A day after city of Columbus officials confirmed a lack of funding would mean no summer jobs program this year, an anonymous donor has stepped forward to provide the $35,000 needed to fund the program as program officials scramble to get the program off the ground.
George Irby, administrator for the summer jobs program, said he was notified by text of the donation.
“I had done an interview with WCBI (Wednesday) and right after it was over, I got a text from someone saying they wanted to donate the $35,000 we weren’t going to get from the state,” Irby said. “I called the mayor to ask if the city still wanted to try to put the program together, and he said yes. This definitely caught us by surprise, so right now we’re really scrambling to put things together.”
The city, which budgets $20,000 each year for the program, decided it would not offer it this year after being informed that the Mississippi Department of Transportation would not be providing the $35,000 grant due to budget cuts.
Program officials, most notably Irby and supervisor Travis Jones, generally begin organizing the program as much as a month before it begins the Tuesday after Memorial Day.
“There’s an awful lot to do,” Jones said. “We have to get an ad in the paper announcing the program, get applications together, get them to the students, process them after they are returned, and after that do interviews. Then we have to get the drug-testing scheduled while trying to put together a plan for the program — the work we’ll have to students do.”
The program, which began 24 years ago, usually offers full-time, minimum-wage work to 20-25 students, ages 16-24, and lasts eight weeks. Most of the students pitch in with the public works department.
Jones said the scale and scope of the program this year is a work in progress.
“It’s hard to say, just a day after finding out we’re going to have a program this year after all, what it will look like,” Jones said. “We want to make it as good as possible, but there are some real time challenges.”
Irby said he hopes to expedite the process to the point where students can work six to eight weeks.
“School starts Aug. 4, so we really have to get a lot of things going and everything has to fall in place just right if we’re going to be able to give them that many weeks,” Irby said. “We’re not complaining, though. We’re extremely pleased that someone can forward to make this happen. We’ll do everything we can to make it the best program we can.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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