Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
Source: Passentino, Chuck. "Why Me?" Video. Grossmont College ESL. YouTube. Posted 17 December 2016.
Source: The Gallery: A 35th Anniversary Photographic Directory of the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community Faculty, Administration, and Staff. El Cajon, CA: Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District, 1996. p102.
Source: English Department Gallery Photos. Private Photograph and Documents Collection. Copyright Homer B. Lusk. Digitally reprinted with permission, courtesy of Homer Lusk, Grossmont College Professor Emeritus and former English Department Chair.
Charles "Chuck" Giacinto Passentino attended California State University, Pomona (a.k.a. Cal Poly Pomona), where, in 1979, he earned dual degrees: a Bachelor’s of Arts in Philosophy and a Bachelor’s of Science in Recreational Administration.
By the late 1980s, he had moved to San Diego to enter a graduate program in Linguistics at San Diego State University, where, in 1990, he obtained his Master’s of Science with a focus on ESL Education. The next year, Chair Homer Lusk hired him part-time to begin teaching basic skills English courses and ESL courses in the fall 1991 semester. When Dr. Mary H. Donnelly became English Department Chair in 1994, one of her missions was to build the Project Success learning communities program and to expand one of its most significant cohorts, ESL. With Passentino already having proved himself as an effective educator and innovator for the college's growing community of English learners, Donnelly brought him aboard in fall 1995 as a full-time instructor to assist with the expansion. Over the next ten years, Passentino gained popularity for his amiable style of teaching literacy, communication skills, reading and vocabulary, and pronunciation.
By 2006, the ESL Program had gained enough critical mass to begin transitioning into a stand-alone Department, at which point Chuck Passentino, Patricia Bennett and Nancy Herzfeld-Pipkin broke ranks with the English Department to become charter staff members of the new ESL Department. After Bennett helmed the Program for several more years as Program Coordinator, Chuck Passentino stepped into the role and, in 2009, earned the title in the official catalogs as the first Department Chairperson of English As a Second Language.
Four years later, Passentino would pass the baton of Department leadership to colleague Helen Liesberg but continue afterward to serve as one of the Department’s most experienced, popular, and innovative ESL educators.
Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
8800 Grossmont College Drive
El Cajon, California 92020
619-644-7000
Accessibility
Social Media Accounts
