Occupational Training

A leading California foundation plans today to announce a broad campaign to help Los Angeles immigrants become more active citizens with a new $3.75-million, five-year program to help them learn English, improve job skills and increase civic participation. The California Community Foundation in Los Angeles also is set to release a 75-page report that documents the essential and dynamic role immigrants play in the regional economy and suggests ways to help them become even more productive.

One man in the classroom earned more than $100,000 framing tract homes during the building heyday. Another installed pools and piloted a backhoe. Behind him sat a young father who made a good living swinging a hammer in southern Utah. But that was before construction jobs vanished like a fast-moving dust storm in this blustery high desert. Hard times have brought them to a classroom in rural Kern County to learn a different trade. Tonight's lesson: how to avoid death and dismemberment.

A veterans outreach organization in Long Beach was named one of 17 groups nationwide Wednesday to receive a share of $7.5 million to train veterans for green jobs. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis announced the agency grants to provide about 3,000 veterans with training and employment in green jobs. In California, the Long Beach site will get $500,000 to train more than 100 veterans in Los Angeles County and find work for them.

There was a logjam at the door of a makeshift schoolhouse one recent morning, because everyone was being scanned with a metal detector. There was a reason for that. Of the 50 students filing in for class, 45 were once gang members -- in at least 30 rival gangs. It was a swaggering crowd, with shaved heads and baggy pants, gold chains draped around thick necks. Many still used their street names: Brick. Q Ball. The students sat on metal folding chairs.

A state panel that hands out worker training funds to employers delayed voting on a $2-million request from a soon-to-close Bay Area automaker that builds Toyotas. Panel members said Friday that before agreeing to reimburse the factory for training autoworkers, they wanted to know more about when the plant's partners knew they were closing the last automobile factory in California. The factory, New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. in Fremont, is a joint venture between Toyota Motor Corp.

A Torrance hospital held a baby shower this week for an unlikely addition: A 7-pound robotic baby named Simantha. The $35,000 baby "born" May 30 will serve as an educational tool for students and staff members in the clinical skills lab at Torrance Memorial Medical Center. Simantha joins three robotic adults: Stan D. Ardman (a play on the phrase "standard man"), Brittnay and Jake, who is called Jessica when staff members use her as a female. John Edwards, the clinical skills simulation technician who runs the lab and maintains the robots, was beaming like a proud father at the baby shower, he said.

His style is a mix of Socrates and Don Rickles. His goal is to coax, bully, tease, demand and manipulate ex-convicts into getting ready to find a job. One of the first chores is to get them to drop the habits they picked up behind bars: lying, faking, refusing to make eye contact, getting verbally aggressive when disrespected, thinking of the whole world as just another overbearing prison guard. Scott Silverman is relentless. "You're doing that thing again, something between a smirk and what you call a smile," he tells one student.

For 15 minutes on Wednesday, I stood theoretically in the tower at Los Angeles International Airport and learned a little about how it feels to be an air traffic controller at the nation's third-busiest airport. Had it been for real, I would have been very, very worried. With about 1,400 commercial takeoffs and landings a day, LAX controllers have one of the most stressful jobs in aviation as they labor to keep a major transportation hub moving while staying at least one step ahead of disaster.

In one kitchen, Bob Suchyta perfects his muffins and brownies, trying to build a business in case the economy costs him his radio job. In another, Chelsea Britt, a recent college graduate, bakes in hopes of keeping her dad's panforte business going. In a third kitchen, Robyn Chandonnet prepares vegan raw cheesecakes. There are dozens of stories behind the bowls and stoves and recipes at Chef's Kitchens, an incubator for food businesses.

With unemployment continuing to climb, President Obama on Tuesday unveiled a plan to pump $12 billion into the nation's community colleges over the next 10 years to help struggling workers prepare for new careers, saying a better-educated workforce was crucial to long-term prosperity. "Time and again, when we have placed our bet for the future on education, we have prospered as a result -- by tapping the incredible innovative and generative potential of a skilled American workforce," Obama said.