AS LAYOFFS MOUNT, JOB TRAINING FUNDS
DRY UP; MAY BE ELIMINATED


Mike McCagg
ccSCOOP News

03-25-11 - Funding to help the region’s unemployed or soon-to-be unemployed is quickly running dry this year and the prospects for new funding next year may be bleak, officials with the state’s Workforce Investment Act (WIA) Office at Columbia-Greene Community College said this week.

The news couldn’t come at a worse time as officials at the at the Holcim Cement plant in Catskill announced the plant will be closing, leaving 100 workers – some of them from Columbia County - out of a job, and school officials across the state plan to issue pink slips to teachers and support staff as they struggle to deal with declining state education aid.
Workforce Investment Executive Director M.A. Wiltse told ccSCOOP job training funding for this year – which runs through June for the agency – is nearly depleted.

“We had $300,000 budgeted for tuition for job training programs and that is pretty close to gone,” Wiltse said.
“There are so many people that are unemployed these days that it becomes more and more difficult to provide the assistance they need,” she said.

The unemployment rate for Columbia County in January - the most recent data available – stood at 8.6 percent, up from 7.3 percent in December and down ever-so-slightly from 8.7 percent in January, 2010.

The funds are used to pay for tuition to programs that re-train workers for new careers, such as commercial trucking, accounting and nursing.

Without the funds for job training program, Wiltse said her office is limited in what it can do for the region’s jobless. Computer program training, job search assistance, interviewing skill building and resume writing skills are among the services the office can still provide with the limited amount of funds it has left.

However, even that may be in the jeopardy for the next calendar year. A version of the proposed federal budget proposed by the U.S. House of Representatives would eliminate funding for Workforce Investment offices.
“We are completely federally funded so that would be it for us,” she said.

"The Department of Labor, which is state funded, would still be there, but the (workforce investment) office would be gone. Workshops on how to search for jobs, resume writing and putting it all together would be gone or almost gone if the federal funds are eliminated,” as would the job retraining program, she said.

The WIA office has been pivotal in helping the region’s jobless find work.

Training for careers as a commercial trucker have helped some of the county’s unemployed find work, while others have been trained for careers in the burgeoning nursing field. Even highly educated teachers who found themselves unemployed last year when schools undertook mass layoffs sought out services of her office, Wiltse said.

“We tried to assist them in considering other career options, to think how the skills they have can be used in other careers,” she said.

Those same services are likely to be in greater demand this summer – if the office has any funding – given the cuts proposed in schools in the county and beyond.

“It is a very difficult time to unemployed,” she said.

According to the Campaign For Tomorrow’s Workforce, beyond eliminating job training and counseling services, the House of Representatives' proposed funding cut to the WIA would eliminate funding for:

· Title I youth activities, which ends up as funding to DYCD for WIA Out of School Youth (OSY – about $13 million) and In School Youth (ISY – about $13 million) programs in New York City.

· Title II activities, which support adult education programs. In New York, these funds go to the State Education Department for adult education programs serving individuals 16 and over, in funding to NYC CBOs and community colleges.

· YouthBuild – a comprehensive education and training program model that service providers compete for directly to the USDOL.