Flap in Closing Vocational School

Brian HewsNewsLeave a Comment

South East vocational students

Dateline Norwalk — At its latest South East Regional Occupational Program Governing Board meeting, the Board was to officially vote on removing administrative and certificated staff at the SEROP, the vocational school across from John Glenn High School in Norwalk.

The move follows a vote last year by the Board to dissolve SEROP.

The move will save the ABC Unified School District, who financially supports some operations at SEROP, $3 million per year. It will allow SEROP teachers who are not union members to move from lower to higher paying union positions complete with all benefits a union member receives.

Sources tell Hews Media Group-Community News the “onboarding process” has already begun. All SEROP teachers have been contacted and told they have “good paying union jobs waiting at ABCUSD.”

The plan for SEROP employees was crafted and has the support of the local ABC Federation of Teachers union that operates within the ABC Unified School District.

But a deliberate and politically motivated misinformation campaign about the closing of SEROP affecting the Academy is causing anxiety among Academy students, parents and staff, and infighting between school board members.

One source of anxiety is that some families think that SEROP and the Academy are one and the same. They are not.

The SEROP offers vocational courses for adults wanting to become pharmacy technicians, dental assistants, among other vocations.

SEROP’s website indicates “our mission is to provide students with exemplary and rigorous career technical education that will support academic achievement.”

The Academy is a “Military and Law Enforcement High School” that operates on the same campus as SEROP.

Students are called cadets. The academy, according to its website, takes students from “25 different school districts,” and is operated similar to other high schools.

“The SEROP and the Academy are two separate schools,” a high-level ABC source told us, “dissolving the SEROP will not close the Academy.”

But that is not what certain Norwalk La Mirada School District School Board members and staff have Academy families believing.

The misinformation campaign has been so effective that parents involved with the Academy started a petition website that states, “in 2016, ABC Unified decided to withdraw from their partnership with the Norwalk-La Mirada Unified School District and thus pulled its funding of Southeast ROP.”

The site has received over 1,100 signatures.

And a letter obtained by HMG-CN from Supt. Hasmik Danielian to Academy families employs additional misinformation.

The letter states, “You may be aware that the funding model of our Southeast Academy is changing. Since 2000-2001, Southeast Academy has been jointly supported and funded by NLMUSD and ABC Unified School District through the Southeast Regional Occupation Program (SEROP). However, ABC Unified has elected not to continue in this partnership.”

But that is not true. The two organizations receive funds to operate from separate sources.

This story originated at www.losceritosnews.net

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