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College Of The Canyons Celebrates 45 Years In Education

College of the Canyons officials celebrated COC’s 45th birthday Monday during a lunchtime celebration at the college’s Valencia campus.


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“At College of the Canyons, we’re ready for the next 45 years. We’re prepared to face that future, even though we have no idea what it’s going to hold,” Van Hook said Monday. “And the reason is because we care and we have the courage to dare.”

Birthday cake, commemorative pins and memories were shared at the event organized by the college’s Associated Student Government.

(Here’s a link to an SCVTV video on the ceremony.)

One of the college’s original governing board members, Bruce Fortine, spoke about the changes that have taken place, not just at the college, but the Santa Clarita Valley, and how COC has grown with it.

“Forty-five years ago, there was no mall, there was no auto center, there was no industrial complex,” Fortine said. “There was only 60,000 people who lived here.”

An overwhelming majority of Santa Clarita Valley voters, 92 percent, showed support for what would become COC by responding to the question: “Do you want a college?”

Construction of the “core campus” would begin in 1970, after a voter-approved bond measure.

The college, which now boasts two campuses — one in Valencia, which hosted the ceremony, and another in Canyon Country — started off with help from a Hart district school, he said.

“Forty-five years ago today, Sept. 22, is when we first started holding classes,” said Bruce Fortine, governing board member for the Santa Clarita Community College District. “Not here, they were at Hart High.”

Then-William S. Hart Union High School District Superintendent Dave Baker lent space to the college’s first students until the campus was built.

“The real story actually begins two years earlier,” according to information COC released for the college’s 40th anniversary.

The idea for a college in Santa Clarita Valley officially gained public support the same year the master-planned community of Valencia was born, officials said.

Voters approved the college on the Nov. 21, 1967, ballot, as “optimism abounded for what lay ahead in this once-sleepy whistle-stop along the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Los Angeles-to-San Francisco line.”


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College Of The Canyons Celebrates 45 Years In Education

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About Perry Smith

Perry Smith is a print and broadcast journalist who has won several awards for his focused, hyperlocal community coverage in several different regions of the country. In addition to five years of experience covering the Santa Clarita Valley, Smith, a San Fernando Valley native, has worked in newspapers and news websites in Los Angeles, the Northwest, the Central Valley and the South, before coming to KHTS in 2012. To contact Smith, email him at Perry@hometownstation.com.