Developing community service career ladder programs to support welfare-to-work
Abstract
In collaboration with the Rhode Island Department of Human Services and the Providence School Department, the Parents Making a Difference welfare-to-work program enrolls participants as education award-only AmeriCorps members enabling them to continue receiving public assistance benefits. The Parents Making a Difference experience serves as training for jobs as educational aides and assistants in the Providence School Department, helping to meet a pressing demand for experienced, multicultural paraprofessionals. Recommendations and models are provided for establishing welfare-to-paraprofessional and paraprofessional-to-career training programs. This practice is based on research by Trina P. Barnes and Owen Heleen in their 1998 National Service Fellows report, Career Ladders, Community Service, and Welfare-to-Work.Issue
While entry-level employment is a major improvement over unemployment and public assistance, these jobs do not afford a family a solid enough base upon which to build a future. Both communities and families can benefit by the development of focused career ladders that lead to full professional employment.Conventional training and education often does not work well for many of the unemployed, who have had a poor educational experience.Action
First Stage of the Ladder: Welfare to Paraprofessional
These are structured programs in which education, training, and mentoring are embedded in real work or valued community service. They also provide critical exposure to the workings of a particular field, moving participants from outsider to insider.
Successful "first stage" career ladder programs share three features:
- The programs are targeted on a defined set of employment opportunities. There are "real jobs" at the end of the ladder.
- Training is very closely related to the work or service performed. Indeed, sometimes the training is almost indistinguishable from the service.
- They are human-focused and flexible, recognizing the developmental nature of working with many folks who are unemployed.
- Identification of "who's right" for a program. Oftentimes welfare caseworkers are simply too busy with high caseloads to make a good match. Community-based recruitment is an alternative for making a good match between programs and welfare recipients.
- While many programs provide for half-time service, as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) hours per week requirements rise over the years, more participants will need more intensive programs.
- Participants need to receive mentoring and support from people who have been through similar experiences.
- Training must be relevant to available jobs in the community.
- Participants need help tackling the "logistical challenges" of their lives — transportation, scheduling flexibility, child care, and so forth.
- Make programmatic connections with the children of participants. Three-quarters of participants in Parents Making a Difference served in their own child's school. One participant described how her participation caused her middle-school age daughter to think differently about herself and her education, leading her to pursue a college degree.
- Participants must perceive their service as "real work."
- Participants should not be treated differently from the rest of the service corps.
Second Stage of the Ladder: Paraprofessional to Career Professional
A core objective of the career ladder model is to ensure that low-income participants progress beyond the paraprofessional level. There are many program models for the second half of the career ladder, especially in the field of education. For instance, welfare-to-work paraeducators (e.g., teacher aides, schoolyard monitors, computer lab assistants) are often ideal candidates for becoming professional teachers.
Second stage education career ladder programs recruit highly motivated paraprofessionals already familiar with the world of the school and the classroom and provide them with tuition assistance, intensive and personalized academic advisement (often by someone who has "been there"), and other supports required to succeed in college. Often, the school system in which the paraprofessional works makes flexible schedule or reduced work loads available to career ladder participants. School systems do not however usually give participants a leave from their classroom duties because a goal of these programs is to integrate college instruction with practical experience.
Many paraeducator programs also illustrate "best practices" as advocated by the field of teacher development as they integrate college education and training with classroom experience, model and support reflective teaching practice, build in team teaching, and incorporate performance-based assessment including teaching portfolios.
Recommended links for stage two career ladder programs:
A Guide to Developing Paraeducator-to-Teacher Programs [full download]www.rnt.org/publications/toolkit2.pdf
Breaking the Class Ceiling: Paraeducator Pathways to Teaching (1996) [excerpt]www.rnt.org/publications/breaking.html
Context
Parents Making A Difference AmeriCorps program in Providence, Rhode Island.
The Providence school system annually hired approximately 275 new teacher aides and classroom assistants to supervise cafeterias, playgrounds, and buses, provide one-on-one assistance to students, and meet children's special needs. These were unionized positions with benefits that paid between nine to eleven dollars an hour in 1998.
The school system guaranteed employment to any graduate of the Parents Making a Difference program who completed a year of successful service. The program provides the school system with employees who have at least a year's experience in how to work with a variety of school staff, who are bilingual, who know the community and how to work well with families, and who have become known and trusted in the school. The positions require a high school diploma, putting a premium on the program's ability to help members complete their GED.
The Providence School Department's Title I program offered its aides and assistants courses toward their associate degree at the Community College of Rhode Island and reimbursed them for tuition upon completion of each course. Combined with the AmeriCorps education award, graduates of the Parents Making a Difference program could advance many rungs up the career ladder.
The Rhode Island Department of Human Services allowed participants in their Pathways to Independence program to continue receiving the "regular" package of public assistance benefits while becoming part of the Parents Making a Difference program. After one year of successful service, these participants would have received a year of valuable training, an offer for a good job, free coursework toward an associate degree, and an AmeriCorps education award to use toward post-secondary education.
Citation
Barnes, Trina P. and Owen Heleen. Career Ladders, Community Service, and Welfare-to-Work: A review of the literature and promising programs and a kit for communities. Washington, D.C.: Corporation for National and Community Service National Service Fellows program, 1998.Outcome
The Providence School System guaranteed employment to any graduate of Parents Making A Difference who completed a year of successful service.
As a result of hiring participants of career ladder programs, many school systems are able to increase the ethnic diversity of their teaching staff. In 1998 only 13 percent of teachers nationwide were people of color while nearly one-third of their students were. The discrepancy in urban areas was even more pronounced.
By showing the determination to progress from reliance on government-subsidies to self-sufficiency, participants of career ladder programs serve as community role models. As such they help reinforce community-school relationships.
Evidence
In reviewing the first 18 months of the Parents Making a Difference program, it was revealed that 57 percent of those who entered the program and stayed for more than 30 days were then able to secure paid employment.
Other service programs also have solid experience in helping people transition away from welfare, including Project Match, of the Erikson Institute in Chicago; New York City's partnership between the United Federation of Teachers and the Board of Education; and various programs in Virginia and Michigan.
Posted On
March 26, 2003For More Information