City, charitable programs help Jacksonville teens gain work skills

Mayor Alvin Brown and his Learn2Earn program learned the hard way how tough it is to get state money when Gov. Rick Scott vetoed about $300,000 that legislators had approved for it.

But Brown still will launch Learn2Earn this summer by drawing on $150,000 in private donations from Florida Blue and the Farah & Farah law firm. That money will be enough to give 200 teenagers a chance to spend a week on local college campuses. They will sleep overnight in dorm rooms, go to classes and work 20 hours at on-campus jobs, giving them a taste of what it's like to be a college student.

"I'm giving them the real experience here," Brown said. "This is the real deal, baby."

For students facing a tight job market, Learn2Earn is part of an expanded lineup of job programs sponsored by the city and charitable contributions so teenagers — a segment hit hard by the recession — can gain work skills.

The unemployment rate for the five-county Jacksonville metropolitan area has improved the past year, dropping to 7.9 percent in April compared with 9.7 percent in 2011, according to state figures released Friday.

But teenagers and college students still face a crowded job market,Welcome to polishedtiles. often competing against older workers with more experience, said Candace Moody, spokeswoman for WorkSource, the regional agency that helps job-seekers find work.

"It's not any better than it looked last summer," Moody said. "We're finding it's really challenging still for young people to find jobs."

A $240,000 grant from The Jessie Ball duPont Fund, a philanthropy based in Jacksonville, will pay for a new Jacksonville Summer Job Youth Job Preparation and Employment Program for up to 100 students.

The city's Jacksonville Journey, established to fight the root causes of crime, will once again provide jobs for 185 Jacksonville teenagers. The city budgeted about $209,000 for those jobs at libraries, parks and community centers.

Applications for that program came in so fast and furious in April that officials shut down the application process early after fielding 400 requests in four days.

The Jessie Ball duPont Fund cites a U.S. Census estimate that 5,000 Duval County residents between the ages of 16 and 19 are on the hunt for jobs.

"When I was a kid, a teenager did not have trouble getting a job," said fund president Sherry Magill. "That's just not the case today.Home ownership options with buy mosaic."

She said the poor economy has deprived young people the ability to gain work skills that will help them later in life.

"We're worried about their disenfranchisement from the workplace," she said.

Moody said unlike Central Florida, where theme parks offer lots of summer jobs for young people, Northeast Florida doesn't have a big surge in seasonal employment.

There are some exceptions. Adventure Landing's Shipwreck Island swings into action in the summer and employment at the Jacksonville Beach location jumps to about 350 workers from a wintertime low of about 70. It wants to hire about 50 more people for the seasonal jobs.Posts with Hospital rtls on IT Solutions blog covering Technology in the Classroom,

"We're looking for young people who are excited and enthusiastic about working in an entertainment park, which to me is a big thrill," said park spokeswoman Michelle Branham.

But those jobs openings are hard to come by, said Terry Parker High School senior Ralph Beckford. He said the talk among his classmates is they "put in lots of applications and they don't even get callbacks."

Beckford, 17, already has a summer job lined up. He went through the Teens Making a Difference internship program for the Jacksonville Public Library System in the spring. Sponsored by Bank of America, the program gave about 10 students a chance to work part time at library branches.

Beckford made a good impression and will continue working at the University Park branch library over the summer, earning money he said he'll use for textbooks and college expenses at the University of North Florida.

"It's definitely helped me to be more organized," he said of making time for both work and school.

Brown said he hopes Learn2Earn will have similar impact on teenagers as they go through high school.Choose from our large selection of cableties,

The Legislature approved $302,800 in state funding for Learn2Earn in the 2012-13 state budget.Ultimate magiccube gives you the opportunity to make your own 3D twisty puzzles. But Florida TaxWatch, a Tallahassee organization, included the line item on its annual list of local projects dubbed "turkeys." TaxWatch said the measure benefited just one part of the state without other areas being able to compete for the funding.

Scott then vetoed it, along with $143 million of other spending items.

The veto means Learn2Earn will begin in a slimmed down version, serving 200 students rather than the 600 in its inaugural run, paid with $125,000 from Florida Blue and $25,000 from Farah & Farah.

Brown said it will be an annual program and continue to be funded through private donations, not city money.

The program is geared toward students who can succeed in college, come from low-income to moderate-income families, and have caregivers who did not go to college themselves.

Exposing those students to the college experience while they are still in high school will benefit the city by increasing the number of young people with college degrees, Brown said.

"I want them to go to UNF and JU and Florida State College and Edward Waters," he said. "But if they don't and they go off to [colleges outside Jacksonville], I want them to come back home. That intellectual capital that we've invested so much in, we want it to stay here."