Let's rush urban youths to the Internet

Let's rush urban youths to the Internet
by Rodolpho Carrasco
Saturday, July 10, 1999 in Pasadena Star News
(Rodolpho Carrasco is associate director of Harambee Christian Family Center in Pasadena, Calif. and a columnist for the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group. Check out more articles by Rodolpho Carrasco here.)

A CNN story this week reported that by the year 2006 the United States will need 1.3 million new IT (information technology) workers. It's a staggering figure, especially given the fact that, in 1996, the U.S. government counted a total of 1.5 million IT workers in the 50 states.

The implications are not difficult for anyone to grasp. Technical institutes are filling up at an alarming rate. Traditional colleges and universities are trying to make their curricula more relevant to the changing times. Up and down the labor force, people are looking for opportunities to re-train themselves or risk losing their jobs to out-sourced vendors.

No one is exempt from the need to rush toward Internet and information skills especially urban young people. It's a simple equation, not difficult at all to grasp. Urban youths need jobs. IT jobs are unfilled at such a rate that Microsoft and other corporate heavies lobby Congress, in this age of immigration restrictions, for easements of immigration quotas in order to import IT workers and fill their gaps.

Why not urban young people to fill those jobs? For urban youths to step into IT jobs will require a level of training that many at present do not have or cannot access.

B. Keith Fulton of the National Urban League, in an article in Philanthropy Journal Alert, writes that only 14 percent of schools and libraries in low-income areas are connected to the Internet, as opposed to the nearly 80 percent of schools in more affluent areas that are online. In addition, Fulton says, "... the lack of teacher training and know-how make it difficult for schools to transfer tech skills."

In response to this need, many youth-serving agencies are folding technological development into the core of their curriculum. Breakway Technologies in South Central Los Angeles (www.breakaway.org) has forged key partnerships with corporations and film studios as they seek to help South Central residents access their Internet economy. Wilshire district-based Bresee Youth Center has operated CyberHood (www.bresee.com/cyberhood) for the past two years, training young people in desktop publishing. OpNet in the Bay Area (www.opnetwork.org) finds internships in Silicon Valley for low-income, 19-25-year-olds.

It wasn't long ago that a technology focus by urban youth-serving agencies seemed odd, or even like an onstentatious luxury. But according to Fulton and many businesses, founda tions, the government and school districts it is a necessity. That necessity has driven us at the youth-serving nonprofit agency I co-direct to do something about re-distributing technological skills in Northwest Pasadena. As we have done so, we have witnessed important advancements.

One day recently, we received a sizable donation of computer equipment. The following day I was touring a visitor around our center when we entered the room with the newly-donated equipment. I nearly croaked. Milling around a large, metallic scrum of dissembled computers, our high schoolers and some summer college interns were a whirl of moving hands and parts. Hard drives here, RAM chips there, cords, connectors, mice. In my mind I shrilled, "They've torn the place up!" But it was just the opposite.

Victor, who will enter the 10th grade in the fall, looked up and said, "Rudy, I checked this one myself."

His tutor, a recent college grad with a degree in physics, confirmed, "Yeah, he's been figuring out which computers work and putting them together all afternoon."

Later, I watched two high schoolers, neither of whom had ever messed with the innards of a personal computer, take apart and reconstruct another CPU. I have seen students who previously were only interested in playing computer games turn around and type 30 words a minute, write their resumes and print them, create seven webpages in one day, and take a CD-rom out of one computer, install it in another, and run a music CD off the newly installed CD drive.

These examples point to the hope of urban youths winning IT jobs. The possibilities are endless. But our present efforts are not enough.

Fulton quotes labor experts who say that at least 60 percent of all jobs by next year will require some competency with computer-based technology and applications, but only 19 percent of Latinos and African-Americans are connected to the Internet.

In the past month, I didn't hear much about urban young people getting IT jobs. I did hear, however, about companies looking to Canada for IT workers now that 1999 visa quotas for places like Pakistan and India have been filled. I am not against non-citizens holding jobs here in the U.S. But something is wrong when our urban young people can't even compete, are not even in the final pool of candidates, due to lack of access to technology and training in this, the richest nation the world has ever known.

We've been theorizing about "bridging the digital divide" in Fulton's words or whatever you want to call it. No matter what name we give it, it is a problem that must be addressed. What are we waiting for?

The copyright for these materials are owned by Rudy Carrasco.  These materials were used with permission by TechMission