Adult Education Enters the High-Tech Age

Les Lane fell trying to climb without a ladder.

To meet the demands of his bosses at a Moorpark T-shirt company, Lane scrambled up some shelves along a warehouse wall to retrieve stock. He slipped, severely breaking his ankle.

Two years later, Lane is still unable to stand for more than 15 minutes at a time. So he spends his days at a task he had never envisioned for himself at 45 years old: training for a new career in computers.

He considered attending a community college or private computer institute, the traditional sites for such high-tech training. But he chose instead to enroll at a local adult school.

Once viewed as the province of students trying to catch up on the basics such as learning to speak English or finishing their high school equivalency degrees, many adult schools are now becoming centers for teaching technology.

As they move into this arena, adult schools in Ventura County and around California increasingly are competing against colleges and private institutes for students such as Lane who have been laid off or disabled on the job.

And Ventura Adult School, where Lane is enrolled, has been at the forefront of this statewide trend, a position state education officials credit to the leadership of Principal Barry Tronstad.

When Tronstad took over at Ventura Adult School in the late 1980s, the school’s vocational offerings consisted mainly of routine courses in bookkeeping, word processing and other office skills.

Tronstad began quickly to revamp the program--filling the school’s classrooms with the latest models of computers, hiring teachers from industry and designing courses geared to a changing workplace.

“They were a pioneer,” said Al Koshiyama, a state Department of Education adult education administrator.

Besides being a leader among the state’s 412 adult schools in offering technology classes, Ventura Adult School also stands out because of its responsiveness to its community, Koshiyama said.

“Most adult programs just keep on doing the same-old, same-old, year after year,” he said. But Ventura Adult School has “state-of-the-art vocational technical skill development.”

Ventura’s adult education program now offers courses ranging from computer-aided drafting to computerized accounting and computer animation. And it boasts an 80% success rate at placing graduates in entry-level jobs in these fields.

Ventura County has seven adult schools ranging in size from the 100-student Fillmore Adult School to the 14,000-student school in Oxnard. All of the adult schools are run by local school districts.

Besides Ventura Adult School, the three other large adult schools in the county--located in Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley and Oxnard--also offer training for careers ranging from computerized bookkeeping to X-ray technology.

But Ventura Adult School has gone the furthest in building a vocational rehabilitation program for injured or laid-off workers.

Of the 9,500 students who attend Ventura Adult School each year, about 275 are disabled or laid-off workers.

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By contrast, Oxnard Adult School has only about 75 such adults among its 14,000 students. Simi Valley Adult School’s 11,500 students include only 80 who are there for vocational rehabilitation.

Besides any altruistic motivation to serve the disabled and the out-of-work, Ventura Adult School has another reason for shifting its focus--cash.

Because workers’ compensation funds and state and federal retraining programs pay tuition for disabled and laid-off employees to prepare for new careers, they are a ready source of money for budget-strapped schools serving such adults.

Ventura Adult School charges $700 per month, for example, for the computer-aided drafting course that Lane is taking. The course typically lasts about five months, bringing the total cost to about $5,000.

That is a big jump over the nominal fees for typical adult school classes, such as the $48 that Ventura Adult School charges for a semester of conversational French.

Overall, Ventura Adult School gets $850,000, or more than one-quarter of its annual $3-million budget, from its vocational rehabilitation program for disabled or laid-off workers. The school gets another $1.2 million per year from a special retraining program it runs at Camarillo State Hospital for adults confined to the institution.

Simi Valley Adult School, by contrast, gets only $100,000 in fees each year from its vocational rehabilitation courses.

But the Simi Valley school, which has one of the widest selections of course offerings among the county’s adult schools, gets about $4.6 million from the state each year compared to only about $1 million in annual state funding for the adult education program in Ventura.

In light of such stagnant levels of state funding, Tronstad decided when he took over Ventura Adult School that the only way to enhance the school’s courses was to get money from other sources. So he began to contract with local insurance companies and rehabilitation agencies to train their disabled or laid-off clients.

Under state law, the school cannot use any of the money it receives from vocational rehabilitation contracts to support other programs at the school.

So it uses the funds from its Technology Development Center--the name of its vocational rehabilitation program--to pay the salaries of the center’s 10 full-time teachers and to upgrade its equipment. The school spends roughly $200,000 each year on hardware and software for subjects ranging from computer animation to computer graphics.

Offering such courses allows the adult school to play a vital role in the community at a time when when midlife career changes are becoming the norm and employers are demanding an increasingly high level of skills from workers, Tronstad said.

For students, adult schools frequently offer more individual attention and flexible hours than community colleges or private institutes, some students at Ventura Adult School said.

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Unlike schools that abide by traditional academic year calendars, students are able to enroll in any Technology Development Center’s courses at any time during the year.

Although students report to class during regular hours each day--from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. for the computer-aided drafting course--they work at their own pace.

Lane said he considered but dismissed the idea of enrolling at a community college, where it takes two years to earn an associate’s degree.

“You can’t afford at my age to kick back and go to school for two years,” he said.

A onetime painting contractor and heavy-equipment operator, Lane has always made his living by the sweat of his brow.

But a year after breaking his ankle, when even surgery failed to heal the pain, Lane faced the fact he had to train for work that he could do without standing or using his legs.

When he earns his computer-aided drafting certificate in November, he hopes to land an entry-level job, most of which pay between $7 and $11.50 per hour. That would be less than what Lane earned in previous jobs, he said, but it would be far more than the $187.50-per-week workers’ compensation payments that he has to live on while he is in school.

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Lane travels to school from his home in Carpinteria each day. Other students come from as far away as San Luis Obispo.

“I had never touched a computer, not even to play computer games,” Lane said.

But he never forgets the seriousness of his situation.

“I’m concentrating on this,” Lane said, gesturing toward his computer, “because I don’t have a backup.”

Margie Giallenardo, a 57-year-old Camarillo resident, worked as a waitress for 40 years before she slipped at the Newbury Park restaurant where she worked, breaking her hip and left arm.

No longer able to lift heavy trays, she is now studying computerized bookkeeping at Ventura Adult School. Although she earned $15 an hour as a waitress, including tips, Giallenardo said she expects to get a bookkeeping job paying $8 to $12 per hour.

“I loved waitressing,” she said. “It was the only thing I knew.” But she said she shares with her classmates a hopeful attitude about the future. “Everybody has a pretty good attitude here. You’re here because you want to be.”