Vocational Schools May Find It Hard to Ply Their Trade

Federal mandates requiring California to move hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients into jobs in the next two years has lawmakers looking to the state’s 2,500 trade and vocational schools to play a major role in teaching needed skills.

That has added a sense of urgency to an ongoing partisan battle in the Capitol over how closely the state should regulate the schools. Gov. Pete Wilson and the school lobby say the huge need for more trade schools fuels their argument for easing current regulations, some of the toughest in the nation, when they expire at the end of the year.

But some lawmakers, recalling the widespread diploma-mill fraud that spurred the tough 1989 state law, want to extend the current licensing, educational and financial criteria.

Three bills have been introduced in the Legislature this session to continue existing levels of regulation of the schools, which train about 400,000 students a year, according to legislative analysts.

The strongest of the bills is AB 71, introduced by South-Central Los Angeles Democrat Roderick Wright, which won approval from the Assembly appropriations committee this week. The bill would extend indefinitely the June 30 expiration date for the 20-member panel that is responsible for accrediting the schools and investigating consumer complaints.

That panel, the Council for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education, is perhaps the most visible manifestation of the law signed by Gov. George Deukmejian eight years ago.

The law is largely credited with ending rampant fraud in the trade school business, which was tainted by charges that students were graduating without adequate training and cases where schools closed down after collecting student tuition.

Lobbyists for the schools are fighting the Wright bill, calling on lawmakers to ease the regulatory burden they say is driving some schools out of business and prohibiting new schools from opening.

They’ve found an ally in Wilson, who vetoed similar legislation last year, arguing that the level of licensing fees required from small vocational schools is excessive.

Although the Wright bill won the endorsement from the Assembly committee, the bill is not expected to muster the support of two-thirds of the Legislature necessary for it to take effect before the end of the year.

That will give Wilson, Republican lawmakers and the trade schools time to come up with less restrictive regulations for governing the schools’ operations.

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