NOT WORKING Summer jobs scarce for needy youths BY BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL

Leandro Castro was 16 when he got his first job, at the George Wiley Center, an education and advocacy center in Pawtucket. Over the course of the summer, he learned how to type and use a fax machine. Castro worked on a campaign to help low-income families at risk of losing their gas and electric service. Beyond all of that, Leandro says, "The best thing about it is I was helping my mom. She had a lot of bills, and I used to give her half my paycheck." Leandro’s brother, Roddy, who was 14 at the time, also participated in the Wiley Center program that linked teens from low-income communities with summer jobs. Without those jobs, both youths agree, they would have likely spent the summer playing basketball and otherwise doing "nothing."

Several years ago, the federal Job Training and Partnership Act (JTPA) subsidized these kind of employment opportunities for teens from low- and moderate-income families. JTPA, however, has gone the way of much federal money for social services — to the cutting room floor — and places like Wiley Center have had to scrap together funding from other sources. JPTA’s successor, the Workforce Investment Act, also has no "stand-alone summer component," says Jim Glover of Workforce Solutions of Providence and Cranston, a publicly funded job training and placement agency.

Wiley Center director Henry Shelton, a leading advocate on the summer job issue, says, "The federal government is out to lunch as far as teenage jobs are concerned." He notes that JTPA used to subsidize about 1000 jobs for Rhode Island teens each summer. By contrast, last summer’s Wiley Center program ran with some money from Governor Donald L. Carcieri’s contingency fund, plus about 50 jobs from the City of Pawtucket. Shelton says the governor has again committed seed money for this summer, but overall funding remains a shadow of what it once was, and, the activist says, "The business community doesn’t do its fair share."

Glover hopes to change that. He directs Project Hope, a pilot effort that provides training and summer jobs for a handful of 11th graders at Hope High School. Launched by Workforce Solutions as an alternative way of creating summer jobs, Project Hope is funded by the Rhode Island Foundation, the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, and — and this is what makes it different — the Rhode Island Commodores, an organization of leaders from many of the state’s powerhouse businesses. Participants started this spring with an in-school employment "readiness curriculum," and are interviewing for paying jobs at such companies as Citizens Bank, Lifespan, and Edwards & Angell. The model of tapping for-profit businesses is a promising one, but it hardly makes a dent: so far, Project Hope has gotten pledges of 14 jobs and three sponsorships. It is slated to expand to other schools over the next several years, but for now, Glover agrees, "It’s not going to fill the need. A lot more kids need jobs than this little pilot program is going to fill."

Shelton calls this paucity of jobs a shame — for kids and for Rhode Islanders in general. Beyond the financial boost provided by working teenagers like Leandro and Roddy Castro to their families, Shelton says employment is a "dropout prevention program." Leandro agrees. "When you’ve got a job, you’re more mature," he says. "You’ve got stuff going on in your life."