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- Dr. Bill Blank
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Bill Blank
BB: Well, there are quite a few better days. A lot of grants have dried up, but you’re absolutely right. During the past 25 years or so, our department in its various iterations has been very, very active securing grants, mostly at the state level, but we’ve also had a number of federal grants. Vocational and technical education has experienced a lot of growth and change and development over the last 25 years and a lot of that growth occurred because of those grant initiatives. I looked at my grant records just recently and I was personally responsible for securing about $3.5 million in grants over the years. Ray Hill, who was chair of the department of course before me, was responsible for twice that level of grant funding, but the grant involvement was a very nice plus because of what it would do. First of all, it provided a lot of funding for travel, for some infrastructure, for graduate assistantships, summer employment, those kinds of things. Most of our grants added a nice synergy in terms of the grant activity complementing our academic program. A good example would be about 10 years we had a grant called the Leadership Development Program. This program involved recruiting women into traditionally male occupations such as electronics and welding, particularly displaced homemakers and pregnant teens. It provided support for them and childcare for them to move into high wage careers. We ran that project for 10 years and it was responsible for providing a seed that resulted in a new course in our undergraduate program which is taught to this day and became one of the approved exit requirements. We run three to four sections of that equity course every semester and it’s interesting to look back and see it really started with a grant activity. I guess that’s the ideal situation with grants that you have some kind of leverage in terms of your academic program. The grant days were good. We’re still doing some grant work, but not at the level we did at one time.
LB: Now I know the department has always had a close relationship with the surrounding counties first with Hillsborough, but also Pinellas, Pasco, Polk, and the others that we serve, were any of the grants involving the counties or were those extra activities?
BB: Most of our relationship with the surrounding districts primarily involved sitting on committees that they had going, doing some staff development for their teachers. At one time, we would routinely visit everyone at the post secondary technical centers of which there are a dozen or so in the Tampa Bay area. Every semester we would conduct a full day of advising for their teachers about upcoming courses and what to take for their next level of certification or degree. So, we had a very close relationship. They would invite us out into their schools to advise teachers on site. We would actually teach classes sometime at the tech centers and sometimes high schools, but most of that interaction with the district was just partnership for providing staff development, helping them with curriculum startup for new programs; some were grant related but most were not.
LB: Of course a lot of those administrators were your former students. After a few years in positions of leadership some had graduated from your programs including some of the assistant superintendents and others.
BB: Yes, as I’m sure you’ve seen in your former program when you’re here long enough you begin to see a number of your graduates really take over. Not only on the local level, but state and even national leadership positions. That’s particularly gratifying to see assistant superintendents and even superintendents and occupational deans at community colleges. I’m thinking around at a dozen or so post secondary technical institutes in the area. Probably 90% of those directors or assistant directors are graduates of our master’s, educational specialist, and doctoral programs. LB: I know our faculty over the years always felt we were climbing uphill being in physical education when we were competing for funding with math, science, and English and so forth. Was that ever the case within your faculty, that feeling that we’ve got to work harder to get our fair share?
BB: Not only was it a factor but it very much still is. It’s the Ginger Rogers’ factor you know where you have to be twice as good cause you doing it backwards and in high heels. The whole area of vocational education is quite frankly looked down upon by many on the academic side of the fence. Historically, vocational education programs were often associated with the less talented students, the trouble makers. I mean it wasn’t too many years ago where some justice systems would sentence youth offenders to either you go to prison or you go to the vocational school. So that didn’t give us a sterling reputation among the public, but in the last 20 years or so vocational education has completely been transformed into a high tech, rigorous, high quality, technical education kind of operation. But the image among our colleagues particularly has persisted and, we still have a long way to go there. One serious challenge we faced over the years is as our faculty members have retired, a succession of deans in the College of Education who weren’t terribly familiar with vocational education and perhaps didn’t really support it very strongly, and were less inclined to replace those retiring faculty. Over a period of ten years or so we shrank from about thirteen full-time permanent faculty lines down to our lowest ever which was three. We’re currently at three faculty members and we’re on the list to get a fourth here in another year or so. It’s been a constant struggle in terms of recognition and credibility.
LB: Not recognizing the intricacies of preparing teachers in those technical fields that you’re working with and the necessary equipment and expertise that is necessary to do that and do it well. It’s been my observation that you’ve done it well for many years despite many challenges within the University.
BB: An interesting update on that total business of support for our teacher education programs is that since the inception of the department 35 or 40 years ago we have had a business education undergraduate program. We had a marketing and distributive education undergraduate program. We also had an industrial technical program. And 10 or 12 years ago, we began a fourth undergraduate program in technology education, which used to be industrial arts. All of those programs are now officially closed due to our shrinking number of faculty. We simply could not at the same time run these undergraduate programs and run a masters program that was growing by leaps and bounds and an advanced graduate program. We had a meeting with one of the deans recently and basically indicated that we had to add faculty or close programs and that dean’s position was that we had to close programs. Our undergraduate programs including business education which you’re very familiar with are now history.
A part of that dean’s decision had to do with St. Petersburg Junior College becoming St. Petersburg College and becoming authorized by the legislature to become a 4-year institution and begin an entire College of Education from scratch. They showed some interest in starting up these same programs that we were faced with shutting down and that decision was made and about a year and a half ago. Our undergraduate vocational education teacher programs were shut down and St. Petersburg College is in the process now of starting up similar programs. The need in the Tampa Bay area hopefully will still be served, but not by USF, and that was a very, very excruciating progress to go through. To work 30 years or so and try to strengthen and build those programs and see them not supported. Of course, these are policy issues the administrators have to make. There are only so many resources and as you suggested earlier, the high visibility such as elementary and secondary education sort of gets most of the resources because most people are familiar with those teachers and those programs out there.