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The Trump administration will be undertaking a "phased pause" at contractor-operated Job Corps centers across the country, which was recently found to have a low graduation rate and a high number of serious incident reports filed. A press release from the Department of Labor stated that the pauses will occur at contractor-operated Job Corps centers by June 30, and will initiate "an orderly transition for students, staff, and local communities." Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said in a statement, "Job Corps was created to help young adults build a pathway to a better life through education, training, and community. However, a...

The Department of Labor on Thursday announced it has paused its Job Corps operations, cautioning that the program has issues with student safety and fiscal sustainability. “Job Corps was created to help young adults build a pathway to a better life through education, training, and community,” Department of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said in a written statement. “However, a startling number of serious incident reports and our in-depth fiscal analysis reveal the program is no longer achieving the intended outcomes that students deserve.” The Department of Labor just released its first-of-its-kind Job Corps Transparency Report, using data from program year...

A Labor Department program designed to train 16- to 24-year-olds to join the workforce spends more per person annually than Ivy League colleges, but participants wind up making minimum wage on average — raising questions about whether it should continue to exist. The Job Corps pays teenage runaways, high school dropouts, and twentysomething ex-cons to live in dormitories and receive their GEDs and vocational training. The national cost per graduate was $188,000, with the average graduate staying 13.5 months. Of more than 110 campuses, the 10 least efficient averaged a cost of $385,000 per graduate. Job Corps participants earn $16,695...

WASHINGTON – The last minutes of Jose Santos Amaya Guardado’s young life were hell. The 17-year-old was lured into the woods by three of his classmates at the federally funded Homestead Job Corps in Florida. Outside the live-in vocational school, the students pulled out a machete, police say, and began to hack away at him. As he lay in a pool of his own blood, the attackers threw him in a shallow grave and set him on fire, authorities say. Accused ringleader Kaheem Arbelo, 20, allegedly marked the moment by having sex in the woods with student Desiray Strickland, 18....

Florida police say four teens hacked a 17-year-old boy half to death with a machete before ordering him into a hole and burying him while still barely alive. Then two of the alleged attackers celebrated by having sex nearby. Desiray Strickland, 18, was arrested Wednesday in the sickening murder of Jose Amaya Guardado on June 28. Kaheem Arbelo, 20, Jonathan Lucas, 18, and Christian Colon, 19, were arrested last week, and reportedly confessed to the crime. The foursome apparently plotted the gruesome killing for a couple of weeks, according to court documents obtained by the Miami Herald. They allegedly dug...

The North Texas Job Corps Center is part of the U.S. Department of Labor's national program, which helps train students for jobs.Layoffs at the North Texas Job Corps Center in McKinney will affect 300 positions a little more than a month after Dallas news station Fox 4 investigated allegations of abuse at the facility. The cuts were revealed in two letters to the Texas Workforce Commission filed under the The Worker Adjustment Retraining and Notification Act. The notices said NTJCC expects to lay off 240 workers, while Fluor Federal Solutions will eliminate 79 jobs connected to the center. Layoffs are...

$1.7 billion plan to preach humanity's 'goodness'The federal program Job Corps will tap into a proposed $1.7 billion budget not simply to provide career-development services to at-risk men and women but to raise awareness of the “inherent goodness” found in each human being. The money will be spent to make people feel good. The “I Am Somebody” initiative for fiscal year 2015 will teach appreciation of “ethnic diversity” in response to problems among job training and other employment-assistance recipients, according to the project Statement of Work, or SOW, which WND located via routine database research. “Recently Job Corps students have...

A national freeze on most new enrollments into the federally funded Job Corps training program will delay the efforts of low-income teenagers and young adults in Connecticut and around the country to get their lives on track. One group estimated that the freeze, in place until July, will affect about 250 Job Corps candidates in Connecticut. The U.S. Department of Labor suspended new enrollment Jan. 28, citing cost overruns that critics have blamed on mismanagement. Job Corps, which began in the early 1960s, is a free education and training program serving mostly high school dropouts. The program helps participants get...

Two years ago, Kristina Harris Perkins, a 19-year-old woman enrolled in the San Jose Job Corps Center with big plans for the future, lay dead on a light-rail station platform. She had been stabbed in the heart. Now, after a marathon 26-day preliminary hearing spread out over three months, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Rise Pichon has ruled there is enough evidence to try five young adults -- all from the same San Jose family -- on charges of murder and attempted murder stemming from a deadly brawl captured by security cameras at the Alum Rock station. Two other...

A riot-like fight involving approximately 60 students at the Job Corps facility in Alachua County ended Saturday night with several people arrested and others suffering minor injuries. More than 13 Gainesville police officers responded to the melee just before 9 p.m. and arrested four adults and six juveniles on charges from disorderly conduct to battery and resisting arrest without violence. Seven individuals were sent to the hospital with mostly stress-related symptoms, such as hyperventilating and fainting. The center, located at 5301 N.E. 40th Terrace near the airport, houses 350 students between the ages of 16 and 24 for nine months...