Teaching Students How to Survive in the Working World

Art San Juan sprawled back in his chair and sighed as Tracy Schmanski delicately tied a bandage around his splinted right arm. White bandages obscured his forehead. His left arm rested against his chest, caught up in an elaborate sling.

Schmanski offered him little sympathy. She knew that San Juan would soon swaddle her in the same bandages and splints.

Behind them, several people trying to lift a patient into the back of an ambulance stumbled and nearly dropped the gurney.

There is always a certain element of disaster in the emergency medical technician classroom at the Southern California Regional Occupational Center in Torrance.

After all, SCROC teachers are told to try to make their classrooms as much as possible like the working world their students will face.

Down the hall, the pungent medicinal smells of a dentist’s office are unmistakable. Disembodied jaws rest on work stands, permanently gaping open as aspiring dental assistants build molds and practice other treatments on the jaws’ teeth.

A few doors over, banking services students dish out play cash at tellers’ booths that look as if they were transplanted from the lobby of a neighborhood bank.

“Something special is going on here,” said Anne Just, a researcher with the National Center for Research in Vocational Education. The center awarded SCROC an “exemplary” designation early this year, the highest recognition it gives. Just appeared at a recognition luncheon held recently at the Torrance school.

“This is a place filled with a sense of professionalism, dedication and concern . . . (that is) helping students develop into mature, self-confident employees ready for a modern work environment,” Just said.

It is high praise for a school that started as an experiment 22 years ago with only six classes. The center has since expanded to more than 50 programs and has been emulated by schools across the country, including 69 in California.

Created as a joint enterprise of six South Bay school districts--Inglewood, Centinela Valley, El Segundo, South Bay Union, Torrance and Palos Verdes--SCROC was the result of a growing sense among school administrators that individual districts could not afford the equipment and expertise needed to train students in modern job skills.

As new technology required the use of more sophisticated--and more expensive--equipment in many types of jobs, administrators realized that many students were leaving high school without marketable skills.

Using a patch of land on Crenshaw Boulevard next to Wilson Park that once was used as a Navy munitions dump, the districts created the vocational center to pool their resources and provide a higher level of training, SCROC Supt. Elizabeth Nash said.

Their foresight paid off.

Once the territory of high school students bused in from the 39 public and private campuses in the South Bay, the center now attracts more than 1,800 adults each year, making up nearly 45% of its student population.

The center’s $6.5-million budget comes mainly from state vocational education money. High school students pay nothing for their training. Adults pay fees ranging from $50 to $90 per class.

Each class at SCROC is grouped into one of 11 divisions: Agricultural Services, Business, Construction, Electronics/Electrical, Graphics, Health Services, Information Processing, Marketing, Personal Services, Metal/Machine and Transportation Mechanics.

In addition to the standard vocational fare of auto mechanics, machine shop and plumbing, students can learn a variety of fields, including aircraft repair, interior design and television repair, or train to be travel agents, security guards, gardeners, cosmetologists, hotel workers, computer operators or graphic designers.

To stay up to date, administrators have five or six new classes in the planning stages at any given time.

There are no class bells at SCROC, which operates from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., six days a week. The same performance standards are expected of high school students and adult students, who share classes.

Except for a handful of special-education programs for disabled students, classes are not grouped by achievement levels. SCROC teachers, who are not required to have college degrees but who must have worked in their field for several years before coming to the center, are not told anything about their students’ academic backgrounds.

The emphasis is on making students understand what the working world is like and teaching them how best to survive in it.

“It’s a chance for young people to be exposed to an industry before they’re pushed out there,” said Beatrice Stepter, the center’s banking instructor. “If they have problems adjusting, I have enough patience to stop and help them achieve their goals. That may not happen in the working world.”

In some cases, students who have failed in their academic classes are so intrigued by their SCROC studies that they get As for the first time in their lives.

“The students are very motivated,” Nash said. “We don’t have much trouble getting them to come to school because they enjoy it so much. . . . We imbue in our students that anyone who is willing to try can be successful.”

Edward Waffen, an administrator at the center, tells the story of one young man who enrolled in the automobile upholstery class and ended up mastering some basic math.

“He was so excited to get in there and just wanted to do everything,” Waffen said. “Then the instructor told him to measure something with a ruler. He didn’t know how to use a ruler.”

Patiently, the teacher explained, and soon the student was adding and subtracting fractions--and making some quality car interiors.

The occasional lack of basic skills, combined with the growing complexity of many fields, have complicated the center’s vocational education mission, Nash said.

“In electronics, a teacher may spend hours on math and algebra. Machine tooling has the same problem,” Nash said. “In our office classes, the teachers have revised their curriculum to include basic skills like punctuation, spelling, grammar.”

At the same time, she noted, the workplace is becoming more sophisticated. “Where things are becoming computerized, we try to make sure we have that computer equipment in their working classroom so they know what is expected of them.”

At times, SCROC teachers refer students to an academic class or adult school to prepare them for the job-training class.

The center also works with English as a Second Language programs throughout the South Bay. As the students become fluent in English, they are referred to SCROC training programs to find work.

For some of its students, SCROC becomes the first step in their college education.

Torrance High School senior Denise Robinson, 17, said she enrolled in the dental assisting class to see whether she was truly suited to be an orthodontist, as she plans.

Now she plans to put herself through college by working as a dental assistant.

“This has been really professional and interesting,” she said, removing the mask and gloves she had donned to look in a classmate’s mouth. “I always loved going to the dentist, and now I know that I’ll love being a dentist.”

Adult students often enroll at the center to get started on a new path in life.

Schmanski, the woman enrolled in the center’s emergency medical technician class, said she had been a secretary for a couple of years after graduating from SCROC’s office skills class, but never liked it.

“It was hard to sit at a desk and look at a computer screen all day,” she said. “It wasn’t right for me.”

So, after spending the last eight years raising her two young sons, Schmanski, 28, decided to go back to SCROC.

“A friend told me that they have free child care, and I’ve always been interested in the medical field, so I thought I would try this out,” she said. “Now I’m thinking of going to work for an ambulance company and maybe being an X-ray technician someday.”

Each class has an advisory committee of industry representatives which oversees the curriculum, telling instructors what skills they need their workers to have and helping find inexpensive or donated equipment as industry standards change.

As a result, classes are constantly being modified to assure that graduating students will be able to find work.

In some cases, a company sends its employees to SCROC to learn new skills.

When Garrett Automotive in Inglewood decided to move one of its manufacturing plants to Mexico, company personnel administrators realized that many of their 200 workers here did not have the skills to move on to other positions.

“We used to hire a lot of people right out of SCROC at one point,” said Lenny Smith, who coordinates special projects for Garrett’s human resources department.

“So we thought: ‘Let’s try to turn it around. Let’s send our people to SCROC, retrain them in something else, and see what happens,’ ” he said.

Nineteen workers signed up for the evening electronic assembly class subsidized by Garrett. This month, 18 graduated, qualified to move elsewhere within Garrett or to another firm.

“I always liked electronics, but I never had a chance to get very involved in it,” said Juan Bent, 42, who has been working as a parts cleaner for Garrett.

What he is doing now “is not the best of jobs,” Bent said, but it supported his wife and three children. Now, faced with being laid off at the end of this month, Bent has a line on two other jobs within Garrett, both of which pay more than he currently earns.

“I was depressed” about the layoff, he said, “but now I’m going to end up doing something I like.”