Daily Astorian: Job Corps Cheers Golden Anniversary

News Article

By Edward Stratton

On Sept. 27, 1963, two months before his assassination, President John F. Kennedy visited Tongue Point in Astoria and foretold of the plan to save the former U.S. Navy reserve fleet base from the wrecking ball. It would become a helicopter base for the U.S. Coast Guard, he said, as well as a weapons-procurement training school for senior civilian and military personnel.

Kennedy had the part about the training school right. But rather than weapons, Tongue Point Job Corps Center opened Feb. 2, 1965, as a school for young men (and shortly thereafter women) to procure vocational skills and jobs as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty.

To honor the 50th anniversary of Tongue Point, the second Job Corps center in the nation, U.S. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., and other politicians from the county, Astoria and Seaside, along with Clatsop Community College President Lawrence Galizio, attended a short ceremony and student assembly Monday.

Tita Montero, business community liaison for Tongue Point, said she and a medical-assisting student making the yearly trip to Washington, D.C., were the first constituents to meet with Bonamici after she was sworn in Feb. 7, 2012. Bonamici repaid the favor Monday speaking for the 50th anniversary and at a graduation.

Many success stories

"What really resonated with me was listening to the individual stories from the graduates," Bonamici said, touting the in-demand skills in hard trades students are getting.

Since it opened, Tongue Point has taken more than 30,000 students, ages 16 to 24, starting out all-male until 1968, all-female until 1972 and coed ever since. Enrollment has ebbed and flowed with federal funding. Its capacity of up to 550 students has sometimes been cut in half. The enrollment is now more than 470 students.

The center focuses on hard trades such as construction, maintenance, health care, office work and welding that Bonamici said would allow students the freedom to follow their interests and contribute to the economy. Its seamanship program, including the former Coast Guard buoy tender Ironwood as a training vessel, is the second-highest paid trade in Job Corps and the agency's only such program nationwide.

Tongue Point has taken students from all around the world, at times a respite from totalitarian regimes, war zones, famine and civil strife. It also takes 6 percent of its students from Clatsop, Columbia and Tillamook counties, including 25-year-old Blanca Diaz from Astoria.

"I just knew that it was a good place to come and get an education," said Diaz. She was studying at CCC when an adviser told her about Tongue Point. She enrolled in August to train to be an electrician.

But Diaz never fully left the college. CCC President Larry Galizio, speaking Monday, reminded students of the program that lets them earn college credits from automotive, welding, business and other technical courses at Tongue Point. The college also stations teachers at Tongue Point for classes, and Tongue Point students often go to the college campus.

Diaz is preparing for a work-based learning assignment in the community. Tongue Point students average 340 work-based assignments a year, helping businesses locally and in their hometowns, in addition to the countless projects they volunteer for on behalf of local nonprofits and government agencies.

Before leaving, they receive advising on employment, writing resumes and skills to help ensure they remain employed.

In 2011, Tongue Point had a 68.1 percent graduation rate, with recent graduates making on average $11.23 per hour, a nearly 90 percent job-placement rate and a 72 percent trade-specific employment rate a year after graduation.

Dedicated workforce

The center has averaged 150 employees a year since opening. The Management and Training Corporation currently operates Tongue Point for the U.S. Department of Labor, and the center is the fourth-largest employer in the county. Tongue Point was recently named the Astoria-Warrenton Area Chamber of Commerce's January member of the month. Through wages, student spending, college tuition, local contracts and local purchasing, it infuses about $10.5 million annually into the local economy.

"Staff work here because of the students," said Jennifer Berg, a technical training manager who has been with Tongue Point for 25 years. "I've had parents come in and say "You were my adviser when I was a student.'"

Kimberley Zufelt, a group life manager, first came to Tongue Point as a student from Mullan, Idaho, in 1984 to study landscaping. She got a job after graduation with the Portland Parks Bureau, but returned to Tongue Point in 1989 and has worked for Job Corps ever since.

"Definitely the focus on employability and job placement, it's really evolved a lot," said Zufelt about the changes she's seen in her years as a student and employee at Job Corps. "And I think there's a whole lot more accountability for Job Corps to be a successful program, to put a quality student out there."

A rough start

"It started out as a miserable government experience," said Chamber Executive Director Skip Hauke, of Job Corps' beginnings. Montero said Hauke is a longtime supporter who used to buy advertisements for Job Corps when he ran his grocery store.

Hauke spoke out against the discrimination students often experienced in the 1960s, as many were part of the first major influx of African-Americans to Astoria. Before 1974, newspaper articles estimated the center 70 percent African-American, owing to its strategy of pulling students from the East and Southeast.

"The kids came from all corners of the nation; they were from different backgrounds; they were from different cultures; and were just different," Hauke said. "And it's not the Job Corps' fault, it's the citizens of Astoria. It was their fault."

By 1972, Job Corps focused more on recruiting students from the same regions as its centers, flipping the demographics of Tongue Point to 70 percent Caucasian. The center has developed a reputation for creating professional students and many skilled local employees.

Ever the joker, Hauke compared the development of Tongue Point's vastly improved reputation and regard locally over the last 50 years to the Virginia Slims advertising slogan, "You've come a long way, baby."

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