NYSPPSA Education Partnership to Promote Process Servers

• December 17, 2018
• by Ellen Eakley
• Associations
• Articles

Editor's note: This article was written by Ellen Eakley, president of NYSPPSA, regarding the first time in the United States that process serving will be taught as an adult educational class. The opinions expressed here belong to Ms. Eakley.

For the past few months, John Leonard and Larry Yellon, the NYSPPSA Promotion and Growth Committee members, have been working with the Adult Education Department at Eastern Suffolk Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) on Long Island to develop a course to educate and train new process servers across New York. This is an exciting opportunity for NYSPPSA to partner with BOCES, the largest adult education division in New York State, to help develop the next generation of professional process servers.

We begin this venture with Eastern Suffolk BOCES, the largest of 37 regional BOCES in New York State, covering a geographical area that comprises 57 school districts. The adult education program currently works with over 2,300 students who take a range of courses over many different professional disciplines. The Career Training, Licensing and Certification Division of the Adult Education program has courses in paralegal studies, security guard training, public safety, legal studies, and more.

In partnering with NYSPPSA, BOCES has committed to perform all marketing functions to promote the course. This will include a listing for the Professional Process Server Course on their online course offering, and adding it to the brochure that is mailed out to all students and alumni. Additionally, they will create a custom email campaign targeted to students who have previously taken paralegal and security guard courses, as we believe this may be the pool of people most interested in exploring a career as a process server.

NYSPPSA is creating the curriculum based on the “Guide to Successful Process Service in The State of New York” created by Larry Yellon. The class will align with the new online certification program titled “How to Serve Civil Process in the State and City of New York.” After this program is successfully launched with Eastern Suffolk BOCES, NYSPPSA will have the opportunity to use it as a model and bring the course to the other 36 regional BOCES programs around New York State and add it to their adult education programs.

As the official association of the profession throughout New York State, NYSPPSA is excited about this outstanding opportunity to reach a whole new generation of process servers and develop them into skilled members of the profession. This will be a great opportunity for all process serving agencies in New York to enjoy an entirely new pool of talent to draw professionally educated and trained servers.

The current goal is to have the course ready for the spring semester at Eastern Suffolk and begin promoting it to other BOCES in New York starting summer of 2019. We are pleased to announce that as of this date, Larry Yellon has been approved as a licensed New York State Education instructor for the purposes of facilitating this course. We will continue to update our members as this develops.