Opening Windows of Opportunity

It’s 4 o’clock, and Sonia Cole attacks the thickening afternoon traffic in her black Chevy Blazer with the exuberance of a freshly licensed kid. The drive from her teller job at United California Bank headquarters in Monterey Park to her home in South-Central Los Angeles should take about an hour this time of day, but dexterous lane changes and deft accelerations shave a good 10 minutes from the trip. When she pulls into her driveway, it’s still this side of 5, a small but proud victory for a woman who just a few months ago allotted more than four hours of her day for the same commute by bus.

At 29, Cole is getting used to sampling the other side of the digital divide. Not only does she have that smooth black Chevy cooling in her driveway, but she is also one of the few people in her neighborhood to have a computer.

The used Compaq sits on a low wooden desk jutting out prominently into the lacy bedroom it shares with Cole’s 5-year-old daughter, Rachel. The machine is officially the property of Goodwill Industries of Southern California, Cole explains, and it will be hers when she completes her coursework for Go the Distance, a Goodwill pilot project geared toward teaching computer literacy to those who are being eased off welfare rolls.

Cole starts up the computer. Rachel climbs on top of her mother and takes over the machine. Launching a CD-Rom, she claps and sings along with an animated bear reciting his ABCs. Having abandoned her education when she discovered she was pregnant in eighth grade, Cole said she struggled with her self-esteem for years. “I never thought I was worth anything, could do anything before. United California Bank is my first job ever.”

Two years ago, Cole was living under a bridge with other crack addicts while her mother looked after Rachel and Javier, now 13. Arrested and given three years’ probation with the stipulation that she remain clean, Cole discovered Goodwill. “I knew that staying at home on welfare doing nothing would make me go right back to using,” she said. At Goodwill, Cole found what she now thinks of as her last chance. She received interview training and career counseling. She’s taken GED certification classes and also got work experience in a Goodwill thrift store. After that, Cole, whose goal is to become a bank supervisor, was ready for real job interviews.

“When they interviewed me at United California Bank, they asked me why they should hire me,” she said. “I said, ‘I don’t know why you would. I’m a recovering crack addict who’s never had a job.’ But I also told them I’d already been to the bottom, so they could trust me. I wasn’t going back down there.”

She got the job. “She’s an inspiration to everyone she works with,” said her supervisor, Marlene Bucanfuso, a vice president and customer service manager. “And she’s an excellent customer service representative.”

In her first year on the job, Cole has received two raises and now works almost full time.

The pride she feels in supporting her kids keeps her strong. So does the online coursework that Go the Distance customized for her. Each night after dinner, Cole sits at her computer and enters the virtual classroom, exploring material about her chosen major: supervision management. Working at her own pace, Cole peruses the weekly text-based lectures, takes notes and solves study problems. If she has a question, she doesn’t raise her hand; she sends an e-mail or posts a query to an online bulletin board her professor checks regularly. At the end of each section, she takes a test.

“The population we’re dealing with is composed of people who have failed in other educational systems, people without access to transportation, child care or time beyond the hours they are already working,” said Margaret O’Brien, Goodwill’s vice president of work force development.

The students in the Go the Distance program face huge obstacles to their vocational studies. Many are drug addicts. Many have been abused. Most rely on public transportation. They simply aren’t able to navigate traditional vocational training offered at community colleges. “The campuses are large and confusing; the classes are over their heads,” said O’Brien.

Few other programs or studies are concerned with preparing employed workers still on welfare to support themselves and their families. Once they land jobs, said O’Brien, they’re often stuck without potential for advancement. Or, they get fired.

Frustrated by the high failure rates among this population, O’Brien and other Goodwill executives believed the Web might be an alternative to traditional vocational education. “At the time, everyone was talking about e-schooling, and we thought it might make sense for our demographic,” she said. At the program’s launch 10 months ago, Goodwill’s goal was to have a majority of its 24 students, including one man, complete the courses and obtain a 30% average salary increase. The group has already exceeded these expectations. “On average, the participants’ salaries have gone up 65.9% since we started [the project], and only one has dropped out,” said Jennifer Tucker, project coordinator. (Course categories include bookkeeping, assisting in a medical office, child-care management, pharmacist technician, professional secretary, paralegal and accounting.)

The real success of the program, however, may lie in something O’Brien and Tucker call “the intangibles.” “These machines have become meeting hubs in some neighborhoods,” said Tucker, “where owning a computer is actually still a novelty.”

The irony of discovering a forum suited for educating the poor in the domain most commonly associated with affluence is not lost on O’Brien. A 2000 Department of Commerce study, “Closing the Digital Divide,” showed that householders with college degrees are nearly 16 times as likely to have home Internet access as those with only elementary school educations. The computer however, is only half of it. Although Goodwill was willing to pay for DSL service, it turned out DSL providers don’t offer services in many of her participants’ neighborhoods, including Crenshaw, South-Central L.A., Compton, Watts, South Gate and Hawthorne. Even telephone modems have proved problematic; the quality of the copper telephone wires is often poor and the lines are outdated, resulting in disconnects, feeble connections and endless downloads. Goodwill is looking into cable servers as an alternative.

Supporting students as they become computer literate is even more crucial. “If you start analyzing why the other programs failed,” said O’Brien, “it was simply because the computer was put into the home, and that was it.” Eventually, she said, people stick their computers in the closet and forget about them.

Once machines are installed inside a participant’s home, Tucker makes herself available at all hours for the estimated six months it takes to complete the customized coursework. She checks in on her students almost daily, both in person and over the phone.

“You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen,” she said. A cockroach invasion impeded one computer installation, another participant returned her computer because her boyfriend didn’t want it in the house. She has helped students through bouts of homelessness requiring temporary storage of the machines. Once, a student Tucker was visiting learned that her boyfriend had been shot. Tucker drove her to the hospital, where they learned the man had died.

“These women have a lot going on in their lives,” she said.

Of the 24 students who participated in the program’s launch, three have placed their studies on hold, including the woman who lost her boyfriend. Three have graduated. Eighteen, including Cole, are still at it.

Partly because of the success of this program, Goodwill Industries recently received an $850,000 technology grant from the Department of Commerce for five technology-related projects around the country. About $150,000 will go toward a second year of Go the Distance in Los Angeles.

While Rachel sits on the bed eating her dinner, Cole checks her e-mail and skims her evening lesson. “I’ve gotten perfect scores on most of my tests,” she said pulling a notebook off a nearby shelf for proof. “On the last final, I got a 97, and I wanted to take it over again, but they wouldn’t let me.”

She usually spends two to three hours working online each night. Cole hopes to have her studies wrapped up in another month or so. After that, Goodwill will check in on her for at least another year. But she doesn’t plan to stop her studies. Her next goal? “I think I’ll study Spanish next.”