Aerospacep Workers Will Be Retrained With Grant : Employment: More than 2,000 South Bay layoffs are expected this year. Much of the $2 million in federal funds will be used to help engineers become math and science teachers.

More than 2,000 aerospace workers expected to be laid off this year will be eligible for specialized job training and other employment programs through a $2-million federal grant awarded last week to the South Bay Private Industry Council.

The money, which will be administered by the city of Inglewood on behalf of the industry council, was awarded by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Job Training Partnership Act defense conversion fund. Inglewood is a member of the council, a consortium of local government and business representatives.

In its application for the grant, the council estimated that about 2,200 aerospace workers, mostly from Northrop Corp., which has offices in El Segundo and Hawthorne, and TRW in Redondo Beach, would lose their jobs by December as a result of defense spending cutbacks.

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Jan Vogel, executive director of the private council, said a large part of the award will be used for a program to retrain engineers as math and science teachers. But he could not provide a breakdown of how all the money will be spent until the council determines specifically how many workers it will serve and what their needs are.

“What we’re going to do is gear it to the individual,” he said. “If a particular individual is not an engineer and is maybe somebody who might match to being a truck driver, then we’ll go out and get truck-driver training for that individual.”

Vogel estimated that the figures given to the U.S. Department of Labor for the grant are now out of date and that layoffs will exceed 2,200, although aerospace corporation executives declined to provide figures.

Northrop spokesman James Hart said that although the company had not completed employment projections for this year, “Most likely, we are going to have to continue to cut costs where we can and sometimes, unfortunately, that does include job reductions.”

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TRW spokesman Daniel McClain declined to comment on the council’s projections but painted a somewhat brighter employment picture, saying: “If existing programs remain funded according to plan, the company expects employment to remain level.”

Vogel predicted that the council would be able to place most laid-off workers in existing financial management, job search and career transition workshops.

The one-year teacher training program is conducted jointly with California State University Dominguez Hills and is the only one of its kind in the South Bay.

The program focuses on retraining laid-off aerospace workers who have at least a bachelor’s degree in math, engineering or science to be high school teachers. Twenty-five students will begin the first class Monday .

“It’s a natural way to retrain certain people,” Vogel said. “Aerospace workers have a background in the math and science fields, and there are many people that have always had in the back of their mind that they’d like to teach.”

The class also is intended to meet the state’s critical need for math and science teachers.

“Right now the university pipeline is producing only about half of what the state needs every year,” said Gary Levine, associate dean of the university’s Extended Education program. The state needs between 700 to 1,000 math and science teachers yearly, Levine said.

“We’re sure that all of the people in this (class) will be able to be employees in Southern California,” Levine said. “These people will all be teaching within a year.”