Survivor of the Budget Cuts

By Ellie McGrath

With 42,000 trainees, the Job Corps is still going strong

Morris Heights is a New York City battleground. Situated in the South Bronx, the area has one of the highest crime rates in the city. Blocks of buildings are burned out, homeless people camp in boarded-up tenements, small boys peddle angel dust on the streets. In the midst of this chaos, behind a cast-iron fence, three calm acres of grass and flowers surround a stately Tudor building. Students in blue and beige uniforms read in the shade of oak trees. "The oasis," as the facility is called by the community, is one of more than 100 federally funded Job Corps centers in the U.S. Inside its gates 263 young people, ages 16 to 22, mostly high school dropouts from the surrounding ghetto, study English and bookkeeping, cooking and carpentry, social skills and selfdiscipline. They live in dormitories, and when they leave, they often move to entry-level employment, or the armed forces, or even, sometimes, to college.

The 17-year-old Job Corps is one of the very few social programs spared by the recent Reagan budget slash. There have been some criticisms about the cost, budgeted for $620 million next year. The total expense for each of the 42,000 trainees who will be enrolled in 1982 ranges from $5,000 to $13,000 a year. But partly because some Job Corps centers are run by private companies, and provide job training for the private sector, the program won support from conservative lawmakers. Says Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee: "This program works. Even $13,000 a year is a cheap price to pay to keep someone off the welfare rolls for the rest of his life."

The corps claims that nine-tenths of its students get jobs. It has kept almost no long-range records on some 850,000 "graduates," however, and the overall placement rate is probably far lower than 90%. Still, the ties that some centers have with business and labor help a good deal in placement. At Clearfield Job Corps Center near Salt Lake City, for instance, 170 of about 1,500 trainees last year completed an advanced automotive training program run in conjunction with the United Auto Workers.

To get into the corps one should be disadvantaged and in deep educational trouble. But felons and drug addicts need not apply. If the program sometimes succeeds with hard cases where public schools have failed, it is partly because students who apply see the program as a last chance. While some drop out right away, those who stay usually commit themselves to a six-month residential program that is a cross between boot camp and boarding school. Says one South Bronx administrator: "If students went home at 5 p.m. to ghetto conditions, you would defuse 70% of what they learn." Job Corps staff not only provide vocational and remedial training but attempt to nurture cooperation and disciplined self-confidence. Even so, one teacher notes: "When they leave you know that the odds are still against them in almost every way, and you wonder if you've betrayed them by not telling them so."

At the South Bronx center the world that awaits students is right outside the gates. But the center seems to be a model for training in depressed areas. When Avco International Services Division, part of a multinational corporation, was awarded the contract to start a Job Corps center in Morris Heights, it worked through the local office of the minority Recruitment Training Program. R.T.P.'s Julio Pabon, 29, began involving local planning boards, schools and block associations. Avco agreed to hire more than 90% of the staff locally, and Pabon personally held meetings with local gangs to persuade them to leave the center alone. He was so good at it that several gang chiefs joined the Job Corps. Since the center opened in April 1980, only five students have been expelled, only 13 have quit. The majority have only third-to sixth-grade reading skills. Many have yet to learn the multiplication tables.

The key to the South Bronx program is its individualized teaching. Classes are usually no more than ten or twelve students. Says Director of Programs Marta Moczo: "They learn that they can learn. Having instructors sit next to the students, touch them, relate to them, helps." By the time students leave, many have eighth-grade or high school reading skills. Admits Yadwin Rodriguez, 22: "When I first came here, I couldn't read so good. Now I'm involved with pronouns, adjectives, verbs, you name it, man."

Says Center Director Roberto Albertorio: "The main problem we face is apathy, suspicion, lack of confidence, and most of all, lack of self-discipline." To maintain discipline there is one staff member for every three students, a 16-man security force and a formidable list of rules. Stealing, fighting, hard drugs, sex on campus are all causes for expulsion. There is a $5 fine for sniffing glue; a $2 penalty for gambling. Serious offenses are reviewed by a board composed of three staff members and two students. Even manners come under consideration, and the most persuasive pressure to behave may come from peers. Explains Deliana Gillard, 20, who will be going to Vermont College this fall: "The staff is always polite. And when we have new corps members who aren't, we ignore them until they come round. We are all minorities, and we have a sense of unity."

--By Ellie McGrath.

Reported by Sylvia Kronstadt/Salt Lake City and James Wilde/New York

With reporting by Sylvia Kronstadt, James Wilde

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