Job Corps

The Job Corps representative in Los Angeles County is targeting women to train for jobs. The Jobs Corps provides tuition-free training in 130 skills. Students can also receive high school equivalency diplomas, free medical and dental care, monthly spending allowances, savings accounts and job placement after graduation. This is a free program to qualified applicants. There are no loans to repay.

Last summer, Daniel Machuca was a year out of an East Los Angeles high school, but all his diploma had gotten him was a series of dead-end jobs. In Baldwin Park, Caroline Ruiz had her degree, too, but she was stuck cleaning up offices. And in San Francisco, Noemi Pegueros had resigned herself to making an odd dollar carrying people's groceries and falling in and out of runaway shelters. Today Machuca is training to be a short-order cook and talking about some day being a chef.

'It gave us a chance to work with young people--both men and women--who need a second chance in life.' Sophia Ramos glanced at the computer screen with a practiced eye. Her fingers roamed confidently across the keyboard. "I've been here a year and four months, and I've learned a lot," the 18-year-old South Gate resident said, pausing briefly between lessons at the Job Corps training center on South Hill Street in downtown Los Angeles. "They're really concerned about you here," she said.

Last summer, Daniel Machuca was a year out of an East Los Angeles high school, but all his diploma had gotten him was a series of dead-end jobs. In Baldwin Park, Caroline Ruiz had her diploma, too, but she was stuck cleaning up offices. And in San Francisco, Noemi Pegueros had resigned herself to making an odd dollar carrying people's groceries and falling in and out of runaway shelters. Today Machuca is training to be a short-order cook and talking about some day being a chef.

Albert Magana, an Oxnard teen-ager, has been bunking at the San Diego Job Corps Center here for seven months. He's turning his life around. Magana, 16, is in one of the center's vocational training programs, learning how to install solar water heating units. He came to the center because, he said, "I was doing poorly in school and hanging around on the streets. I thought to myself, 'I've got to get my act together.' " But that may never happen.

With all the confidence of a seasoned professional, Francine Eager pulls out the wires inside the electrical makeup box and strips the insulation from their ends with a wire-stripper. Then she carefully twists them together and, with the help of a pair of linesman pliers, adroitly slips on the special nut that will connect the wires and enable electricity to flow through the building.

President Bush said Saturday that his budget will propose funding increases for popular nutrition and job-training programs, likely exceptions in a fiscal plan that will see a return to federal deficits. The budget will call for an additional $364 million for the $4.3-billion Women, Infants and Children nutrition program and $73 million more for the Job Corps, currently funded at $1.5 billion, the president said in his weekly radio address.

About 300 young people came down with the flu at a Job Corps training center, and doctors fear they may have spread the virus throughout six states when they went home for Thanksgiving break. In addition to the 300 cases of influenza confirmed by lab tests, the other 360 students at the Atterbury Job Corps Center in southern Indiana may also have contracted the virus, said Dr. Greg Steele, the state epidemiologist.