Local News in Brief : Gains at College Cited

Pacific Oaks College and Children’s School in Pasadena has received a passing grade from the accreditation commission whose stinging criticism three years ago triggered major upheavals in the institution.

Saying “great strides have been made in the past three years,” a team of accrediting commissioners from the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges indicated that Pacific Oaks was recovering from years of financial and academic woes.

The team studied the school in April as an unusual interim measure ordered by the association after its critical review in 1985. Accreditation reviews are usually conducted about every five years.

While not laudatory, the visiting team noted that Pacific Oaks had improved in many areas and that school leaders are aware that “much remains to be done, and they are capable of doing it.”

The 1985 report urged that Pacific Oaks establish higher academic qualifications and salaries for teachers, create “greater academic rigor throughout the program” and also criticized the school’s “financial instability.”

Founded in 1945 by a small group of Quakers who borrowed money for the down payment on a nursery school, Pacific Oaks was a preschool until 1956, when its adult education program grew into a small college that now awards bachelor’s and master’s degrees in child development and marriage and family counseling.