AS EDUCATORS HIT THE UNEMPLOYMENT LINES, JOB TRAINING PROGRAMS DRY UP

Mike McCagg
ccSCOOP

07-21-10 - At a time when unemployment offices across New York State can expect an influx of thousands of education workers - teachers, teacher’s aides, bus drivers, cooks, etc - looking for work, the amount of job training funds will be significantly less.

While Columbia County's unemployment rate decreased to 6.8 percent in May, down from a high of 8.3 percent in January, those numbers can expect to once again increase with an influx of almost 200 newly unemployed teachers, aides and the like in the county. That number doesn't take into account those who might be unemployed because their company contracted with a school district and was cut, such as private school bus contractors.

Despite the projected increased demand for services, M. A. Wiltse, Executive Director of the Workforce Investment Office at C-GCC, said her agency's budget has been cut roughly in half, down from $1 million last year.

"The stimulus money is gone," she told ccSCOOP, referring to approximately $470,000 in federal ARRA stimulus funding awarded to the office to deal with the impact of The Great Recession.

The Workforce Investment Office’s fiscal year runs from July 1 through June 30 - and the bitter pill of lost funding will begin over the summer, just as those education workers will begin seeking services.

"There will still be assistance in terms of finding new employment, but our budget has taken a hit in terms of job re-training," Wiltse said.

The job training programs are provided to dislocated workers who are unlikely to be able to return to their previous jobs and could use new job skills. Through the initiative, eligible people receive tuition to pay for training for jobs that are in demand at the time. In the past, those have included jobs in accounting, jobs as nurses and truck drivers, and other positions that area employers have had a hard time filling.

Wiltse said she doesn’t expect that many teachers will look for retraining initially, but she does expect many of the aides and others will seek the assistance.

“How much retraining teachers are going to need is an issue we haven’t figured out yet, but we do know that some of the support staff that have been laid-off will need additional training to find employment in other fields,” she said.

One aide in an area school district – who asked to not be identified – had spent a dozen years in an elementary school classroom and loved it.

She told ccSCOOP that she has “no idea” what she is going to do now and will likely have to seek assistance in finding a new job since “there are no jobs in education right now.”

Wiltse said that her office provided assistance 1,900 individuals during the first nine months of the fiscal year that ended on June 30. Of those, 258 took part in job training programs. With about half the funding available for the upcoming year, the training opportunities are likely going to decrease dramatically, though the exact total of the decrease is still unknown.