Academy Students Graduate Out of the Cold

File clerk. Receptionist. Administrative assistant.

These are not the high-voltage, my-daughter-the-doctor careers that middle-class couples dream of for their children.

But if you’re out in the cold with your nose pressed against the window, they look like heaven.

Just ask the 45 fresh graduates of the Customer Service Academy, a federally funded job program at Ventura College.

At their commencement ceremony Friday night, each received a certificate, a flower and a scroll with an inspirational message. In the audience, their kids and spouses, parents and friends cheered them on. Cameras flashed and tears rolled.

“I thought I was unteachable,” Olga Camper, a single mother of three teenage boys, told the crowd.

She had been laid off from a dead-end telemarketing job. Before that, she had collected welfare on and off for 10 years. Now, after the academy’s six-week crash course, she has a job she loves as a receptionist for a defense-engineering firm in Ventura.

It was an eye-opening six weeks. She learned math skills beyond here’s-your-change-ma’am. She learned to maneuver through office software programs. She picked up business terms that would puzzle anybody who has never done hard time in a cubicle.

“When an envelope came in the other day marked AP, I knew it was for Accounts Payable,” she said. Her fellow grads cheered.

They were dressed in stylish suits and long gowns and looked ready for a night on the town. For many, it was their first graduation from anywhere. The Customer Service Academy is no prep school; some of the students’ prior experience includes teen pregnancy, gang affiliation, welfare, jail and an excellent working knowledge of hopelessness. A few once held decent jobs but wound up on the street, victims of corporate downsizing or terrible luck.

Now an administrative assistant with a home-improvement company, David Hayes installed appliances until he wrecked his back doing seven refrigerators in one afternoon. He had spent most of his early life bouncing in and out of foster care, but in his early 30s, unemployed and on welfare, he hit a new low.

“I got to the point where I was afraid to go outside,” he said.

After a social worker directed him to the academy, his outlook changed. “It opened me up,” he said. “It was a great feeling to get out of bed every morning and go to school.”

Since the program started last spring, three-quarters of its 100 or so graduates have landed jobs that pay an average of $8.47 an hour. That’s a lot more than they’d make either on the dole or at the drive-thru window.

Dennis Marletti, the academy’s recruiter, lined up Blue Cross, Kinko’s and other companies interested in giving the students a shot. He also recruited the students themselves, leaving fliers in Laundromats and welfare offices and sending them home with elementary-school students in poor neighborhoods.

“I left them in carwashes and other places where people might be working just to eat,” he said. “I got one kid from Burger King who was so excited about the program he recruited his friend.”

Nancy Egelko, the academy’s lead teacher, was busy Friday night holding back the tears. Student after student had thanked her lavishly; after all, she had helped them nail down the basics they needed to prove themselves to prospective employers.

For some, it was helpful to hear about such fundamentals as just showing up--never mind that you were up all night with your sick kid or that your ride fell through and you had to take three buses.

Others never knew about work rituals that people in the mainstream take for granted--like answering the office phone with your name and a cheery “How may I help you?” instead of a mere “Hi.”

“I see my former students working around town,” Egelko said. “I was really touched the other day when a young lady I know stopped me in a store and said, ‘You know, this will be our first Christmas in a long time.”’

Unfortunately it might be the program’s last. Its funding runs only through next spring, unless a corporate sponsor steps in.

But that bit of unpleasantness didn’t come up amid all the celebrating Friday night.

Chuck Muncie, a former NFL running back who lives in Oxnard, paid tribute to the graduates for turning their lives around. It’s a subject he knows well; Muncie spent two years in prison for selling cocaine and now runs a foundation that helps ex-gang members have their tattoos surgically removed.

“You guys are now in the system,” he said. “You’re part of corporate America. You’ve got a story to share. You can walk around with your heads high and your chests out.”

On university campuses, students would bristle at being told they’re about to become part of corporate America.

But when you’re out in the cold, it sounds like a dream.

*

Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.