Tomorrow's Workforce

How one inner-city program is trying to give kids the skills they need -- and the ones you need, too.

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Washington, D.C. One evening in June, 17-year-old Vincent Hawkins was clicking through a Web site he had constructed, which was devoted to two of his passions: professional wrestling and an animated television show known as Dragon Ball. Nothing unusual for a teenager, except the setting. He was sitting at an IBM PC with a Pentium II processor in the Perry School Community Services Center, located in the neighborhood of Washington, D.C., known as Northwest No. 1. The area's grim moniker is one of the legacies of a 1960s urban-renewal plan that had the unfortunate but not uncommon result of rendering the area economically desolate, making it the second-poorest area in the nation's capital.

The center is housed in a former public-school building that had been abandoned for more than 25 years before a consortium of community organizations reclaimed it. In 1998, the Perry School began offering health care and then in 1999 added social services, job training and placement, day care, and after-school programs, including computer instruction at its Networked Learning Center.

The school is just around the corner from a block of 29 newly built owner-occupied town houses, one of two affordable-housing projects in the predominantly black neighborhood. The Perry School and the new houses are the exceptions, however, in an economic backwater just five minutes from the Capitol, an area where the median income is $12,400 a year. There are more than 1,500 units of public and subsidized housing within half a mile of the center. There's not a major supermarket or drugstore nearby.

Hawkins, a handsome, soft-spoken youth with a powerful athletic physique, was dragged into the center by a friend earlier this year when high school football season was over. Hawkins didn't have a PC at home and had little exposure to computers at school, although he had tried surfing the Web at a public library.

That lack of computer literacy had already affected his job prospects. "When I applied for a job at Blockbuster last summer, they asked me, 'Can you use a computer?" he recalls. "I said, 'I can type my name. That's about it.' No one would hire me." Since then Hawkins has attended an after-school computer-learning program at the Perry School. But the aim isn't simply to help him qualify for a job at a retail store, although that could well be an option.

This summer, after several months in the program, Hawkins was teaching younger grade-school-aged children at the center. A few weeks earlier he'd made what was for him an unheard-of $10 an hour helping to inventory all the PCs in the community center. With several other teens, he checked available memory, hard-drive space, and network cards to see whether the machines could be upgraded. "We were competing with each other to see who could do a PC the fastest," he says. "I finally learned all those things people were talking about with computers."

A talented football player at Dunbar High School in the district, Hawkins still hopes for a potential college-sports scholarship or a career in acting. But just in case those shoot-the-moon dreams fail to pan out, dabbling with his Web site and creating digital movies with his classmates are helping him acquire the knowledge that might open up broader opportunities, ones that will allow him to leave the neighborhood that the Perry School serves.

"We're bringing technology to areas where people don't have access to it," says Networked Learning Center director Kelly Gainer, a compact and energetic young woman who speaks passionately about the program. "And they're not just learning computer skills. I expect them to go beyond that so they can have the confidence to go beyond the average job."

"They're not just learning computer skills. I expect them to go beyond that so they can have the confidence to go beyond the average job," says Kelly Gainer, director of the Networked Learning Center.

Gainer had been working as a manager at MCI for five years when she read an article in the Washington Post with the headline "Sometimes Money Is Not Enough," which featured an inner-city high-tech program called Martha's Table. She quit her MCI job and worked at Martha's Table for two and a half years before leaving to head up the Perry School program in 1998. With two assistants and 15 PCs, Gainer runs a program for children ages 6 through 13, heads a program for teens, and oversees an adult job-training workshop. "This is my calling," she says simply.

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