About Us
Located in the heart of downtown Toronto, just two blocks south of Canada’s most vibrant intersection at Yonge and Bloor, the Canadian Centre for Verbatim Studies (CCVS) is the nation’s first instructor-led Private Career College dedicated to the training of court reporting and broadcast captioning professionals, both of which are desperately needed in Canada.
Realtime court reporters are high-tech professionals in the legal field who are responsible for recording verbatim (word-for-word) what is said during court proceedings, examinations for discovery, public hearings, tribunals and boards of inquiry. They use stenotype machines to transcribe what is said, and are responsible for producing a final, formatted transcript. Broadcast captioners use stenotype machines to create a record of what is heard on television for closed captioning, and what is said for conferences, DVD subtitles, and any other venue in which a realtime written record is needed.
Both careers require the same core skills – one of which is the ability to stenotype at over 200 words per minute.
CCVS’s initial offerings are 1) a full-time two-year Court Reporting Diploma Program, which features 20 hours per week of instructor-led class time, and a 50-hour internship at the end of the program in which students apprentice, one-on-one, with an experienced court reporter while actually on the job; and 2) a part-time three-year Court Reporting Diploma Program, which features 6 ½ hours of instructor-led class time each week, and the same internship opportunity as the full-time program.
The Centre also benefits from an Advisory Committee comprised of veteran court reporters and CART providers, a Director with over ten years of experience in curriculum writing and teaching, and an owner who was a top court reporter and president of one of Canada’s largest and most prestigious court reporting agencies before choosing, instead, to dedicate her full attention and expertise to the Canadian Centre for Verbatim Studies.
In the past, schools across Canada have attempted to offer court reporting programs through distance learning (online through computers), but these programs have fallen far short of their expectations, with only one successful graduate from the George Brown program (no longer accepting new students) in the last five years. Other students in that program have gone directly into captioning. Besides CCVS, the only other classroom-based program in Canada is held at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) in Edmonton, which yields only a handful of graduates for each two-year period.
Moreover, the location of NAIT makes attendance by potential students in Eastern Canada prohibitive. NAIT only accepts 25 students per year. CCVS, in bustling downtown Toronto, provides a more convenient location for potential court reporting students from the Greater Toronto Area, the Golden Horseshoe, or Ottawa. We do intend, however, to eventually launch a branch of CCVS in Ottawa, given the severe shortage of court reporters in the nation’s capital, where, arguably, court reporters are needed most. The average working reporter in the industry today is between 50 and 55 years of age, so Canada desperately needs a new generation of work-ready court reporters now.
The mandate of our program is to not only address this need, but to replenish and fortify the ranks of the industry with expertly-trained, highly-skilled reporters and captioners. By its mere existence, CCVS doubles the nation’s potential yield of court reporters. Of equal importance, our exclusive practicum helps our valued students to adjust realistically to the demands of working in the field, as well as to develop best practices as freelance professionals. In combination with a rigorous, yet supportive, curriculum, and programming that focuses on the success of each student, the Canadian Centre for Verbatim Studies intends to play a pivotal role in meeting the demand for court reporters and captioners in Canada.
“I can speak first-hand to the numerous problems I have encountered because of a lack of new reporters and captioners coming into the profession,” says Kimberley Neeson, one of Canada’s top captioners, former vice-president of the Chartered Shorthand Reporters’ Association of Ontario (CSRAO), and the president of her own captioning firm. “It is painful to see a hard-of-hearing person go without access to communication because I do not have enough captioners available to provide voice-to-text translation.” CCVS expects many of our graduates to enter the broadcast captioning field.
“CCVS graduates will be extremely well prepared and able to function at a very high level,” says James Godden, senior contracting officer at the Courts Administration Service in Ottawa. “I cannot imagine that successful graduates would have difficulty finding reasonable employment.”
The successful training of new Canadian court reporters would also be a boon to existing reporting agencies that are forced to sometimes compete with American agencies for Canadian work. “As manager of ASAP, I have been severely limited in my ability to grow the company specifically because of the lack of adequately trained court reporters, transcriptionists and scopists/editors,” says Nathalie Fisher, General Manager of ASAP Reporting Services. “With the mass exodus of reporters in the late 1990’s, and the continuous retirement of a significant number of court reporters in Ontario … I foresee the need for adequately trained and qualified transcriptionists, scopists, and court reporters to increase extensively in the next five years.”
Canadian Centre for Verbatim Studies:
Is Court Reporting Right for Me?
LINKS:
National Court Reporters’ Association
Chartered Shorthand Reporters’ Association
Canadian Centre For Verbatim Studies
10 St Mary St, Suite 504 (at Yonge Street) Toronto, Ontario Canada
Phone # 416-960-2287, or 1-877-337-2287