The U.S. Department of Labor has officially announced the impending closure of the Ouachita Job Corps program after 52 years in the Hot Springs area.
Job Corps National Director Tina Terrell spoke to employees Thursday morning at the center, which is located in Royal west of Hot Springs, about the process of closing it. She said the information would be featured on the Federal Register today.
The center was considered for closure in August and placed on the endangered list, primarily due to low attendance and graduation rates. Ouachita Director Robert G. Fausti has previously said the center struggled to recover from a suspension of enrollment at all Job Corps centers in early 2013.
"We first have to deal with the students, because that is why we are here," Terrell said. "We have to put a plan together of how we transfer the students. Then we have to deal with the employees because we are going to work to try to help them find other jobs, whether it's other jobs in the Job Corps program or National Forest Service or other federal agencies."
"This is something we've been working on for, oh, probably close to a year now," U.S. Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-District 4, said this week. "I went out and visited the Job Corps and toured it and met the new director that had been put in place and was kind of impressed with some of the progress that they had made out there."
Terrell said a human resources team will work on site with employees to assist them with job placement. A point person will assist Fausti with the process. Terrell said she wanted to stress to employees their jobs would not end without notice and they will be treated with respect.
"That's all I want to do, because if I was in the same boat, I would want somebody to do that to me too," Terrell said. "I'd want somebody to meet with me and say, 'Can you answer my questions? OK, you can't answer them now. Can you come back and answer them?'"
Some employees were frustrated with Terrell's inability to provide them with answers to questions about some of their concerns, such as the time frame for the closure. Terrell said she was unable to answer some questions because the department has not worked out all of the details.
"From the administration's standpoint, this center is closed," Terrell said. "My job is to implement a decision, which is the center is closed. I don't make the decision. The secretary of labor made the decision."
Employees asked why the Cass Job Corps center in Ozark would remain open instead of the Ouachita program. Terrell reportedly said Cass would improve by the end of the year.
"It was very evident to many of the staff that she has never supported Ouachita," one employee said.
Cass and Ouachita are two of only three Job Corps programs in Arkansas. The third is located in Little Rock.
Terrell said the closure process will begin today and she hopes to proceed methodically, intelligently, patiently and persistently, but also humanely. She spoke to students Thursday afternoon.
"The reason is because this is going to affect 71 students, who don't know where they are going to end up and that is very disconcerting to them, understandably," Terrell said. "It's going to affect 41 employees who want to know, 'How come this is happening to me?'"
Terrell said closure decisions are based on the Labor Department's complex labor exchange performance measurement system. She said Ouachita has been a low-performing center for the past five years and the administration closed the site to ensure tax dollars are managed effectively and efficiently.
"Obviously I don't like it because I think the folks that work there and the folks at the Forest Service have done a good job with what they've got," Westerman said. "Part of the problem is that they're measured on the number of students that they have, but it's the Department of Labor's responsibility to send them students. So they're going to close down the Job Corps for so-called poor performance because of the number of students that go through and it's the Department of Labor's responsibility to supply those students. It's something the Department of Labor has contracted out to a group in Atlanta."
"There are a number of aspects that deal with closing this place," Terrell said. "You've got the students, you have the staff, you have the equipment, you have the buildings, you have contracts and you have agreements. All of that goes into managing an organization."
Fausti said another factor was the number of "negative terminations" at Ouachita when the center removed students from the program due to unacceptable behavior, such as criminal activity, drugs or physical threats to students. He told The Sentinel-Record in March the center is a "significant contributor" to the local economy with 85 students enrolled, 50 employees and an overall annual budget of $4.8 million.
"I think they ought to give them more time to make the improvements that they had already demonstrated they were making," Westerman said. "You know one of the reasons I like this Job Corps is because it trains people for vocational and technical jobs and it's something that I hear employers are needing, so we're taking that out of the equation now."
"I like to focus on a decision has been made, but there's a lot of other things that come in to implementing that decision," Terrell said. "I am a bureaucrat, I don't mind saying that, to say I can work through those aspects to address concerns."
Terrell recently headed the closure of the Treasure Lake Job Corps center in Oklahoma. The process took about eight months.
"I didn't get one employee grievance or one employee complaint," Terrell said. "I didn't get one lawsuit. I didn't get one media inquiry. I closed a federal facility in eight months. How did that happen? I'm not saying I'm brilliant. I'm saying it's because I basically said, 'We are not going to do this and say thank you, goodbye, here's your stuff.' We are going to treat people with respect, literally, because that's what it is. These are human beings. Yes, they affected this center and, yes, they are affected by this center, which means we do this the right way.
"The right way is you put procedures in place, you follow those procedures, you put timelines in there and identify gaps. So that way, when a person at the end of the day, whenever the end of the day is, when they walk away, they either have a job, they either have a service package, they may just walk away without either one, but they also walk away saying, 'I got everything I requested to get to this point.'"
Westerman joined with other members of Arkansas' congressional delegation in April to request U.S. Department of Labor Secretary Thomas Perez to halt further actions to close the Ouachita center.
"I've had meetings. My staff has worked on it. Other members of the delegation have worked on it," Westerman said. "The Department of Labor, just basically, from what I've seen, does what they want to do. They'll go through the motions to make sure they get all the boxes checked off, but I think they knew they were going to close this before they ever had meetings with us.
"We're going to keep working on it, but I think the Department of Labor's made up their mind, and I think they're bent on closing this one and I'm worried about the one at Cass as well."
Employees have vowed to continue searching for a mechanism to keep the center open.
"We are still fighting the fight," an employee said. "We are here for students. Many of us have families here and cannot relocate. It is very heartbreaking that we have made improvement only to be told that we are going to be closed effective July 1."
The Labor Department restructured in 2010 and removed the budgeting and procurement operations from the Office of Job Corps. The operations were placed within separate divisions of the Employment and Training Administration.
The program experienced a budget shortfall of more than $30 million the following year. The enrollment suspension was enacted in 2013 when more than 70 members of Congress from both parties requested explanations for a shortfall of about $61.5 million. Terrell officially began as director the following February.
Frank E. Lockwood, Washington correspondent for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, contributed to this report.
Local on 07/01/2016