The Court Reporting and Captioning Career Department was granted $95,000 to train students to provide captioning services.

Vykki Morgan, professor of court reporting and educational technology, and Mark L. Wallace, director of public and governmental relations, requested the funding of $150,000 to fund the captioning program on February 2008.

The department hasn’t received the money yet, Wallace said.

“It is a long process to request this funding but we are really pleased to get it. We expect the money by late summer, maybe by September,” he said.

This funds will go toward the real-time writers and captioning training for Cerritos College project, it will be use to train those students pursuing a career in captioning.

The department planned to use the money as follows, but it may change since the project got less funding than requested.

Regional marketing, advertising and recruitment, offer scholarships to beginning students to assist recruitment, teacher training, curriculum development offline and real-time captioning, and to purchase studio/lab equipment and supply lab materials (offline and real-time), software/licenses, training and resources materials.

Cerritos College wants to expand in the captioning area of the department because of the 1996 Telecommunications Act; it sees an opportunity for job placement.

Wallace confirms, “This act says that as January, 100 percent of all broadcast programming was mandated to be available in captioning; and then full coverage for all new Spanish programming by Jan. 1.”

He adds, “Currently the caption broadcast programming is significantly short of mandates. With this funding, Cerritos College will begin the work to meet the needs of industry for a highly skilled workforce.”

Micki England, instructional aide, said, “Cerritos College went to Capitol Hill to seek federal funding for its captioning program, there is such a shortage of broadcast captioners.”

This is the first time that Cerritos College is granted funds like this one, says Wallace, I have worked in other colleges that had applied for earmarks and when I came to Cerritos College two and a half years ago I saw that it had never applied for them.

“The money is there so why not ask for it,” he said.

There was one more funding request that was granted to Cerritos College at the same time, Project Health Opportunities and Pipeline to Education.

Project H.O.P.E. was asking for $258,540 but got funded $238,000. The funds are expected by late summer as well.