Around 100 graduates and former administrators from the Success Via Apprenticeship program gathered at UFT headquarters on March 20 to reflect on and learn about the career and technical education teacher training program’s history and celebrate its 30th anniversary.

Sterling Roberson, the union’s vice president for CTE high schools, welcomed celebrants, who included several of his own classmates from the program’s 1984 inaugural class.

“SVA launched me into my career as an educator,” Roberson said. “On behalf of the UFT, I’m very happy and proud to host the 30th anniversary of the nation’s first and most successful recruitment, training and retention program for CTE educators.”

Frank Carucci, a past UFT vice president for CTE and strong supporter of the program, spoke about SVA’s history, including the role played in its development and founding by former UFT vocational schools vice presidents Morris Shapiro and Ed Espaillat. He praised it as “the single best program for recruiting teachers.” Carucci added, “Without the SVA program, there would be no CTE programs today.”

Dwight Threepersons, who worked with Espaillat to found the original SVA program in the mid-1980s, explained how the idea for it originated in his own experience as a skilled tradesman hired to work as a long-term substitute and then full-time vocational teacher in city schools.

Every year, a small group of graduates from New York City CTE programs are chosen to participate in the rigorous five-year program during which they attend college classes while at the same time apprenticing both in a classroom and in industry. Graduates then typically go on to teach in a city CTE program.

Electronics teacher Stacey Thomas, from the Bronx Design and Construction Academy, was a student at Samuel Gompers HS when Roberson returned to teach electronics at the school as an SVA student-teacher.

“A guidance counselor talked to me about going into SVA,” Thomas said of her decision to enter the program herself in 1990. “Eventually I did — and I’ve been a part of it ever since.” The program, which has an extremely high retention rate, is “the best-kept secret in the city,” she said.