Vocational Education

Re: “Tracking by Interests Could Be Right Answer for Some Students” (Feb 11).

Adrienne Mack: You’re 12 years too late in responding to tracking and industrial arts/vocational education in LAUSD.

I taught printing for 14 years. I entered the teaching profession with a love of the trade and a desire to teach it. As years went by, the school site administrator used the shop programs as a dumping ground for the school’s difficult children: the emotionally disturbed, educationally handicapped, those beginning English as a second language, the hard of hearing and the blind. These students were tracked into shop classes while others who wanted to be there were discouraged from doing so, and kept out if they were also academically promising. It was a joke that these were termed “elective classes.”

In the meantime, my class size increased from 24 to 32 children, all in a facility made to accommodate a maximum of 24. Less and less money was allocated to the program while supply prices climbed and new technologies rendered my equipment obsolete. All of this while the administration expected professional-quality work from these kids. I was not the only industrial arts/vocational teacher in this situation.

In 1987 I was displaced from the school due to dropping enrollment, and felt as if I were going through a divorce. I was fortunate enough, however, to be picked up by another school, to teach history. It was a new beginning, and I embraced this challenge.

Yes, Adrienne, the word is out about teaching industrial arts and vocational education in Los Angeles schools. I should mention that state college training programs in these fields have been cut in response to you and others who [earlier] sought to abolish tracking due to prejudice against anything but college prep courses and tracking only problematic students into our programs.

I say you have learned a lesson, a hard lesson. It’s too bad that so much of a once-extensive industrial arts/vocational program is now gone. With your new vision and support, maybe together we could change things for a better future for our youth.

ARNOLD TOSTI

Sunland

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Adrienne Mack points out that “kids can take Regional Occupation Program classes in the afternoon or go to the Mid-Valley or North Valley Occupational Center after school and on Saturdays.”

In fact, concurrently enrolled high school students can take up to two hours of their normal six-hour day (morning or afternoon) in occupational classes at North Valley Occupational Center or West Valley Occupational Center at no cost. Buses pick up and drop off students from L.A. Unified School District high schools in the Valley. Students interested in occupational center classes need to contact the career advisor at their high school to enroll or the Young Adult counselor at either occupational center.

North Valley and West Valley occupational centers offer alternative programs of combined academic and vocational training for high-risk youth who drop out of high school. These students learn job skills and work toward their GED or high school diploma.

Saturday and evening classes for concurrently enrolled high school students is yet another option offered through the LAUSD and, specifically, the Division of Adult and Career Education.

DONALD R. GASKIN

Gaskin is principal, North Valley Occupational Center--Pacoima Skills Center.