Eden ROP Offers Career Pathways
California high schools usually do a good job of pointing students to colleges, but the path forward can be a bit more mysterious for students who’d like to go to work right out of high school. The mystery can deepen if the student wants to pursue a career rather than simply get a job offering little chance for advancement.
Former Castro Valley High School principal Blaine Torpey had been a student like that.
“I was a better worker than a student,” Torpey recalls. “It took me a few years to be ready for college.”
Today he’s superintendent of the Eden Valley Regional Occupational Program, helping students make the same kind of transition he did. He had worked in several world-class restaurants before going to college years after high school and becoming a teacher before going into administration.
Working with employers, high schools, and Chabot College, Eden Area ROP gives students and former students the skills they need to quickly enter in-demand occupations that pay well. Among those are medical careers, auto technology, culinary work, and even cybersecurity—which has been in the news recently.
The Eden Area ROP has been in operation for over 50 years and now enrolls some 4,500 students. Some 600 attend classes at ROP’s Hayward center, while the rest attend classes at their high school.
ROP’s school partners are the Castro Valley, San Lorenzo, Hayward, and San Leandro districts.
At Castro Valley High School, ROP’s program dovetails with classes like Mr. Thompson’s Marketing Occupations class. The high school also offers such other ROP classes as engineering, auto tech, photography, and computers.
“We give students a taste of the real world, with a taste of what particular kinds of careers are actually like,” Torpey said.
Adult programs at the center include dental careers, direct service providers for people with special needs, electrician training, medical and nursing careers, and welding technology.
Compared to private business colleges, the ROP adult classes are quite affordable.
The programs can also lead to fairly quick entry into a field. The adult program to become a dental assistant takes 14 weeks to complete, and the medical assistant program takes 20 weeks. One can become a certified electrician trainee in 6 and a half months.
High school students take ROP classes as part of a career pathway, which connects them to the chosen industry via field trips and internships geared to good-paying jobs that employers are struggling to fill. Employers often meet students even before they have graduated from the ROP program.
Career pathway offerings at the high school level also connect to community colleges and allow students to earn transferable early-college credit while in high school. A summer institute at Chabot College this year offers an introduction to several career fields, with live sound recording being perhaps a less expected one.
For more information on Eden Area ROP, high school students can talk to their counselor, and adults can call ROP at (510) 293-2910, visit www.edenropadultprograms.org, or e-mail them at adultinfo@edenrop.org.