Marin educators reach milestone on career training school

Fortified by $1.6 million in donations, Marin education officials are set to break ground Thursday on a centrally located vocational school.

The Marin County Office of Education and San Rafael City Schools plan to build the center, an outdoor covered classroom structure, at Terra Linda High School.

“I think this is really needed for our students,” said Ross resident Charles Goodman, an organizer for the fundraising campaign.

“There were more than 100 individual contributors for this — which I think is saying something for Marin County,” said Goodman, chair of the Shifting Gears Foundation. “Such a wide group of people saw this as a viable program.”

The structure will be built over the next few months behind the campus auto shop. In addition to automotive technology classes, the center will add career training in fields such as construction and health care.

Planners aim to launch classes in electrical work, plumbing, welding, auto repair, building ventilation systems, health sciences, medical technology and education.

“This will be a game changer,” said Ken Lippi, senior deputy superintendent for the Marin County Office of Education. “This is going to greatly expand the opportunities for our students to participate in career technical education classes.”

Educators also plan expanded hours after school and on evenings and weekends. Vans will be available to transport students for classes not offered at their high schools, Lippi said. He said the transportation will be available once the center is fully operational.

“This fall, we’re adding a class called ‘Introduction to the Trades,'” Lippi said. “It will be a survey class for all of the trades, primarily building and construction trades, and it would be an entry class into the next level. It’s incrementally going to grow over time.”

Terra Linda High School plans to continue this fall with its classes in automotive work, medical assisting and school careers. Some other high schools in Marin already offer a limited selection of career technical education classes, but not every school offers every type of class.

“One high school might have a class in construction and another might have one in auto,” Lippi said. “If you wanted to take auto, but your high school doesn’t have it, it has been challenging.”

Down the road, students might be able to shuttle between different courses at different schools in the same day.

The new center will provide not only a wider range of subjects, greater access and more hours, but also connections to certificate programs at College of Marin and those offered by industries — all potentially leading to internships and jobs.

Jesse Madsen, who oversees college and career programs for the county education office, said the goal is to give students “the opportunity to achieve academic success and obtain high-demand, livable-wage careers that lead to job satisfaction and financial security.”

“Employers have expressed a high demand for qualified employees in our targeted industry sectors,” Madsen said.

Goodman, who helped establish the “Car Appreciation and Preservation” class at Terra Linda High School last year, said the new center is “a good start” to responding to concerns in a Marin County Civil Grand Jury report in 2019.

The report said Marin students who might want job training instead of a degree at a four-year college were “underserved” by the curricula at the county’s high schools.

“Vocational training, now included in what is called career technical education, is not promoted sufficiently to accommodate those students who could benefit from such programs,” the report said. “Although the educational establishment in Marin County has increased opportunities for this group, the workforce-bound group may be unaware of the programs that exist. More can be done.”

Lippi agreed that the center will help fulfill the grand jury’s suggestions.

“We’re already serving hundreds of kids with CTE classes at Terra Linda,” Lippi said, referring to career technical education. “This will greatly expand that number.”

Lippi said the covered shade structure will cost about $600,000 to build. Staffing, equipment and class development costs will be about $1 million, he said.

“Our donors have been all across the board,” Lippi said. “They range from a donor in the six figures, to a woman who turned 99 years old and who asked her family not to give her a gift, but instead to give a donation to the center.”

“So we have all her grandchildren and family members who gave $99 each in her name,” Lippi said.