Washington’s Mayor Keeps His Pledge: Summer Jobs for 24,000 Youths

In a city where the teen-age unemployment rate is running almost 36%--double the national average--Washington Mayor Marion Barry earlier this year vowed to find a summer job for every young person between the ages of 14 and 21 who wanted one.

Nearly 24,000 youths took him up on that pledge and, when the program began early this month, they were all working.

For Barry, his young army of workers proves a point: that the nation’s capital--and by implication, other cities across the land--could find productive summer jobs for its youth if only local officials and business leaders cared enough.

The federal Summer Youth Employment Program supports job programs in almost every major city, but some have undertaken more ambitious efforts than others. In Washington, Barry more than doubled the federal grant of $7 million with city funds and aggressively recruited local employers to provide jobs.

10,000 in Los Angeles

Los Angeles, by contrast, receives $13 million in federal funds but makes no municipal allocation. Los Angeles is providing summer jobs to about 10,000 youths of the 30,000 to 40,000 who applied, according to Jane Dawson, director of the city’s Summer Youth Employment Service.

Nationwide, the federal Summer Youth Employment Program is spending $825 million this year to support jobs at the $3.35-an-hour minimum wage for more than 770,000 youths. Federal aid is funneled to the states, which distribute it to their cities according to the number of poor residents.

Steve McManus, a Labor Department spokesman, said most cities rely exclusively on federal funds for their summer jobs programs. He said such cities as New York, Kansas City and Indianapolis have created outstanding programs solely with federal money.

New York, with the nation’s largest summer jobs program, receives $31 million in federal support. But of the more than 500,000 job applications filed this year, Manny Bustelo, commissioner of the city’s employment department, said that only 41,000 got jobs.

In Washington, where every applicant has been put to work, the city set aside more than $8 million of its own funds to supplement its federal grant. The resulting $15.7-million war chest finances jobs ranging from cleanup crews to computer operators.

Seven-Week Enterprise

In addition to the infusion of city funds, the Washington program benefits from the presence of federal agencies and a host of nonprofit organizations willing to put the city’s youths to work--at no cost to themselves--for seven weeks during the summer.

It also benefits from a city bureaucracy that has grown more efficient as it has grown more experienced.

It was not always so. When Barry tried to create 30,000 jobs for city youths in 1979, teen-agers were sent to the wrong work sites, paychecks were often delayed and there were simply not enough jobs to go around.

“I blew a bureaucratic fuse,” said Barry as he joined 30 newly employed youths in attacking weeds in front of the Eastgate Gardens public housing project. “We just didn’t have the sophistication.”

This year, Barry used slick brochures and an aggressive publicity campaign to recruit both young workers and potential employers. He was so successful that, after initially making the guaranteed job offer to all 14- to 18-year-olds, he extended the invitation to include 19- to 21-year-olds.

Called ‘Fine Example’

The Labor Department’s McManus called Washington “a fine example” of what a city can do by “building on what’s already there.”

“It’s a massive administrative task,” Barry said. “But we are able to handle it.”

Among the 23,702 youths who signed up to work, 1,057 were dropouts, 328 were handicapped, 103 were ex-offenders and 640 were single parents.

Barry said the program aims to teach not only job skills but also responsibility. He said he prefers to spend city dollars now rather than to “spend $15,000 a year to keep one person in jail.”

“I guess the objective,” said Joanne Jackson, a librarian at Washington’s Calvin Coolidge High School, where 160 youths are working, “is that they would be ready for a job.”

The older youth workers at Coolidge spend their mornings learning to operate IBM computers and their afternoons performing word processing for the school district. The 14- and 15-year-olds, who are allowed by federal regulation to put in only four hours a day, serve as tutors for elementary school students.

‘Learn to Be on Time’

“We have to learn to be on time and dress accordingly,” said 15-year-old Barbara Milam, a Coolidge student. “If you miss a day, you don’t get paid.”

Lisa Dickey, 15, said she learned another lesson. “When I want to ask my mother and father for some money, they say, ‘Didn’t you get paid last week?’ ”

Carolyn Gee, who worked as a tutor in the Washington job program last summer, said she was glad to be promoted to yard work at Eastgate Gardens. “It was terrible,” the 16-year-old said of tutoring. “The kids ran me crazy.”

Gee would have applied for a job at McDonald’s had the program not existed, but she said many of her friends would have been unemployed without it.

Harold Brown, who supervises the workers at Coolidge, said most youths would have trouble finding jobs if not for the program. And many of those who found work, he said, would have quickly been fired because of their poor skills and attitudes. “This is a reasonably protected, simulated work environment,” Brown said.

May Be Too Protected

There is a danger that the work environment may be too protected, in the view of Barbara Gardner, director of urban affairs at USC. In Los Angeles, she said, the summer jobs program has steered at least some youths to menial jobs that provide no stimulation.

“I’ve seen a lot of these summer programs in action,” Gardner said. “I wonder if anybody has evaluated whether the kids are better off at the end of the summer than at the beginning.”

Beth Buehlmann, a Republican staff member of the House Education and Labor Committee, said the government is seeking to add an “educational component” to summer job programs. The Summer Youth Employment Program, she said, consistently receives widespread, bipartisan support in Congress, and more federal funds would allow the program to include more education.

In Washington, Barry recognizes that seven weeks of summer employment is not enough, but he expresses hope that his summer jobs program will put participants on a track toward year-round, full-time jobs. And as the computerized monitoring of program participants improves, he said, he intends to keep track of the youths who graduate from the program and help them find suitable year-round jobs.

“This is not just a treadmill,” Barry said. “The goal must be to get them permanently off the unemployment rolls.”