Employees Thank County for Tuition Program : Education: Despite a tight budget, supervisors are helping workers pay for graduate degrees in social work. It’s an investment in the future.

Praising a novel county program that trades higher education for seven years of mandatory service, veteran employees told county supervisors this week that they had done the right thing by sparing the program during county budget cuts.

“This is a once-in-a-life opportunity,” nurse Addie Lara told the board. “I hope I can pay the (county) back with indentured servitude.”

Despite its tightest budget in years, the Board of Supervisors has continued its $126,000-a-year commitment to a program that pays most of the tuition and book costs for 21 employees seeking master’s degrees in social work from USC.

The program is unusual because full-time employees are taught at the County Government Center, now equipped with a USC reference library, and because the county requires seven full years of service after employees receive graduate degrees in 1993.

“It is a long commitment, isn’t it?” said Rino Patti, dean of the USC School of Social Work. “And I don’t know of another instance where a county has agreed to underwrite employees’ tuition. This program has a few unique elements.”

Created in 1990, the three-year program is intended to help the county grow its own crop of social workers, including many who speak a second language and understand the problems of the county’s fast-growing minority communities.

Because of a statewide shortage of social workers and high housing costs locally, the county has consistently failed to fill many of its 200 jobs that require professional social workers.

A dozen jobs at a time have been vacant in the stressful field of children’s social work, the curriculum emphasized in the USC program, county Personnel Director Ronald Komers said.

“Some have been open for years on end,” Komers said. “And social workers who are multicultural and multilingual are almost nonexistent.”

For Ventura County, which is 27% Latino and 5% Asian, that is a serious problem, he said.

The solutions to the problem--and to the overall social worker shortage--appeared one by one before the supervisors at a Tuesday hearing.

Barbara Harris--middle-aged, raising four young children and working 40 hours a week--said that two years ago, she was certain that higher education had passed her by.

“This is my third attempt at going back to graduate school over the last 20 years,” said Harris, an investigator for county Adult Protective Services. “I never thought I’d have a third chance.”

Gabriel Serrano, one of seven Latinos in the USC program, thanked the board for continuing its assistance. Eliminating the costly program had been discussed as budget troubles mounted this spring. Serrano volunteered to help if the county finds the money to field another class of masters candidates next year.

Serrano, a probation officer who has worked for the county for 18 years, said that as a social worker, he will bring with him a knowledge of Latino culture and insights into the problems of poverty.

“For example, concerning youth violence, we need people who understand the dynamics that make a young person have such a feeling of valuelessness,” he said in an interview.

Lara, a mental health nurse, said he did not mind that he was now bound to seven more years of county employment.

Unlike the reluctant doctor forced to practice in Alaska on television’s “Northern Exposure,” Lara said he had already worked for the county for 12 years and had no intention of quitting.

“I had decided that this would be my career,” said Lara, 38, a native of the Philippines. “So I thought I might as well serve it with additional skills.”

Once trained as a professional counselor, Lara said he will be better able to help the county’s Filipino community, which has doubled to 13,500 residents since 1980.

“Once they know there is someone there who understands the (Filipino) culture and knows the language, they feel it’s easier for them to reach out. It’s a trust issue,” Lara said.

Ventura County proposed the graduate social work program to USC in 1990, when the county budget was balanced without much strain.

But now, the county has cut 10% from its budget since January, 1991, and is facing even more reductions because of a multibillion-dollar deficit at the state level.

“It is a very expensive program,” Chief Administrative Officer Richard Wittenberg said. “But it qualifies people for a number of hard-to-fill positions, and it has recruited minority candidates. It has filled a rather desperate need for the county.”

The program has been good not only for the county and its employees but for USC, which for a decade had considered sponsoring a graduate social-work program in Ventura County, Patti said.

The university has underwritten about 20% of the students’ tuition either through lower fees or federal grants, Komers said.

The county has picked up 60% and the students themselves pay about 20% of tuition, or nearly $2,000 a year.

The county will indirectly get its money back, since the employees’ USC field internships include 22,000 hours of social work in the departments of mental health, children’s services, adult services and correctional services.

The employees receive a small stipend, but the county will save $382,000 in salaries by using the employees as social workers, Komers said. That covers almost the entire cost of the masters program, he said.

Those 22,000 hours break down to about 12 hours a week on top of the 40-hour workweek many students already put in. Employees say they work 60-hour weeks when homework and a four-hour weekly class are added.

What that will eventually mean is a boost in their $34,000 average salaries and a USC graduate degree--”an E ticket in the social work business,” Komers said.

But for now, many of the student employees probably identify with Serrano, who said he sees his wife and three teen-age children all too infrequently.

“Most of us are family people and we work full time, so there’s a lot of parenting done by phone during class breaks,” Serrano said.

And on weekends, “those are the mornings when dad’s in the bedroom doing his homework.”