I attended a community college in Fayetteville, NC, back in the late 90's, that had a couple of Perl courses. Maybe you could check your local CC's. If anything, they could do their first 2 years there and then move to a University.
Ironically, I chose the Intro Java class over the Intro Perl class. Mainly because of the hype that Java was surrounded by back then and my lack of knowledge of computers, much less programming languages.
I have since seen the light. :)
Edit:
Just checked their current catalog out of curiosity and it appears that they still offer a Perl course:
FTCC