Poor Administration of the 1977 Summer Program for Economically Disadvantaged Youth in New York City

The operation of New York City's 1977 Summer Program for Economically Disadvantaged Youth, funded by the Department of Labor, was reviewed. The program was established to enhance the future employability of economically disadvantaged youths by providing them with useful work experience. In 1977, Labor granted the city $35 million to operate this program which provided 7 weeks of employment for about 70,000 city youths.

The program was poorly planned and administered by both Labor and New York City. Some of the worksites were providing useful work experience to the enrolled youths, but over half of the worksites had serious problems, such as insufficient work or absent enrollees shown as being present. In these instances, program objectives may have been defeated by fostering bad work habits and paying salaries for little or no work. The following factors contributed to the problems: (1) inadequate planning resulted in an insufficient number of productive jobs; (2) project sponsors from previous years were generally funded with little consideration of their past performance; (3) the methods used to register youths raised questions about income eligibility; and (4) monitors were inadequately trained, many worksites were not visited, and problems noted were frequently not followed up with corrective actions.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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