Death Watch? : S.D. Job Corps Trainees Hoping to Ward Off Reagan’s Budget Cuts

Albert Magana, an Oxnard teen-ager, has been bunking at the San Diego Job Corps Center here for seven months. He’s turning his life around.

Magana, 16, is in one of the center’s vocational training programs, learning how to install solar water heating units. He came to the center because, he said, “I was doing poorly in school and hanging around on the streets. I thought to myself, ‘I’ve got to get my act together.’ ”

But that may never happen. Magana is one of the 626 San Diego Job Corps youths whose chance to learn a useful trade may be cut short by the federal government. President Reagan’s budget proposals call for an end to the Job Corps, a $617-million vocational and educational training program for youths between the ages of 16 and 21.

The San Diego County training program has been operating at the Navy’s Ream Field, a former helicopter base, since the government turned over land and buildings there in 1979. Job Corps workers have helped turn the former storage buildings into a campus for the training center.

Each year, the San Diego center trains about 1,000 financially disadvantaged youths like Magana for jobs in welding, carpentry, clerical work, cement masonry, bricklaying, automotive work, solar heating and culinary arts. The trainees also can complete their high school educations and can hone their driving skills in the center’s driver education program.

Job Corps students must live at the center during their training. Room and board is free, as are clothing and a small monthly cash allowance. When they graduate, trainees are given a relocation allotment that adds up to $100 for each month they spent in the program. The maximum stay is two years.

Magana categorized himself as “uncontrollable” and “incorrigible” before he signed up with the Job Corps. He admitted he was hanging around the “wrong types” and taking drugs.

Since he joined the program, Magana has completed his high school education through the center’s GED program. The Job Corps has been a positive force in his life, and he hopes to get a job in San Diego after he graduates from the solar program.

“I miss my relatives . . . just my relatives,” Magana said. “My friends are still on the streets. When I go back there, I try to put some sense in their heads. Sometimes they think I think I’m too good for them because I don’t hang out with them anymore.”

Carol McGhee, 20, said she moved from Phoenix to National City two years ago with “problems galore.” She had quit high school in her senior year, and had became a heavy user of drugs and alcohol.

“I started living in the fast lane in Phoenix,” she said. “I wanted to do what I wanted to do. I thought (doing drugs) was cool. I thought it would get me money and friends. I would do coke, pills and any drug I could find.

“I called my mom,” McGhee said, “and she told me to look in the phone book for the Job Corps. When I went to the interview, I decided to get my life together. I looked at the Job Corps as a last chance.”

McGhee is in the retail sales program, and she hopes to land a job in a San Diego department store after she graduates April 12. She said she will start job hunting Monday.

“The Job Corps has taught me how to lead an honest, clean life and got me off drugs,” McGhee said. “Since I’ve come here I’ve turned over a new leaf. I’m real proud of myself.”

She said she participated in a letter-writing drive “to let President Reagan know what danger he would put peoples’ lives in if he shuts Job Corps down.”

Besides finding herself, McGhee has found a fiance at the center.

Kenny Jackson, 19, plans to get a job in plumbing or electrical work after he graduates from the solar training program in April. He and McGhee plan to marry in May.

McGhee joined Jackson in criticizing less motivated corps members.

“Some people abuse it,” Jackson said of the Job Corps program. “They come here for two years and do nothing.” He said some trainees become lazy. He and McGhee agreed that about 400 of the students are slackers trying to skate through the system.

“They do not need the two years,” Jackson said. “If you want to learn, it only takes one year.” “I feel there’s a lot of waste,” he added. “If I was the President, I’d cut the time in half and the number of students in half.”

The program wastes money in other areas as well, Jackson claimed. For instance, “they hire people to come in here to put a hinge on a door,” when the center is full of apprentice carpenters and experienced carpentry teachers.

Thomas Guerin, director of the San Diego center, which receives $6 million in federal money annually, said the students’ complaints have merit. He attributed the problems to what he said are restrictive federal standards.

However, he said, the corps program in San Diego is successful, with 75% of its enrollees labeled as successes, and of that figure, 94% find jobs upon graduation. Guerin said the government rates a student as successful if he or she remains in the program longer than 90 days.

He said the key to the success of the Job Corps is the number of union members who train students in the vocational trades.

“It’s what really makes it go,” he said, because “it’s a guarantee” that graduates will be accepted into the unions’ apprenticeship programs.

“Sometimes we get some students who should not be here,” Guerin said. “We have to deal with them the best we can.” He added that the center could be better run “if we had more control over the bucks that come here. I think we have a great deal of overhead, just as any bureaucracy does.”

Guerin explained that rehabilitating the old Navy buildings into a modern campus is being handled through contracts let on the federal level, without local input or control.

“If they’d let me have it my way, I’d let the corps members do all of it. We have the talent,” he said, adding, “I think we could bring in more enlightened management.”

Guerin said of Reagan: “He’s throwing up all the programs for scrutiny. These programs have to be scrutinized.” He expressed optimism about the future of Job Corps: “I think there’s going to be a compromise.”

He said he will join 100 other Job Corps center directors, along with union members and representatives of Home Builders of America, in Washington March 12 to lobby Congress and Reagan on behalf of the Job Corps.

“We may have become complacent,” Guerin said of the 20-year-old federal training program. “It’s time for some meaningful dialogue. I think it could be done better.”