Freshman students pictured in the inaugural, 1947 El Camino College Warrior yearbook don’t look like freshly graduated high school students. Most were World War II veterans. The national war effort had evolved into a national education effort, funded by the GI Bill.
One of the founding freshmen pictured in the 1947 yearbook is a future North American Aviation tool and die maker named Bill Pearson.
This past February, Pearson’s daughter Dena Maloney was named the 6th president in El Camino college’s six decade history and its first female president, replacing retiring president Tom Fallo. Maloney keeps a copy of the 1947 yearbook in her office for reasons other than the obvious fondness for her father. The yearbook is a reminder of El Camino’s future.
California’s 113 community colleges have embarked on an education effort, not unlike the post World War II effort, to fill the nation’s workplace “skills gap.” The 2016 California State budget includes $200 million for the Strong Workforce Program. The program matches student training with private sector needs. El Camino will receive $1.5 million of this money for its Career Technical Education (CTE) programs.
Maloney’s previous experience at the Santa Clarita and the West Kern community college districts made her an attractive candidate to replace Fallo.
“Coming from a smaller district gave her more hands on experience,” El Camino Trustee Bob Beverly said. Beverly represents District 3, which includes Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, El Segundo and North Redondo Beach. “We had candidates who were strong in community relations, strong in academics, strong in vocational education. Maloney appeared strong in all of these areas.”
Beverly noted that California community colleges are “two headed beasts.” Their academic program students are expected to transfer to a state college or university. Their vocational program students are expected to enter the workforce after two years. Maloney said the goal of most of El Camino’s 22,000 students is to transfer to a four year college. But her background suggest an equal appreciation for the college’s vocational program students.
In the late 1990s, Maloney was named director of the Santa Clarita district’s Center for Applied Competitive Technology (CACT). In 2006, she was named founding dean of Santa Clarita College District’s new Canyon Country campus, which opened the following year. She also served as the college’s director of economic development.
Foremost among Maloney’s achievements at College of the Canyons were the partnerships she forged with Santa Clarita’s many aerospace contractors.
“They couldn’t find workers. They were raiding their fellow contractors for employees,” Maloney recalled.
“They told me, ‘We’re not in the training business. What can you do for us?”
Maloney told them she was limited in what she could do because her college couldn’t afford the equipment needed to train skilled workers. Boeing, IBM and other Santa Clarita employers responded by contributing $6 million to equip her campus’ new Applied Technology Education Center, which opened in 2011.
“The companies also agreed not to raid one another’s employees, who were sent to the centers for training,” Maloney said.
Maloney had used the same strategy several years earlier to fund the College of the Canyon Biotechnology Center. The 4,700 square foot facility was built off campus, in the nearby Mann Biomedical Park.
College of the Canyon’s two training centers are similar to El Camino’s Business Training Center in Hawthorne. The center offers courses customized to the needs of South Bay businesses, taught by local professionals.
On Campus, El Camino has a new 70 classroom, $38 million Industry Technology Education Center, offering courses ranging from drafting and fashion to robotics and emergency medical technology. It also has a new, $30 million Center for Applied Technology, which offers courses in welding, automotive and green technology. The buildings were built with proceeds from a $394 million bond approved by voters in 2002. At the time, the bond was the largest of its kind in state history.
Courses offered at the new tech center range from architecture and automotive to paramedics and welding,
Proceeds from the 2002 bond will have been exhausted this fall with the opening of the new Murdoch Stadium, an NFL-level, $37 million football, soccer and track stadium, with an adjacent sports medicine center. The original Murdoch Stadium was built in 1949 and named after the school’s founding president Forrest Murdoch. The fabled stadium produced over 60 NFL football players, the most of any community college in the nation, and was the location for Chris Rock’s and Adam Sandler’s “The Longest Yard,” and dozens of other movies.
Maloney has arrived at El Camino just in time to preside, not only over the new stadium’s opening kickoff, but also the spending kickoff of a second, $350 million bond passed in 2012.
“We’re just finishing mapping out how to spend the 2012 bond money,” Maloney said in her soon to be demolished office. A new administration building is planned, along with new fine arts and behavioral arts clasrooms, two swimming pools, a new student services building and a new administrative building.
Back to the South Bay
Maloney said one of the reasons she sought the El Camino position was to be closer to her family. She was born in Inglewood. And though her immediate family moved to La Puente in the San Gabriel Valley when she was young, she spent much of her summers with her grandparents, in Hawthorne and has many South Bay cousins.
After attending Loyola Marymount on a scholarship, where she majored in political science, she earned a masters in government at Georgetown University. She then spent two years on Capitol Hill working for Texas Congressman Charles Wilson.The Congressman’s involvement in the covert funding of the Afghan Mujahideen in their fight against the invading Soviet Union became the subject of the Hollywood film, “Charlie Wilson’s War.”
“I worked for Congressman Wilson on postal service issues,” Maloney was quick to point out.
In the early 1980s, she and her husband moved to Hermosa Beach, where they lived for three years.
“I worked in Irvine and he worked in Van Nuys. Hermosa was mid way. When I got a new job closer to home, we celebrated at the Bottle Inn, on 22nd Street. We used to have breakfast at Le Petite Cafe, around the corner from our apartment on 190th Street,” she said.
Maloney and her husband recently moved to Rancho Palos Verdes. She said she is looking forward to more celebratory dinners at the new Bottle Inn in Riviera Village.
Maloney’s career in education began in the early 1990s with a part time job with the Santa Clarita Community College District. She worked with local businesses on job training. She subsequently was named director of the college’s Employee Training Institute, then, in rapid succession director of its Center for Applied Competitive Technology and then dean of the college’s yet to be built Canyon Campus.
Community connections
This fall El Camino will host its first (at least in recent memory) College Night for high school seniors and their parents. The evening is part of Maloney’s strategic outreach to area high schoolers. Another part of the strategy, she said, is the college’s “dual enrollment” program, which allows high school students to take college level courses from El Camino professors at the high schoolers’ campuses.
Despite her enthusiasm for technology education, Maloney did not speak enthusiastically about online classes. She acknowledged that they will be “part of the mix,” but pointed out they don’t work well for lab courses. She did speak favorably of state legislation that will fund development of online college textbooks because textbooks have become prohibitively expensive. She also noted approvingly that the El Camino’s faculty senate recently approved a new, online course management system.
Arguably the most formidable challenge facing Maloney is the upcoming labor negotiations. During the last negotiations, three years ago, a faculty strike was narrowly avoided. Recent negotiations at college districts in Ventura, Glendale and San Diego have resulted in faculty raises of 3 to 5 percent.
Maloney declined to discuss the upcoming negotiations, except to note that the 2016 state budget did not provide for community colleges cost of living increases (COLA). And it provided an increase of only $75 million for community colleges in base funding. But that is to be spread among the state’s 113 districts and its uses are largely restricted to capital improvements.,
In her previous positions, Maloney was a proponent of “interest-based bargaining,” (IBB), a negotiating strategy designed to find win-win solutions.
Beverly said he is hopeful that interest-based bargaining can be utilized, but noted, “To be successful, both sides must enter negotiations with the same spirit of cooperation and goodwill. They must abandon their confrontational rhetoric: in other words, everybody needs to leave their revolvers at the door. ER
