Job Corp Offers Second Chance at Education

MARION, Va. – After her freshman year, Temeaka Walker dropped out of high school and took a job she saw as a career, working as a shipyard painter.

But after suffering an on-the-job back injury, she knew that kind of work wouldn’t cut it for the long term. So Walker decided on a second chance at education – and found it here, at the Blue Ridge Job Corps Center.

“As I got older, I found that education means a lot in this world, and without it you’ve got nothing,” said Walker, 25, who left her 11-year-old son with her mother in Hampton, Va., so she could come here to study. “This program is, to me, a second chance in life.”

Walker will be among those graduating Friday from the Job Corps Center that this month was named the best in the nation by the U.S. Department of Labor. The Blue Ridge Center is one of 122 Job Corps centers around the nation, and three in the Tri-Cities region. The two others in the region are in Bristol, Tenn., and Coeburn, Va.

Focused on health professions, the federally funded program at Blue Ridge teaches employment-related “soft skills” along with providing a high school education and job training for dedicated but disadvantaged young women.

Walker, who will graduate from the residential program later this month, said she came here at the age of 23 with a ninth-grade education. She is leaving with a high school diploma, certification as a medical assistant, and plans to attend college and pursue a nursing degree.

“They treat us like family members, they adopt us,” said Safoorah Mughal, a 22-year-old student and Pakistani immigrant who came to the United States in 2006 and plans to make Southwest Virginia her home. “Everything is awesome here.”

Gary Tickles, director of the Blue Ridge Job Corps Center, credits a goal-oriented focus among students and staff with the center’s No. 1 rating.

“We’re No. 1 because our report card is the best in the nation,” said Tickles, who explained that the center scored well in the 12 criteria used to judge the center’s performance.

Among those criteria, he said, are higher job placement rates and wages, which are influenced by the focus on a high-demand field: health. The center also teaches basic, real-world skills to its students, who begin the program between the ages of 16 and 24.

“We teach that you need to be on time, you need to dress properly, you need to have customer-relations skills,” Tickles said. “Everything is geared toward what you’re going to run into when you become employed.”

Tickles said the national Job Corps program began in 1964 under President Lyndon Johnson and combined two goals: Get kids off the streets in the nation’s cities and transport them to a better environment, meanwhile injecting money into the impoverished Appalachian region.

Most of the program’s original centers were in national forests, Tickles said, and community service remains a component of the program, where students are provided free training, food, clothing, health care, a place to stay and a small monthly living stipend.

While a growing number of local students participate in the program, the young women in the Blue Ridge center’s residential program come here from a broad area.

“I think what it means is going out with the confidence that they have the skills necessary to be successful in life,” Tickles said of the Job Corps.

For more information about the program, call Candace Gilley at (276) 783-7221.

| (276) 791-0701