SANTA PAULA : Jobs Program Aids Dropouts and Offenders

Two arrests for carrying a concealed .38-caliber revolver do not look good on a resume, but with the help of a federally funded job-training program, 20-year-old Jose Cerda of Santa Paula was able to land his first full-time job.

“I got plans. I want to move up in life, make some money so I can buy some clothes, a car and help out my parents,” he said.

Cerda works at a silk-screening factory in Ventura, producing T-shirts and baseball caps. He won the position after spending just one month in a job-training program conducted by Arbor Inc., a national organization that teaches high school dropouts and juvenile offenders the skills they need to find work.

With the aid of a $140,000 federal grant, Arbor opened a training center in Santa Paula in early January for Fillmore and Santa Paula youths from 18 to 21 years of age.

Along with Cerda, four other Arbor trainees have found employment after going through the program. Arbor helps them contact employers and pays their salaries for the first six months.

While working, the trainees keep in contact with a caseworker for support. Most employers, Arbor officials said, keep the trainees employed after the six-month period.

Another 10 young men and women are now in the program, spending their days learning such tasks as how to open a checking account, find an apartment, write a resume and interview with a prospective employer, with the hope that they too will get a job.

Although their backgrounds would disqualify them for most jobs, it is their troubled past that qualifies them for the Arbor program.

“To be eligible, they had to show multiple barriers to employment,” said Millie Kelly, Arbor’s director in Ventura County.

Kelly said those barriers include reading below an eighth-grade level, having a criminal record and being on welfare.

Nineteen-year-old Esmeralda Magana hopes that the program will help her.

She dropped out of high school when she became pregnant with her son, who is now 2. She also has an 11-month-old daughter.

Out of work and living at home on the east side of Santa Paula while trying to care for her children left her feeling trapped.

“I want to get off welfare, find a place of my own,” she said, wearing a business suit and fresh from an interview for a job as a receptionist at a local car dealership.

“I want a better life for my kids,” she said.