A summer job is supposed to teach youngsters useful life lessons — like the value of work, being prompt and taking responsibility for one’s efforts — but D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty’s disastrously mismanaged summer jobs programs wound up teaching them all the wrong things.
For starters, somebody in City Hall should have figured out that there was no way to create enough 10-week jobs for 21,000-plus teens in a city that still struggles with adult unemployment. So the make-work summer program turned into a fake-work program that fooled none of the youngsters, who have a built-in radar for adult dissembling.
Lesson learned: Adults can be dumb.
The Fenty administration compounded the problem by promising the maximum pay to everybody who enrolled, whether they worked or not and even if they didn’t qualify, as with the 51-year-old who was being paid.
Lesson learned: You can get paid by government for doing nothing.
Of course, this kind of thinking is disastrous in the real world. Worse, after blowing through the program’s $21 million budget with a $31 million cost overrun (260 percent), the Fenty administration had to ask the city to dip into its emergency fund. Even so, thousands of youngsters were turned away without receiving their promised paychecks because the mayor’s office didn’t have the cash to back up its promises.
Lesson learned: Don’t trust City Hall.
Real summer jobs — whether it’s flipping burgers, stuffing envelopes or sitting in the hot sun all day supervising younger kids at the local pool — teach the value and dignity of work performed well. Teens discover that a job requires more diligence and effort than they’ve ever had to expend before. But Fenty’s fake-work program taught them that no real effort is required, since participants who quit or never showed up for their assignments got paid just like everybody else.
Lesson learned: Only losers follow the rules.
Properly managed summer jobs programs can be of real value in a community. When young people calculate the cost in terms of the hours of labor needed to purchase the things they want, they become much more fiscally conservative than when their parents — or the government — foot the bill. Teens need to understand the relationship between effort and economic reward before heading out on their own, but Fenty program participants were cheated out of this valuable, life-altering lesson. Could it be the program was mismanaged because the adults in charge never learned it, either?
