TRAINING – Thin Blue-Collar Line

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LOCAL CATHOLIC SCHOOL TRAINS WORKERS TO FILL JOBS IN GRITTY INDUSTRIES

In the manufacturing lab at Don Bosco Technical Institute, about a dozen high school students are working at brand-new lathing machines, wearing blue dustcoats and safety glasses. They are a rare sight in Los Angeles, because virtually all high schools here scrapped machine workshop courses long ago.

Indeed, Don Bosco Tech, a private Catholic institution in the San Gabriel Valley city of Rosemead, claims to be the only high school in L.A. County that currently offers students highly specialized, hands-on training in a variety of blue-collar professions.

While L.A.’s high-tech labor shortage has been widely publicized, the labor crunch impacting the grittier side of L.A.’s massive economy has gone largely unnoticed. Yet the need is severe.

According to some estimates, as many as 15,000 machining jobs will open up in L.A. County in the next three to four years, as a generation of machine workers retires. Many of these jobs will likely go unfilled, even though they pay $45,000 and $50,000 a year for a worker with only about two years of experience.

“Most administrators and school principals have no knowledge of the metalworking industry,” said Linda Wong, director of the Los Angeles Manufacturing Networks Initiative at the Community Development Technologies Center. “And what typically happens is that, when the instructor leaves or retires, the program gets shut down.”

A CDTech study on the metalworking industry in Los Angeles shows that out of 328 public high schools in the county, just 26 offer any kind of courses in machining, welding or sheet-metal work.

Traditionally, shop classes for working with metal and wood were designed for students who were not considered eligible for college. Even though well-trained machinists are now among the highest-paid blue-collar workers and often have some community college education, that stigma is still prevalent. As a result, high school administrators have tended to spend their resources on computer labs, which everybody assumes are important, rather than on metalworking equipment, with which they are unfamiliar.

The most notable exception may be Don Bosco Tech. Established in 1955, the high school and junior college offers courses in eight different vocational disciplines, including manufacturing, automotive, construction, electronics and design.

“I wanted to come here because I like to work with my hands, and other schools did not have what I was looking for,” said Joseph Moussa, a junior enrolled in manufacturing technology. Moussa last week was working on his third-year project, a metal chess set, for which he designed the individual pieces. He worked intently, shaping each piece on the lab’s metalworking machines.

In addition to vocational courses, students at Don Bosco Tech take college preparation courses in science, mathematics and liberal arts. They can either graduate with a high school diploma after four years or with an associate of science degree after an additional fifth year.

The mix of academic and technical coursework is producing graduates that many industries are quite literally desperate to hire.

“Their students are superior in terms of their learning and communication skills,” said Jock Scott, vice president of engineering with Vulcan Materials Co. “They have the entry-level qualifications that you expected 35 years ago, but that you can’t find hardly anywhere now.”

Vulcan has hired numerous Don Bosco Tech graduates, according to Scott.

No-strings scholarships

In fact, with five to 20 entry-level California openings on any given day, Vulcan is one of the companies most eager to attract Don Bosco Tech graduates so eager, in fact, it offers scholarships to students who enroll at the school, just to get them exposed to the industry. The scholarships come with no strings attached; recipients are not required to take a job at Vulcan or any other such company upon graduation.

And Vulcan isn’t the only company that offers such scholarships to Don Bosco Tech students. Sponsors include Avery Dennison Corp. in Pasadena, Ganesh Industrial Supply in Chatsworth and Nanak Prachar Sabha Inc. in Los Angeles.

The industry scholarships are an important resource for the school and its students. Although Don Bosco Tech is a Catholic school, it is run independently from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and depends on tuition and support from private foundations for its funding.

And at $5,000 per year, the annual tuition is out of reach for many of the students, the majority of whom are from Latino or Asian families in the San Gabriel Valley. Hence, out of 882 students enrolled in the high school program, 623 receive some kind of scholarship or financial aid.

In addition to benefiting from industry scholarships, the school has been quite successful in raising money from private foundations. The state-of-the-art metalworking equipment that Moussa and his classmates were working on, for example, was bought last year with money from a $750,000 grant the school received from the Ahmanson Foundation.

In addition, Ken McAlister, chair of the school’s manufacturing technology department, was able to secure large discounts on the metalworking equipment from local suppliers Ganesh Industrial Supply and Haas Automation Inc. in Oxnard.

“To some extent this is in the manufacturers’ own interest,” said McAlister. “They know that our students, when they get jobs in the industry, will be familiar with their equipment. And when they’ll be purchasing new equipment, they may choose the machines they’re familiar with.”

Foundation support

Familiarity with the industry and an entrepreneurial attitude have made Don Bosco Tech the premier local training ground for top-notch blue-collar workers, which many industry observers find sorely lacking in L.A.’s public school system. And that may be why charitable foundations have been so generous with Don Bosco Tech.

In addition to the Ahmanson Foundation, others that have given money to the school over the past two years include the Weingart Foundation ($750,000) and the H.N. and Francis C. Berger Foundation ($630,000), said Michael Gergen, the school’s vice president. These funds have helped finance the remodeling of the school’s science labs.

According to Gergen, the school is currently raising $18 million for the construction of new classroom buildings and athletic facilities to accommodate an anticipated 20 percent increase in enrollment over the next five years.

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