Louisville Magazine

JUL 2013

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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its electric arc, she catches her co-workers of guard. "Tey're like, 'Hey, you, can you weld this?' And then they're like, 'Yo, you're a chick? Can you do this?' I'm like, 'Yes, I know what I'm doing,'" she says with a laugh. It will take a lot more teens like Jocelyn Salinas to fll what many manufacturers have deemed a "skills gap." Simply put, manufacturers can't fnd people who know or want to operate the computer-controlled machinery of the day. About six years ago, the Kentucky Community and Technical College System released a doomsday-titled report, "In the Eye of the Storm: Confronting Kentucky's Looming Workforce Crisis." It surveyed dozens of CEOs from across the state. When asked if they anticipate having enough qualifed trade/ technically skilled candidates to draw from in the next 18 months, 92 percent answered no. Tat's why Tom Hudson, nth/works CEO, created the apprenticeship for teens. Basic skills, he says, disappeared over the last three decades as jobs drifted ofshore. "It's not that easy. You just don't turn a switch here," Hudson says. "Tere's knowledge that's been lost over time. " His apprenticeship is based on a German model that embeds workplace learning in the school day. (In Germany, though, kids are tracked into these programs by the tenth grade depending on how well they perform on academic tests.) In Georgetown, Ky., Toyota runs a similar program for high school graduates, combining on-the-job training with college coursework. In order to comply with child labor laws, nth/works had to limit hours and create an educational rotation. Students and parents had to sign hazard waivers. It's a factory, after all. One afternoon, Geof Tomes pulls up his sleeve to show red biceps, a side efect of not wearing the right clothes while welding. Tat electric arc burns skin like sun at the beach. Jenna Kidwell's orange T-shirt bears tiny, red sutures where sparks burned a hole through it. Salinas often endures achy arms, sore feet. Still, when she leaves, she's fulflled. On this afternoon, she and a mentor fddled with a drilling machine, stabbing holes into a steel plate. It's for that cart she's been working on for days. At four in the afternoon, she punches out and picks up her brother from wrestling practice. She's tried to get him into welding. "He's a pretty boy," she says, teasing. "He doesn't like to get dirty." W hack! Marcus McCormick slams his hammer into a door hinge on a powder-blue cupboard. Shoot, he thinks. He likes to break things with one clean hit. Whack! Te door clings. Sore forearms be damned. Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! Te door fnally collapses. It's late morning. McCormick wears a loose Messer Construction gray polo over his compact frame. He's on demolition duty at Kosair Children's Hospital, where a major renovation is underway. Insulation lies in heaps. Patches of remaining light blue walls scab over exposed wiring. For two days now the 23-year-old has been slinging hammers in the building's basement. Underneath his hard hat, drowsiness weighs down his eyelids. McCormick rises at 6 a.m., then catches the 6:41 bus from his mom's place on West Muhammad Ali Boulevard, just him, the other early birds and R&B; through his headphones. No music down here. Only the screeching of a saw slicing through old bathroom fxtures, a fan's hum and the percussive thump of sledgehammers pulverizing drywall. It collects like crumbs in McCormick's nostrils and throat. Sneezing fts hit later in the day. But he doesn't mind. He never thought he'd work for a company like Messer, a commercial construction company behind multimillion-dollar projects in fve states. Really, he never thought about working in construction or the skilled trades at all. Ten last year a friend started "beating Youth Build in my head." Te nonproft for low-income 18- to 24-year-olds sits on an ever-expanding lot in Smoketown. Every year Youth Build accepts 35 students. In less than a year, McCormick earned a GED, mastered the basics of carpentry, HVAC, electrical, plumbing and landscaping. Since 2001, the program has graduated more than 300 participants, with 86 percent of students obtaining a GED and/or vocational training certifcate. Forest Aalderink, Youth Build's training and construction coordinator, says as the housing market has picked up, more construction crews have contacted him, hungry for skilled workers. "More than we have to give," he says. At frst, McCormick, like a lot of Youth Build kids, hesitated at the thought of construction. It was unfamiliar. Growing up in the nowdefunct Iroquois housing projects, he never knew anyone in the industry. "A lot of what we get are students who've been exposed to little mom and pop operations," Aalderink says. "Tere's nothing wrong with that. Tere's a good valuable spot for that in the market. But they need to be exposed to hospital construction, bridge construction, jobs that have 401(k)s ... (the) serious, industrial, heavy commercial side of construction." Much of the industry that once flled swaths of land in neighborhoods like Park Hill now sit vacant, wilting, the unfortunate end to an economic daisy chain: Plants downsized, then closed or moved to cheaper locales. Jobs became scarce. Urban neighborhoods packed with middle class families lost them. For young, low-income AfricanAmericans, like McCormick, unemployment stings. Just 9 percent of poor, black teens in this country have jobs. Te employment rate for middle-income white teens whose families earn $75,000-$100,000 stands at 41 percent. Michael Gritton, with KentuckianaWorks, says businesses feel frustrated as well. "You can't be in a meeting with an employer without them bemoaning the state of K-12 education, the lack of technical education," he says. "It comes up in every meeting you're in." While other Kentucky counties have retained vocational centers, in the early '90s JCPS closed all eight in the district, folding the programs into existing high schools. McCormick had carpentry in high school — welding, too. But he rarely attended. "I would cut those classes and get high or whatever," he says. "I didn't give it a chance." He eventually dropped out of Iroquois High School completely. On break now, McCormick walks across the street to a hot dog stand. He orders two turkey dogs and sits on a bench inside. Hunched over, a tattoo of the name GEORGIA slips out from behind his collar. Tere was a "gang of 10 of us," he says about his family. When it came to high school, nothing could have kept him in. He loved basketball. His freshman year he earned good grades. But distractions tugged at him just before 10th grade. "I was almost put out that summer because my momma didn't pay the bills," he says. "It was just too much stuf that I was thinking about that I shouldn't even have been thinking about as a child." His dad was in jail. Cupboards were bare. It was around this time his attitude toward education changed. "Like, dang, I am growing up. School ain't where it's at right now to help feed my brothers." McCormick started selling drugs, stealing purses, breaking into homes. "Doing all the negative things I shouldn't have been doing in the frst place." When McCormick was 16, his 15- and 13-year-old brothers started skipping school. Child Protective Services got involved. Tey were taken out of the home. McCormick balls up the foil from one hot dog as he remembers this time. "When that happened I just lost it," he says. McCormick, in his school-aged days, would have fallen into that "at risk" category, a group that's nearly always poor, often minority and tends to enter school below grade level in math and reading. JCPS has more at-risk youth than any other district in Kentucky. It's graduation rate, 67 percent, remains below the state average, despite some recent gains. 7.13 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 63

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