Lumens customer, Dr. Karen Gorback, wins annual ACCE Person of the Year Award
Oakland, CA - February 22, 2005
After more than three decades in education, Dr. Karen Gorback, Coordinator for Community Education at Ventura College, is as excited about her career today as when she first stepped into a high school classroom as a freshman English teacher more than 30 years ago. “I can’t imagine doing anything else as challenging and as much fun as a career in education,” notes Dr. Gorback, the 2005 recipient of the Community Education Person of the Year honor, awarded by the Association of Community and Continuing Education (ACCE) at its annual conference in Oakland, Calif., last month.
After teaching high school English and journalism for a number of years in central California, Gorback earned a degree in counseling and worked as an adult education counselor and grant writer for many years, specializing in externally-funded training programs for special needs adult populations. Upon completing a doctorate in Education and Policy at UCSB, Gorback moved into adult education administration, where she continued to develop new training programs, as well as supervise a wide variety of academic programs and student services, such as counseling and career education.
“Earning the job at Ventura College in 1998 as the CalWORKs Coordinator was a dream come true,” Gorback remembers. “Having completed years of research and then a dissertation on welfare reform, I was thrilled to obtain a job in which I could put theory into practice. Most dissertations just sit on a shelf; but I used mine as a blueprint for implementing the new CalWORKs program at Ventura College, and it worked!”
Although she continues to direct the college’s CalWORKs program, as well as other grants, her most recent assignment has been to reorganize and invigorate a sagging community education program at the college. Taking the coordinator’s position in 2002, under the supervision of Dr. Kay Faulconer-Boger, Dean of Community Resource and Economic Development, Gorback set her sights on providing the best possible classroom experiences for community education students.
“These are the greatest students in the world,” Gorback gushes. “They come out at night after work and on weekends to study gourmet cooking or Latin or how to publish a book or a hundred other different topics – all for the sheer love of learning. There’s no college credit. No grades, just the wonderful exchange of ideas that happens in the classroom. When a class is terrific and students are learning something new, that’s as good as it gets. It’s magic.”
The Ventura County Community College District is a public community college district serving residents in Ventura County. The District’s three colleges, Moorpark, Oxnard, and Ventura, offer programs for transfer to four-year colleges and universities, occupational and vocational training, basic skills instruction, as well as community service, economic development, and continuing education for cultural growth, life enrichment and skills improvement. Each of the colleges provide a wide range of general programs and services to students, as well as focusing on its own unique and specialty areas. More than 30,000 students are served each semester.
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