Treasure Island Job Corps students look for a ‘miracle’ to avoid homelessness

Without her Job Corps dorm, all 22-year-old Rain has is a thermal blanket and her “hopes and prayers.”

She’s not alone. At least a quarter of the 400 students undergoing training at the Treasure Island branch of Job Corps “will return to the streets they worked so hard to escape” if the center closes, staff said. And it will, if President Donald Trump succeeds in his move to axe the program.

At present, Job Corps houses the 400 students enrolled in 12 programs, including job placement in culinary and construction industries, and GED and community-college degrees. Many arrive at the Treasure Island location from different states, and stay on for one to two years. 

Finding housing for everyone residing on Treasure Island in a matter of weeks will require a “miracle,” one said. Even if the program re-opens in a year, half of those at-risk participants “may not be around anymore.” 

Job Corps, a federally-funded education and vocational program for young people aged 16 to 24, operated for over 60 years with bipartisan support. That ended when the Department of Labor announced on May 29 that it would begin a “phased pause” in operations at contractor-operated Job Corps centers nationwide. 

All sites were set to shut down by June 30, until a New York federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump Administration’s plans. A court hearing is set for June 17. 

In the meantime, students and staff on Treasure Island are bracing for closure. If that happens, their options seem slim. 

Penny, a 20-year-old trans woman, moved from Glide, Oregon, two years ago to pursue advanced culinary qualifications offered at Job Corps’ San Francisco site, and is nearly done. Focused on completing her training, and finally feeling like her life is “worth something,” she says she hasn’t stepped off the island since. 

Job Corps students are housed while they are in the program. So, “if it all goes down the drain,” Penny said, she’ll be homeless in an unfamiliar city. When she lived outside Tacoma, Washington, before joining Job Corps, there were woods to sleep in. Here, she said, she won’t even have that. 

Jaden James, a 21-year-old also studying culinary skills, said they, too, would be “displaced” and their career “destroyed.” 

“I’m not sure what state I’ll be homeless in,” added another student dressed in a white chef’s uniform.

“We’re going to exhaust almost all the resources,” said Rain. “There’s only so many slots that can take us.” 

Two weeks before coming to Job Corps from Fresno last year, Rain said she’d been planning her suicide. The program “taught me that you don’t give up,” she said, near tears. 

As of June 5, there were 314 homeless shelter beds available to teens and young adults in San Francisco. Only 58 of them are unfilled.

Many students, mostly those nearly done with the program or with another option, have already left Treasure Island, said Lacy Barnes, the secretary-treasurer of the California Federation of Teachers. About 100 students remain. 

On Thursday afternoon, they rallied from behind the wire fence surrounding their campus. Teachers, parents and union supporters joined them on the other side. 

Without Job Corps, teens “building homes for the homeless will now be homeless themselves,” student president Eddie Lopez said into a microphone, as others in the crowd shouted “It’s not fair,” behind him.

Annette Pierson and Kathryn Jurik, a couple from Santa Rosa, described how they were in a “bad place as a family” when a recruiter contacted them about Job Corps. They’d hoped for more time to figure things out before their daughter moved back in, but said they were grateful to the program for leaving her with a motivation they hadn’t seen before. 

Through the fence, Tyler Fulton, a 20-year-old originally from North Dakota, said some students like him who wanted to go home were now being forced to remain on campus because flight tickets were no longer being offered. 

Meanwhile, a woman loaded her cousin’s suitcase into her minivan. Their plan was to drive to Pittsburg in the East Bay, where her cousin would live with their grandmother and look for a new job. 

The crowd dispersed when class started. A mother walked up with a cane a few minutes later, confused about how pick-up worked. Her daughter was getting her GED at Job Corps, she added, and they didn’t know if her transcript could be transferred. 

Much of the information about the Treasure Island center, and the students still there, is now opaque. A website for the program redirects to a page offering other career options. 

Union representative Matthew Hardy said organizers have been in touch with every elected official possible to coordinate where students would go if the federal decision held. 

But many, he said, had already been “kicked to the curb here.”