Job Corps center faces cuts in students, staff

Federal budget cuts have extended to the Penobscot Job Corps in Bangor, which is facing reductions in students and staff.

The Department of Labor has reallocated 50 unused slots for commuter students from the Penobscot Center in Bangor to another Job Corps center elsewhere in the country, according to Eunice Johnson, director of human resources for the Training & Development Corp., which administers the program in Maine.

“Because there was a 50-student reduction … the staff was reduced accordingly,” she said Tuesday.

The program will lose 20 of its 65 staff positions, but about half of those will be lost through attrition.

The program currently serves 385 disadvantaged youth aged 16 to 24, 95 percent of whom are from Maine, according to TDC statistics, with the remainder from other New England states.

TDC, which also runs the Woodland Job Corps Center in Laurel, Md., recently was re-awarded the contract it has held for a decade to operate the Maine center for the vocational-training program for adolescents and young adults. The Department of Labor awards the contracts through a competitive-bid process.

While previous Job Corps contracts for TDC have spanned five years, the current one covers Oct. 1, 1990, to Sept. 30, 1992, and provides for three one-year option periods contingent upon satisfactory performance, according to a press release issued Tuesday from TDC’s new headquarters in Bucksport.

Johnson, who was in Bangor on Tuesday for meetings pertaining to the transition, said all staff positions had been declared vacant and prior staff members will have to reapply for the fewer openings.

But the change should have little effect on “direct services” to students, she said, because the federal contract is “very prescriptive of what a Job Corps center needs” and left little leeway for cutting programs. Rather, she explained, most staff cuts would be in clerical and other administrative jobs rather than in teaching positions.

“We’re not cutting out anything at Job Corps,” she said. “We are redistributing resources.”

The cuts are being imposed under the 1988 Gramm-Rudman federal budget-reduction mandate.