The questions were fired in rapid succession.
What's the law of supply and demand?
What's the goal of any business?
How can profits be increased?
Though it sounded like an introductory economics class, it's the latest effort in Lucas County's welfare-to-work transition. It's called business boot camp, and it's designed to teach longtime recipients of welfare benefits how their behavior on the job affects the bottom line.
"I liked this class a lot - it's benefitted me," said Veronica Santana, 26, a mother of four who recently went back on public assistance. "We've been doing all these questions and stuff about things I never knew about. This profit and loss - come on. I've never been to a class like this."
The county's Job and Family Services agency contracted with Bridges, a local employment training and placement company, to start a pilot program for people who recently have resumed collecting welfare benefits or are longtime recipients.
Under federal law, welfare recipients exhaust their benefits after five years. Ohio caps its cash assistance at three years initially, then requires someone to wait two years before returning to the welfare rolls. People who resume receiving cash assistance have only two years before they're cut off for good, unless they qualify for a hardship exemption.
People started being forced off the public-assistance rolls in October, 2000, in response to radical changes Congress made to the welfare laws in 1996.
Carol Rehm, deputy director of the county's Job and Family Services, said the pilot program offered through Bridges is experimental. Thirty people were referred to it, with a group of six women completing the initial one-week camp that will be followed by job placement and close supervision.
"We were looking for a program for our hardest-to-serve clients - those who have been on assistance for a long period of time and were struggling to find employment," Ms. Rehm said.
Dan Morris, general manager of Bridges, said he hopes the students will begin thinking about work in a way that makes them understand why their bosses want things done in a certain way. He also wants them to ask themselves how they can help make the company money because it will make them more valuable employees. The people in the class often have no stable work history. Mr. Morris said the next phase calls for placing them in three different types of jobs to identify their interests. Job coaches will shadow the would-be workers and help resolve any issues that are barriers to work, such as lack of transportation and child care.
He said the hope is that people in the program will be placed into skilled jobs that will offer career opportunities.
"A job won't keep people off welfare or change the behaviors that got them on welfare. A career that has a future will change those behaviors," Mr. Morris said.
Ms. Santana, for instance, thinks she wants to learn about car care. She said she's only had two jobs in her life - one of them at Taco Bell - and she knows she needs to "get it together."
One of her training experiences next week will be at a ProCare car repair shop.
Aubrey Schmidlin, 20, hopes she'll find steady work as a house painter. She said her benefits will run out in three or four months, so she needs a trade to help support her and her 2-year-old son.
Ms. Schmidlin said she's been through other training programs that weren't as helpful as the business boot camp.
"This has been a rewarding experience," she said. "They don't just teach you interviewing skills and common sense things. They teach you about business, which I didn't have before."
Ms. Rehm said 531 people in Lucas County, like Ms. Schmidlin and Ms. Santana, are in the last 24 months of cash assistance.
Carlotta Williamson-Brown, the jobs program manager for the county's Job and Family Services, said some people who are in their final months of assistance need to learn not just how to get a job, but how to hold on to it.
She said some people who have been on public assistance for a long time need to pick up basic skills to help them keep their jobs, such as not waiting to arrange for child care until the last minute, showing up to work on time, and arranging transportation.
"We want to give them a little more support, make them more marketable," Ms. Williamson-Brown said.
By DALE EMCH
BLADE STAFF WRITER
Contact Dale Emch at:
daleemch@theblade.com
or 419 724-6061.
View article at: Toledo Blade