San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
‘GOING TO CHANGE LIVES’
Local Economy: Could Mike Ramsey be the savior of the city’s Ready to Work program?
On his 13th day working in San Antonio, Mike Ramsey’s voice booms — it’s only slightly muffled by his face mask — across his downtown office. He’s talking fast, over the noise of traffic on West Houston Street nine stories below.
Last year, when the same stretch of Houston Street was still a ghost town because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ramsey was leading the workforce development department at St. Petersburg College in Florida.
Ramsey is now responsible for rolling out the four-year, $200 million Ready to Work job-training initiative that voters approved by a 3-1 margin last November.
The city of San Antonio hired Ramsey last month to run its newly formed Workforce Development Department, which will oversee the program.
Ramsey, a Louisiana native, is friendly and self-assured, and his thundering laugh cuts through conversation. He was a high school teacher in Florida before he led career and workforce education for Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa Bay. He also served in the Navy in the 1990s.
Now, Ramsey is in a tough spot. Though he only arrived in South Texas in mid-August, he has had to answer why the first year of the job training effort — called Train for Jobs SA — has fallen short.
Ramsey, however, is optimistic about Ready to Work’s prospects.
Wave of layoffs
After the pandemic struck San Antonio and threw about 150,000 workers out of their jobs, Mayor Ron Nirenberg scrapped plans to revamp public transit in the city. Instead, he focused on launching a jobtraining program to help unemployed workers in San Antonio not only find work but also better-paying jobs than they’d had before.
San Antonio lags in educational attainment. In Bexar County, 28 percent of people 25 and older hold bachelor’s degrees or higher, compared with 32 percent in Harris and Dallas counties and 52 percent in Travis County, according to the U.S. Census.
And the median household income in Bexar County — about $59,000 — trails the statewide median of $64,000. Households in Fort Worth and Austin bring
in median incomes of $70,000 and $80,000, respectively.
Nirenberg said 10,000 San Antonians would get help from Train for Jobs SA in the first year, which didn’t happen.
Ready to Work is the successor program to Train for Jobs. Out-of-work residents will be able to pursue bachelor’s and associate degrees through Ready to Work. Nirenberg said 40,000 San Antonio families would “get a new economic start” though the larger, four-year program.
Train for Jobs was funded with $65 million from the city, and it was designed to be a short-term initiative that provides monthslong training courses to get workers new credentials and quickly back into jobs. Train for Jobs started a year ago and had placed 467 participants in new jobs as of mid-August. Nearly 3,100 people had either enrolled in or completed some training
by then.
That’s far from 10,000 gainfully employed workers.
“When you set a specific target like 10,000 jobs, people are going to hold you to that,” said Sonia Rodriguez, a leader of the grassroots advocacy group COPS/Metro. “There’s some lack of clarity around what are general targets versus hard, measurable ones.”
COPS/Metro has tracked the city’s development of the jobtraining initiative since its inception in spring 2020. The group has called for the city to bring in more outside expertise
from successful workforce-development programs around the country to help craft Ready to Work.
“You have to do your homework first,” said Virginia Mata, another COPS/Metro leader. “Because this could become a national model for so many major cities, so we’re setting the path here.”
Ramsey contends the firstyear results were positive — considering city staffers developed a novel, large-scale job training program in a matter of months that provided training for thousands of residents.
“We were all wearing masks — everyone was afraid to go back out into public — so you had a lot of hesitancy from individuals who may have been laid off or may have had kids at home,” Ramsey said.
“There’s no road map” to developing a job-training program amid a pandemic, he said. “So it’s easy to point fingers and say, ‘Look how many people got placed and how much money was spent.’ But it’s apples to oranges based upon what workforce development initiatives actually look like during a time when you’re not in the middle of a pandemic.”
Fresh start
The city of San Antonio planned to transition from Train for Jobs to Ready to Work this month. But officials pushed the start of Ready to Work to early 2022 so the city would have more time to contract with outside organizations to help run the program.
In December, the city plans to award three contracts to nonprofits to implement Ready to Work, market the program and evaluate how workers fare after they complete training.
Once it’s rolled out, Ramsey will be overseeing one of the largest worker-training efforts a U.S. city has ever undertaken with taxpayer funding.
In November, San Antonio voters approved a ⅛-cent sales tax that will generate about $40 million annually for SA Ready to Work.
In the first year, 60 percent of Ready to Work participants will be able to train for occupational certificates and credentials. The other 40 percent can pursue college degrees.
Ramsey’s department is working to help trainees find the right career and then connect them with local employers who — the hope is — will pay them more than they were making before.
So far, the median pay for the nearly 500 workers who have gotten hired after going through Train for Jobs is $14 an hour, below the municipal government’s minimum wage of $15 per hour.
Ready to Work’s longer-term training is expected to help workers get jobs that pay more compared with shorter training courses, Ramsey said.
“A big piece of that is making sure that the training programs are aligned to higher-paying jobs,” he said.
Greater: SATX, formerly known as the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation, is creating a database of jobs available in San Antonio, and training providers will be able to access it to tailor their training.
The city has maintained the $15 wage target for the workforce development initiatives — which it, so far, has failed to meet — since it began the job-training push in spring of 2020. But it has shifted its goals for other aspects of the program.
The initial target of training 50,000 workers over the fiveyear effort was cut to 37,000, including 5,000 next year, city officials said in May. Ramsey declined to say what his goal is for the number of workers he wants to see complete training and get a job.
“I don’t want to get caught up in ‘Well, how many people is that, Mike?’ because I’m still evaluating that. I don’t want to give an aspirational number that we wind up not hitting,” Ramsey said. “We’re going to do our best to make sure we have a solid foundation and that this program is going to be sustainable.”
Ramsey said the goal for Train for Jobs was to get 50 percent of trainees placed into jobs. So far, about 51 percent of the 911 workers who have finished training have gotten jobs.
Nationwide, job training is typically provided through local workforce development boards, such as Workforce Solutions Alamo in San Antonio. But training programs through state and federal agencies have generally underperformed. Roughly a third of adult U.S. workers who went through government-funded job training in 2019 landed jobs, according to the Department
of Labor.
“I believe we’re going to greatly exceed that,” Ramsey said.
Project Quest — which COPS/ Metro established in the mid-1990s — is a San Antoniobased training program viewed as a nationwide gold standard for local workforce development. The program has placed 90 percent of its participants into jobs, mostly in health care, that pay more than four times what participants previously earned.
It costs $10,500, on average, over nearly two years to get a Project Quest participant through training and into a job.
Ready to Work will provide $4,000 to $6,000 for each participant annually, depending on how much they need for tuition, emergency assistance and other expenses.
“It costs real money to help people get from unemployment to a decent-paying job,” said Heath Prince, a workforce and education researcher and director of the Ray Marshall Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
Prince didn’t fault the city for not hitting its 10,000-trainee target. He said the city could ramp up to train that many workers annually in a couple of years.
“It’s disappointing only 3,000 have been trained so far, but there’s nothing typical about the last year we’ve gone through,” Prince said. “And 10,000 is a good start. I don’t think it’s overly ambitious given the number of people who lost their jobs because of the pandemic.”
Despite the rocky first year for the city’s worker training initiative, Ramsey is confident Ready to Work will be a success when it’s rolled out next year.
“We’re going to help your family members, your neighbors, the people you know who live in your community, achieve economic stability,” he said. “Five years from now, this program will be a model for other cities to follow.”