Founder's Message - Dr. Charles A. Jones
If you have already made the decision to attend this great school, then good for you! And if you are considering enrolling here, let me encourage you to wait no longer. The sooner you enroll and begin your program of choice here, the sooner you will finish and find that job you always wanted. This is an outstanding school with a very strong history of succussfully preparing its graduates for gainful employment. A wonderful experience awaits you here!
The forerunner to this school had a long and successful history as a part of the Sacramento City Unified School District’s adult education division. When the California State Fair moved from its Stockton Boulevard. location in 1968 to its current Cal Expo location, the school district purchased some of the land and buildings at the former fair grounds and opened a program called the Career & Education Center for adult learners. The school grew, and over many years it served a multitude of adults who needed low cost education and second, third and even fourth chance opportunities to learn. It was for many adults, the only and/or even the last chance they had for an opportunity to gain the necessary academic and technical skills to enter the work force.
In the early 1990’s, the school district made a decision to purchase a new district administration building on Capital Mall in the financial area of downtown Sacramento. The cost of the building was big, and district officials started looking at all possible ways to finance the purchase. One of the decisions made to secure needed funds for the purchase of the new administration building was to sell the land where the Career & Education Center was on Stockton Blvd. That land had very good value as it was adjacent to the UC Medical Center which wanted to expand and wanted to purchase the land. Obviously, this brought about a huge concern and outcry from the many adults who were currently in the Career & Education Center program, and from those in the community who had graduated from the school.
Hearing the outcry, the district decision-makers promised to take part of the proceeds of the sale of the property and build a new school at a different location – hopefully in the same general area. Within the next couple of years, however, with the school’s property having been sold and the cost of the administration building escalating, the decision-makers began to seriously consider not building a new school at all, and thus eliminate the programs from the district’s adult education curriculum.
It was this point that the community really came together and let the decision-makers know that this was not only a cruel and arbitrary renege on their promise to build a new school, but more importantly, what would be lost forever would be the enormous need for Sacramento area adults to get that second or third chance at the academic and technical training they never received in high school.
Being the assistant superintendent of the adult education division during this period of time, I was directly and intimately involved in the difficult struggle for the continuance of this exceptional school. I knew not only the staff and students of the school when it was going through the struggle for existence, but I met and worked with hundreds of former students from the school who wanted to lend their voices and efforts to the process of getting a new school approved, land purchased, and the new facility built.
By now you know the battle was won, but it’s important to realize that this new school represents the efforts of many devoted people who believed not only in second chances, but also believed that it could become even more valuable to the community by providing critically important technical training for the jobs of the future. This school has become a model of success because so many people believe in it, and I think it truly represents an educational mosaic of the entire community and its workforce.
There is a proverb that states “The Best Shall Preserve”….and so it shall. I can’t even adequately express how very proud I am of this school and its graduates. It is the BEST!!
Charles A. Jones - 2009