A Northwest D.C. resident claims to be the latest victim of Mayor Adrian Fenty’s conservation corps — thousands of District youth in blue shirts wandering the streets with seemingly nothing to do, and earning $7.25 an hour from the city while they do it.
James Carstensen left his Park View home last week for a quick jaunt to Fort Totten. He returned 40 minutes later, he said Monday, to find the crape myrtle tree he planted five years earlier in memory of his grandmother lying on the ground in front of his home. Moments later, Carstensen said, he spotted “blue shirts with loppers” walking about a block away.
“These kids all summer are just not supervised,” Carstensen told The Examiner. “If there’s no supervising kids, what are they going to do? They’re not going to work too hard.”
Carstensen typed up a complaint letter to well-read blogger Prince of Petworth, which was posted online Sunday. Within 24 hours the District replaced the crape myrtle “as a gesture of good faith,” said Alan Heymann, spokesman for the D.C. Department of the
Environment. City officials, he said, were unable to verify Carstensen’s story.
“So at least they’re trying,” Carstensen said.
The so-called “blue-shirts” are participants in the mayor’s Conservation Corps, the default job for thousands of summer youth employment program workers. About 4,100 children were assigned to the corps when the summer began, and about 2,000 remained as of Monday.
Though their overall responsibility is to “clean and green” D.C. neighborhoods, blue-shirts have been accused of littering communities with thousands of door hangers, of getting high on the job and of generally roaming the District without purpose or supervision.
“We have herds of kids with nothing to do,” Ward 6 D.C. Councilman Tommy Wells said during recent budget discussions.
Heymann disagreed. Participants in the “largest youth green-summer jobs training program in the country” have learned much about invasive plant species, the “impact of trash on an urban environment,” energy efficiency and conservation, he said. They have received education and training, he said, in urban and park planning, resume writing and sexually transmitted diseases.
But Carstensen said Heymann was “defending an indefensible program.”
“Just giving them a paycheck to walk around and do nothing is not a life skill you want to teach,” he said.
