Technical Education Offers Career Options at Venice High

President Obama spoke this week about a $2 billion federal program aimed at training half a million Americans for jobs in manufacturing.

At a news conference at a community college in West Virginia, the president said, “Right now, there are people across America with talents just waiting to be tapped.”

Closer to home, teachers at Venice High School are also looking to tap students' talents in ways that don't necessarily align with the college-prep focus of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Venice High offers four CTE (career technical education) programs: horticulture, auto mechanics, graphic arts and an award-winning sports medicine program. The programs, all of which have been hard-won, held an open house this week.

"Basically, we're trying to encourage the administration to be more aware that these curriculums are important," said Diana Pollack, who teaches the horticulture program.

"A lot of these classes are the reasons kids stay in school," she said.

Art Lindauer, a 17-year teacher at Venice High who runs the graphic arts program, sent out a letter to parents and supporters this spring, alerting them to the possibility that the program won't be there in the fall. "Venice HS and the LAUSD are planning on displacing me [transferring to another school] along with giving up the $3 million grant to renovate the Venice HS graphic arts shop."

Kirsten Farrell runs the sports medicine program. She was brought to Venice High in 2003 by the West Coast Sports Medicine Foundation. In 2005, she offered the first athletic training class. Now, she teaches five classes and runs a team of 38 student athletic trainers.

"Kirsten has a lot of trust in us," said senior Leslie Cardenas, who became familiar with the program last year, when she came in to rehab her shoulder. Cardenas is going on to study kinesiology (body movement) at Cal State Long Beach in the fall. 

"This pushed me to want more," Cardenas said. "When I came in, I was really impressed with the professionality in here."

The program recently placed second in the state in a student athletic trainers competition.

"The services they provide our teams is really a benefit," said Vice Principal Marc Paez, who oversees the athletic programs. Student trainers are required to do 160 hours of service over the school year, and they staff all of Venice High's athletic competitions.

"It's terrific what they provide not only the students, but the coaches," Paez said.

The students have to schedule their time carefully. Under the state guidelines, sports medicine classes fulfill the "A-G" course requirements needed for California universities, but under the LAUSD, the classes don't have A-G certification, which means they can be taken only as electives.

The auto mechanic classes at Venice High are poised, though, to circumvent a college degree altogether. Through a new public-private partnership with the tool company Snap-On, starting next year, students will be trained, tested and then certified to use the computer-based technology that helps today's mechanics figure out what is wrong with a car.

"I've done a lot to keep the shop up-to-date," said teacher Bob Azadi, standing in the middle of Venice High's impressive garage while a group of students aligned the tires of a car overhead.

Students in his program have gone on to work at such places as local tire shops and BMW dealerships.

With the Snap-On certification, newly graduated students' resumes will go "straight to the top of the stack," said company representative Bob Forest. 

"The more knowledge they have, the better off they are," he said.