Albany officials push back on Job Corps shutdown

Caption

The Job Corps provided housing, jobs and career training for low-income young people. It was dismantled by the Trump administration in late May.

Credit: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

Officials in Albany are pushing back against the Trump administration’s decision to shut down the nationwide Job Corps program.

The program was created during the 1960s and provides low-income students with housing, education and career training.

A statement last week from the U.S. Department of Labor said Job Corps was financially challenged and rife with reports of violence and drug use.

“A startling number of serious incident reports and our in-depth fiscal analysis reveal the program is no longer achieving the intended outcomes that students deserve,” said Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer.

But Albany Mayor Bo Dorough on Tuesday defended the program, which employs about 500 students and 300 staff members in the Albany area.

Those students and staff, who come from throughout the Southeast, now face the abrupt end of their jobs.

“I see these notices about the problems at the Job Corps facilities throughout the country,” Dorough said. “And you know it’s just a hatchet job because it ignores the thousands, the tens of thousands of success stories.”

He said that students have been told to leave their dormitories by next Friday, a move he called “inhumane.”

Albany City Commissioner Jon Howard, whose ward includes the program’s 128-acre campus just east of downtown, said many of its residents don’t have anywhere else to live.

“It’s time to put personalities to the side and think what is the best for those students that are homeless and where can they go,” Howard said. “There’s a huge liability risk with students or anybody that we have to stay in town.”

Former students and staff members of the Albany complex, which is called Turner Job Corps, have expressed their sadness and disappointment in hundreds of comments on social media.

“It is a tragic, unfortunate and wrong-headed decision to close the facility down,” Dorough said. “The decision was made without any deliberation.”

The closure is another blow for Southwest Georgia, coming weeks after Georgia-Pacific announced that it will close its containerboard mill in Early County, ending about 500 jobs.

A Job Corps center in Brunswick also is slated for closure.