By Deborah Rudacille

Melvin Nolasco dropped out of high school in tenth grade. Now 22, the Rockville, Maryland, resident has spent the past six years working a series of part-time jobs. As the recession deepened in 2008, even the part-time work dried up.

“I was out of work for a year,” he says. “I applied so many places. I got a couple of interviews but as soon as they looked at my record, they told me they couldn’t hire me.”

A joyride with a stolen car when he was 18 and a couple of misdemeanor charges have made Nolasco—like many young people with criminal records—all but unemployable in the current job market. “Employers now are very picky,” says Lisa Stern, director of operations for Montgomery Works, one of three One Stop Career Centers in the county. “ They think, why would I hire someone with baggage when so many people are looking for work?”

The number of job-seekers in the mostly white, highly affluent county just outside Washington, D.C. is up 38 percent from last year, Stern says, and many of her new clients are “middle-class white men with degrees,” though the facility has traditionally served mostly low-income and immigrant youth.

Nationally, youth employment has hit an all-time low. Only 32 out of every 100 young adult high school dropouts were working full-time in the fall of 2008, according to researchers at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, versus 52 of every 100 high school graduates and 77 of every 100 four-year college graduates.

With or without criminal records, these young people are considered “disconnected,”—lacking the social, academic, and employment connections that lay the foundation for a successful future. Undereducated and unemployed, they are at risk, researchers say, of lower lifetime earning potential and delayed marriage, as well as destructive and anti-social behavior and incarceration.

Melvin Nolasco has been working hard to escape that grim prognosis. Last March, he enrolled in the Montgomery County Conservation Corps (MCCC), a six-month job training and educational program that has achieved measurable success in helping young people turn their lives around. Over 2600 young people have completed the program in its 25-year history, 300 in the past five years.

MCCC combines job training with intensive counseling and character-building. But it is the promise of earning a GED that gets most corps members in the door. Eighty-five percent of the young people who walk through MCCC’s doors are high school dropouts, says MCCC director Jane Wilde. “Most have ghosted through the school system. Lately, we’re seeing much lower scores on aptitude tests. Many enter at a fourth-grade reading level and third grade math level.”

At MCCC, corps members work with an experienced GED teacher for three hours, two days a week, getting the kind of personalized attention in short-supply in crowded classrooms. “Every time I have a problem, she will break it down till I understand it,” says Nolasco. “When I was in school there were just too many people for her [the teacher] to put in that much time.”

Though not everyone is ready to take the GED test within six months, program guidelines require corps members to advance at least two grade levels in order to graduate from MCCC. Outside the classroom, corps members are county employees, earning $7.25 an hour to carry out assignments ranging from forestry and landscaping to light construction and craft labor.

“I thought it would be really hard, guy work,” says Shana Budd, 21, one of two women in the current class. “But now that I’m here I really like it.” Budd, who has a one-year old son, gets on the bus at 5:15 every morning, returning home around 6:30 p.m. “It’s a long day,” she says. “You have to be committed.”

When her group started in March, “we had like 30 people,” says Budd. Only thirteen, including Budd and Nolasco, graduated in October. “By about the third month, they know if it’s for them. If it’s not, they’re gone,” says Wilde.

Some corps members, like Budd, plan to apply to college. She thinks she might like to study psychology. Nolasco wants to become a mechanic. On completing the program they and their classmates become eligible for AmeriCorps post-service educational awards of $2,360 for further education and training. Corps members can also earn state certification as flaggers, forklift or bobcat operators. MCCC has partnerships with local employers who take on some of their graduates as trainees or new hires. “We need more of those partnerships,” says Wilde.

Maryland is due to receive $29 million in Workforce Investment Act funding, with $11.7 million designated for youth services. States are being encouraged to use those funds for “high-quality summer work experiences.” But MCCC’s history shows that a summer job alone is unlikely to “reconnect” young people who need caring adult support and guidance just as much as they need job training or GEDs.

Maurice Anderson, one of three team leaders, says that a big part of his job is character-building. “We’re here to push them to do what’s right,” he says. That requires getting to know the young people as individuals and helping them navigate the challenges they face outside the program —early parenthood, lack of health insurance, inadequate transportation, homelessness and other troubles.

For Latino and African-American youth in Montgomery County, one of those challenges is racial profiling. Nolasco says that police harass and arrest young people for minor offenses. On his birthday, for example, a friend threw a party for him in the apartment she was in the process of vacating. When neighbors called the police, his friend explained that even though she had moved everything out, her lease was in effect till the end of the month. “But he was just being all mean and saying that he was going to lock everybody up for robbery, but there was nothing in the apartment. The other cops were like, ‘there’s nothing here’ but he was like ‘no, they need to learn their lesson.’” Another misdemeanor conviction resulted, though the judge promised him it would be expunged if he graduated from the Montgomery Works program.

Participation in the program has mostly kept him too busy to wind up in those sorts of situations, Melvin says. “I stay out of the streets more,” he admits. “The jobs I’ve had before were night jobs, just a couple of hours so during the day I would have time to hang out with my friends and get into trouble.”

“These kids aren’t victims,” points out Wilde. “And we don’t treat them as victims. They’ve made poor choices because they haven’t had the right kind of support. We are filling in the gaps to try and get them to understand how to make good decisions for themselves.”

Flyers posted around the conference room reinforce that message. “Your decisions in life will come back to haunt you or bless you” and “You either get started in life or you don’t!”

The message isn’t lost on corps members trying to jump start their lives.

“Everyone here is just trying to make the right decisions,” says Nolasco. “They want to make something of themselves.”

Deborah Rudacille is a freelance writer living in Baltimore. Her book Roots of Steel will be published by Pantheon Books in 2010.