Federal grant funds training in trades

February 19, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

By Kristen russo

WARREN

Martha Johnson stood in her clean business attire looking at the house with the muddy, straw-strewn front yard.

Twenty men and women were outside working in the garage and where the nonexistent front porch should be.

Johnson, administrator of the U.S. General Services Administration, came to the house at 2028 Palmyra Road SW to visit a work-training program funded with about $304,000 from the GSA. The 20 men and women were building the house for Habitat for Humanity as part of a pre-apprenticeship program.

“When you’re in the federal government, you really want to do something that’s leveraging and not a one-for-one use of money,” Johnson said. “It just goes to show that when you invest in people, it comes back tenfold.”

The nine-month pre-apprenticeship program is one of three GSA-funded projects in the country. The other two are in Portland, Ore., and Washington, D.C.

Eric Davis, training director for the Warren Electrical Joint Apprenticeship Training Committee, said the program started as a partnership between his organization and the Trumbull Career and Technical Center. It won funding from the GSA, and the city of Warren supplied the building materials.

Davis said the students earn a stipend of $70 per week and complete training in 18 trades that include bricklaying, boilermaking, millwrighting, pile driving, floor installation, electrical work, elevator building, iron working, insulation, laboring, operating engineering, painting, plastering, concrete finishing, plumbing, roofing, working with sheet metal and teamster work.

Daniel Banks, grant writer for the project, said the students, whose ages range from 19 to 56, divide their time between classroom instruction at the Trumbull Career and Technical Center and on-the-job training at the Palmyra Road house.

Inside the three- bedroom house, the walls were still bare, and bare light bulbs hung from the ceiling.

Johnson and the students gathered in the living room, and she began a question-and-answer session. She asked the questions; the students answered.

Johnson asked them about the program, their interests, what they’ve found challenging and what they’ve enjoyed the most. She also asked what each of them was doing before the pre- apprenticeship program.

Answers varied as each person responded in turn, but there was a common theme among many of them. Most had been either unemployed or underemployed.

There were a few who had worked at desk jobs and simply wanted to work with their hands.

But many had been laid off or had been aides, interns or assistants in jobs that showed no signs of becoming full time.

Raymond Riola, 31, of Leavittsburg, had trouble finding work in the construction business when he came to the U.S. from the Philippines in September 2009.

He joined the pre- apprenticeship program because he wanted to be a “jack of all trades.”

“Working hard is the No. 1 thing. If your focus is on your job, people will see your attitude, and work reflects what you are doing. To me, personally, I always apply that to myself,” Riola said.

Sharon Thompson, 44, of Warren, said she has enjoyed the hands-on experience.

“I was amazed. I had no idea there were 18 trades involved in building a house,” Thompson said.

Thompson said she always has enjoyed restoring older homes but had never built a house.