Plans to move career education classes from high school dropped

Kyle Stivers

While preparing his new budget, Governor Gray Davis included a plan to take vocational classes out of the high schools and move them to community colleges. He wanted to spend less money on vocational programs and more money on academics at the high school level. Due to California's low standards in English and math, he hoped that taking out vocational classes would allow students to focus more on their core subjects.

However, people like Bud Steuart of the Fresno Regional Occupation Program (ROP) and other similar programs, including the Future Farmers of America (FFA) have been doing their own campaign to stop Davis' plan and they have been successful. Steuart explains that if vocational education classes were taken out of the high school, students who did not want to go to college would not be able to get vocational training anywhere except at the community college level.

Davis, in hopes that it would limit duplication of vocational programs, wanted to streamline all vocational studies into one program. His proposal gave examples of how programs such as ROP are very similar to the programs offered at the community college level. He thinks that so many programs available for the same training is not cost efficient and also very confusing to the general public.

In other words, Davis hoped to spend less money on the same programs that are simply named something else. He does not want to spend money on the ROP classes when there are other programs that do the same exact courses.

Davis wants to change the focus of California's existing workforce development system from short-term job training to economic development. This means that he wanted to not pay money for jobs, he would rather pay for career training.

However, this would have meant that all of the funding that YHS receives from the ROP program would have ceased because Davis would not have paid for career training for high school students.

A YHS spokesman said the district is pleased that plans to eliminate career courses at the high school level have been stopped. “These courses are very valuable for our students,” the spokesman said. “We are proud of our career programs and it would have been a shame to lose those classes.”