Summer jobs for youth no longer Ohio priority

Sometimes all a kid needs is a summer job.

It provides a reason to get up in the morning. And a place to go where a supervisor will treat him or her with respect, correct an error or praise a job well done. It gives young workers a feel for working life and puts a little money in their pockets.

Summer jobs have helped shape American youth for generations. There was a day when sons home from college followed their fathers into the steel mills or railyards, where they got a taste of what had been putting food on the table through their formative years. Some decided they liked what they saw and stayed. Others returned to college with a renewed determination to seek a different life.

But times change, and, especially for inner-city youths, many of those summer jobs disappeared. Local governments stepped into the breach, finding money in their budgets to provide summer jobs or drawing on federal money that had been funneled through the states.

In Ohio, that state and federal money to support summer jobs became even more important over the years, as the General Assembly and Gov. John Kasich decided that building a rainy-day fund was more important than distributing local government funds back to communities.

Last year, the state announced it was cutting funding for the kind of summer jobs that local governments had been filling. The money would instead be funneled into a more comprehensive program that requires a year-round commitment from the enrollees and is designed to improve the long-term employment prospects of young people.

This year, local governments are coping with the reality of that cutback and, presumably, a couple of hundred young people are scrambling to find jobs in the private sector. Time will tell whether there are enough jobs to go around – the suspicion is that there aren’t – and whether spending more of the state’s money on fewer participants is the better public policy.

Program funding

This year, Mahoning County officials saw the county’s summer youth employment program funding cut from $1,067,139 last year to $246,494. Even more problematic, that money can be used only to hire 14- and 15-year-olds, which severely limits the kinds of jobs that can be filled. In recent years, the summer jobs programs covered applicants between age 14 and 24.

The frustration of local officials is understandable, but they had been given notice.

Last August, this paper reported that the state would be redirecting $45 million from the summer jobs program to the Comprehensive Case Management and Employment Program. The redirected money would cover about half the cost of the more ambitious job-readiness program.

There was talk of lobbying the state to fund both programs, but that was wishful thinking, given the political climate in Ohio.

Last year, about 200 young Mahoning County residents had summer jobs, including placement at city street and park departments and county engineer’s and dog warden’s offices.

Mary Ann Kochalko, chief operating officer of the Workforce Development Board, reports that 246 people have completed assessment for the CCMEP in Mahoning County.

After the initial assessment, the applicants get an individual opportunity plan. Only 61 have gotten that far. A number of those who haven’t made it to the second step are on maternity leave.

It’s too early to tell whether the state’s reallocation of resources from summer jobs to job-readiness was the right move.

Years from now, there may be hundreds or thousands of people across the state who can say their lives were changed by CCMEP. Or there could be three or four times that many who wonder if their lives would have been better had they only been able to get a summer job during their high school or college years.

What’s clear is that local governments cannot now count on the state to fund jobs for young people. They are either going to have to find money in their own already strained budgets to fund jobs, or they are going to have to build public-private partnerships to find jobs for young people outside of government.