Latham: Tech will rebound

LYNN – Despite having to phase out four shops due to budget cuts in the coming years, Superintendent Catherine Latham says Lynn Vocational Technical Institute is now on solid ground as both a premiere vocational and academic institution.Latham has overseen a massive overhaul at the school since taking over in January, shortly after a state report detailed several problems within the school.While the machine shop, computer assisted design, marketing and early childcare shops will all be phased out over the next two years, Latham said the cuts will allow for the inclusion of more academic programs and more technologically advanced shop opportunities.The superintendent said her decision to close those four specific shops was based mostly on enrollment and alignment with state standards, which no longer support marketing programs.The machine shop will close this year, but Latham said the program would not be extinct for long, as she plans on combining it with CAD to create a more modern and technologically advanced engineering shop.”There were some issues that we needed to address with some of the shops to keep our programs in line with state Chapter 74 (vocational funding) regulations,” she said. “We need to improve the technology and in some cases we need to make improvements by combining shops and programs.”Another goal of Latham’s is to reverse the stereotype in the city that kids at LVTI cannot go to college and that the school is only for bad students.Although she made cuts to the shops, Tech is the only school in the city that received a boost in funding in the fiscal year 2010 budget, with money going toward the addition of a social studies department head and the school’s first full-time Spanish teacher.Funding also allowed Latham to create an employability and entrepreneurship program with its own teacher, something that used to fall on the shoulders of shop teachers.By taking that out of the shops and into its own classroom, shop teachers can focus more on the vocation they are teaching and students can learn the employment and entrepreneurial ideals in a more comprehensive class.”We took it away from the shops and we set up a new program,” said Latham. “It is really a great thing. The instructor is going to Babson this summer to take a course on it.”Latham will also be adding a Career Center coordinator at the school to assist assistant directors Caroline Hall and Bob Bontempo in helping guide vocational students to college or careers beyond graduation.The superintendent said the school is now structured so Hall can focus more on the academic areas and Bontempo on the vocational shops, both providing support for Director James Ridley.