Another day, another needlessly cruel move by the Trump administration. The targets this time are low-income, at-risk youth after the administration announced the sudden closure of the Job Corps program.
The administration released a statement on May 29 announcing that all Job Corps centers will pause operations by June 30. Job Corps was a federally funded program that provided education, career-oriented skills training, and housing support for low-income, at-risk youth. The program has faced financial woes in recent years and is currently operating at a $140 million deficit (which probably could’ve been addressed from a tax plan that wasn’t explicitly designed to punish the poor, but I guess that wouldn’t be on brand).
“Job Corps was created to help young adults build a pathway to a better life through education, training, and community,” Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said in the statement announcing the closure. “However, a startling number of serious incident reports and our in-depth fiscal analysis reveal the program is no longer achieving the intended outcomes that students deserve. We remain committed to ensuring all participants are supported through this transition and connected with the resources they need to succeed as we evaluate the program’s possibilities.”
Unsurprisingly, it appears that commitment to connect participants with “the resources they need” was all talk, no action, as several communities have been left high and dry after the announcement. While the statement said the operations freeze would begin on June 30, hundreds of teens at the Detroit Job Corps were told they had to gather their belongings and leave on May 27.
Given that only select low-income teens were eligible for the Job Corps, many of these kids had no place to go and weren’t given enough time to find shelter. Pastor Mo, a community activist in Detroit, told CBS News about a young man whose homeless mother enrolled him in Job Corps to get him off the street.
“Put her son in Job Corps to get him out of her car, but when it shut down, it put the son back in the car, and his roommate, that didn’t have anybody, she’s taking him in, and we’re trying to find her housing right now,” Mo told CBS.
It’s a similar story in Oklahoma, where three Job Corps centers are closing down. “We have students here that don’t have families,” Adam Martin, a community liaison for the Tulsa Job Corps center, told NPR. “The reality is a lot of them came here to better their future, to better their chances at a life that they never had.”
There were 153 students set to graduate from the Tulsa Job Corps center this summer, whose futures are now unclear.
The Job Corps closure is a prime example of the laziness endemic in the Trump administration. There were real, identified problems within the organization, but instead of designing a plan to address those issues while maintaining the opportunities it provides for at-risk youth, they shut it down completely because that was far less work.
The idea behind Job Corps was a net good: provide an education alternative for at-risk youth to gain essential skills that can help them find and maintain gainful employment. When working with at-risk youth, there’s going to be an innate failure rate.
I come from a family that specializes in juvenile/family law, with my first grown-up jobs being in family law firms. One of the sad truths I learned from that experience is that you can’t save every kid.
That doesn’t mean you can’t save some of them.
Ask any community worker, family lawyer, or educator, and they’ll tell you that the kids you actually make an impact on, who internalize the lessons they tried to pass on and make active choices to improve their lives, are the ones that make the heartache and strife worth it.
This move by the Trump Administration is telling our at-risk youth, the kids who need our help the most, that they’re not worth it. How does that make America great?
SEE ALSO:
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Communities Nationwide Reeling After Trump Administration Abruptly Closes Job Corps
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