Tracks to the Future : Metro Rail Effort Steers Youths Toward Careers in Transit Design

The Blue Line trains that rumble 252 times a day through the inner city do more than haul commuters between downtown Los Angeles and Long Beach.

They’ve carried Jose Torres off to college. And into the future.

The 19-year-old from Compton is among 300 teen-agers living near Metro Rail tracks who are being steered toward careers in transportation design and engineering by an unusual matchup of classroom work and summertime jobs.

Teen-agers recruited from high schools along the slowly expanding commuter line receive intensive after-school training in mathematics, drafting and computer science during the school year.

During the summer, they get engineering trainee jobs with public agencies and private contractors working on various Metro Rail projects.

Finally, graduating teen-agers are encouraged to enroll in college engineering schools for further technical study. Those who lack money to pay tuition are being offered scholarships.

The $800,000-a-year program is being run by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Organizers say the goals are altruistic and realistic.

One is to atone for the disruption that the $163-billion construction project causes to communities as tracks are laid.

The other is to create a corps of young professionals who can help finish designing and building the Metro Rail system over the next 17 years.

“What better people could there be to do that than architects and engineers who come from the community the system serves?” said Beatrice Lee, who is in charge of what officials have dubbed their Transportation Occupations Program.

Who indeed, Torres agrees. He signed up for Lee’s after-school classes two years ago while a student at Dominguez High School. He is now enrolled at Compton Community College and plans to transfer to a university to study electrical engineering.

Torres is spending the summer as an trainee with the Los Angeles City Transportation Department. His assignment involves helping inspect new computerized traffic signals on surface streets next to the Santa Monica Freeway--part of the city’s “Smart Corridor” program to ease congestion on the freeway between East Los Angeles and the Westside.

Torres figured he’d probably be out roaming the streets were it not for the program. “I don’t think I’d be in college now without it,” he said. “It’s certainly been a turning point for me.”

The program has given about 200 youngsters summer jobs this year. Because most local public agencies are broke, the youths’ salaries are paid by the MTA, which is spending federal tax money on the rail project.

Jermaine Johnson, 20, of Compton is helping test valves and review contractors’ plans for the city’s Building and Safety Department. He joined the job-training program four years ago and is a junior studying mechanical engineering at Cal Poly Pomona.

The program made his high school life hectic and all but wiped out his personal life, Johnson said. Classes in computer-aided drafting, architectural model building and descriptive geometry ran from 4 to 7 p.m., four days a week.

“It was work, but it is paying off,” he said.

“Most of my friends don’t have jobs--everything is tight these days. I have buddies in jail and out robbing. Others are partying all the time. But I have bigger plans for myself. I want stability.”

De Shaun Brown, 18, a Locke High School graduate who is studying engineering at Morehouse College in Atlanta after spending two years in the program, said: “When I’m a success, then I’ll have time to kick back and relax.”

Teen-agers are recruited from high school students who show an unusual skill or interest in drafting and math classes. It is made clear that there will be no slouches in the program, said Bill Forester, a Long Beach math and computer instructor who helps teach the classes. Those unwilling to faithfully attend the after-school sessions don’t last: Officials report a 20% dropout rate.

The program was launched in 1985 with 15 students. Since then, 103 college scholarships have been awarded, and scores of youths have found transportation and construction jobs.

Charles Daniel Jr., a manager at EMC, a consortium formed by six engineering firms working on the Metro Rail project, has 13 youngsters in permanent positions and another 13 in summer jobs. The training is helping fill a void in the local labor pool, he said.

“When (Metro Rail) started, we basically imported professionals from the eastern corridor. L.A. was a labor pool for aerospace. But we build trains, and the closest resource pool for us was San Francisco,” Daniel said.

The summer jobs give the teen-agers a sampling of transportation careers available to them.

Theresa Dau, a 20-year-old USC junior from Long Beach, said her jobs helped her pick her profession.

She is working as a city transportation engineering trainee this summer. But during the three previous summers she helped design the Metro Rail passenger station at Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue, worked on a program to service disabled vehicles on South Bay freeways and was an architectural plan checker.

“The job I had last year showed me what happens in the real world,” Dau said. “It made me decide I didn’t want to major in architecture. I’m in urban planning now.”

Javier Robles Jr., 18, a graduate of Franklin High from Highland Park, is headed for MIT to study engineering and math. This summer he is doing survey work and drawing plans for wheelchair curb ramps for the city’s Bureau of Engineering at Crenshaw and Adams boulevards and Crenshaw and 28th Street.

Daniel Patino, 18, of Compton will study civil engineering at Cal State Long Beach this fall. He is working this summer as a trainee inspector in Metro Rail tunnels, “looking for errors and watching to see that they build it right.”

The teen-agers are pretty sharp-eyed too. Torres is proof of that.

At the intersection of 8th and Soto streets in East Los Angeles, Torres scrutinized a set of blueprints and discovered that a traffic light hanging over the intersection had never been hooked up.

The youth reported his findings to city transportation engineers David Roseman and Azzam Jabsheh. Roseman was impressed. “These are top-notch people,” he said of the trainees.

Jabsheh added: “He probably saved the city a lot of money. And maybe a few lives.”