “they would not be as competitive as someone who was trained on a more advanced system.”

Kenneth Boyle, human resources director at the school’s Los Angeles branch, said the students’ complaints about obsolete equipment are “totally absurd. This is exactly what they’re using in the field.”

“We are training them on basic principles that can be applied to other pieces of equipment,” he said. “If you learn to type on an Olivetti, you can transfer to an IBM.”

Ebersol said he has had no complaints from the other 215 students at the school. The Anaheim branch, established a year ago, is one of four in California owned by Diversified Education Co. Although the Anaheim school teaches only telephone maintenance, day and night courses at the other branches include instruction for X-ray and emergency medical technicians, computer repair and video cassette recorder repair, Boyle said.

School Registered, Accredited

The school is registered with the state, according to a spokeswoman at the state Department of Education in Sacramento. It also is accredited by the National Assn. of Trade and Technical Schools in Washington. “Our accreditation is a show of good housekeeping,” association spokeswoman Nadine Keller said.

Keller would not say whether any complaints have been filed against the school. The state Private Post-Secondary Education Division received a complaint from the son of the company’s vice president earlier this year, however.

James Reed, who worked as an admissions representative, charged that the school, among other things, falsified applications with the assistance of management and maintained outdated books and equipment, division consultant Irvine Purdy said. After an investigation, Purdy said, the charges were declared unfounded. “Whatever problems there were, they were cleared,” Purdy said.

Boyle said the students should have come forward earlier if they had complaints. “For somebody to go all the way through the course and then say ‘I don’t like the course,’ we are not going to refund the money.” The cutoff date for refunds was halfway through the course, school officials said.