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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (Dec. 7, 2016)
December 7, 2016 The Skanner Page 3 News cont’d from pg 1 had been talking about moving back to Oregon for some time. Now he’s back in Port- land to serve as execu- tive director of De La Salle North Catholic High School’s office of community learning, overseeing the school’s 16-year-old corporate work study program “ gram’s staff train and ori- ent students on basic job skills and etiquette, as well as “soft skills” – ad- dressing issues that are critical to surviving in a corporate environment, such as punctuality and dress codes. One of the key require- ments of the program is that corporate sponsors ‘This position kind of found me, quite frankly. Things kind of worked out just mag- ically, or providentially’ (formerly known as the corporate internship program). Ghant arrived in Portland at the end of October to step into his new role. “This position kind of found me, quite frankly,” Ghant told The Skanner. “Things kind of worked out just magically, or providentially.” De La Salle North’s program places students with large corporations in the Portland area to work five eight-hour shifts per month. Ghant said the total budget for the corporate work study program is $2 million. To participate in the program, companies pay $27,295 per year for a team of four students with rotating schedules -- or they can divide their sponsorships to receive one student, or sponsor multiple teams. A full year of work helps com- pensate for half the cost of that student’s tuition. Sponsors include Prov- idence Health Services, OnPoint Credit Union and Standard Insurance, among others. Thirty-five percent of students who partici- pate in the program are Latino, 30 percent are African American and 18 percent are Asian-Amer- ican, Ghant said. Ghant and the pro- provide real work for the students to do – includ- ing administrative office work like data entry or interacting with clients – so they learn basic office skills they’ll need later in the workforce. Many have gone on, as adults, to work for the compa- nies where they served as work-study students, he said. “The stories that they tell are very inspiring,” Ghant told The Skanner. “The confidence of these students is probably the number one thing they’ve watched develop. [It’s inspiring] to hear students say, ‘OK, I be- long here,’ in a city that is predominantly White, for students in predom- inantly White settings, corporate organiza- tions.” Ghant added that since he stepped into his new role, representatives from sponsoring orga- nizations have spoken glowingly about the stu- dents the program has sent them, saying they couldn’t do the work they do without students’ help. It’s common to hear that from nonprofit orga- nizations that rely heav- ily on young volunteers, he said, but to hear it from large, private-sec- tor employers was really meaningful. Delta Park cont’d from pg 1 believes the Kaiser shipyards were in- strumental in the war effort. Kaiser’s rapid shipyard production famously produced the SS Robert E. Peary liberty ship in four days and 15-and-a-half hours, breaking the pre- vious shipbuilding record of 10 days. Moore said Vanport forever changed culture and environment of Oregon through the influx of workers from throughout the nation. He also pointed to the institutions that were born from the city of Van- port. “When you look at the things that came out of Vanport, which is Portland State University — Vanport College be- came Portland State University,” Moore said. “Vanport Hospital was the begin- ning of Kaiser Hospital.” PHOTOS BY KATE WILLSON/MULTNOMAH COUNTY Ghant Roosevelt Health Center Roosevelt High students on Monday cut the ribbon on a new Multnomah County school-based health center after school bond renovations at Roosevelt. Dozens gathered to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the opening of the first clinic at Roosevelt, the first one west of Minnesota. Today, Multnomah County has 13 health centers across Portland Public Schools, David Douglas, Parkrose, and Centennial school districts that students visited 17,000 times last year. Pictured here are Nurse Shelley Bedell and student Fredy Mejia at the celebration. LEAD cont’d from pg 1 almost tailor-made to hopefully derive the successes that Seattle did,” said Underhill. The DA cites Portland’s persistent issues with open air drug use and a stagger- ing homeless population, partic- ularly around high-pedestrian areas like Old Town, where the pilot program will be launched. LEAD works by allowing the Street Crimes Unit of the Portland Police Bureau to give low-lev- el drug offenders a choice: they can go the standard route of ar- rest-prosecution-incarceration, or be sent to a case-management program, which offers support services including transitional housing, counseling, job training and drug treatment. According to Commander Chris Davis, officers routinely encoun- ter the same individuals on the street – the majority of them struggling with addiction prob- lems. “Having done a lot of this work myself, you feel for these people, because they’re just stuck in this lifestyle,” said Davis. “The feed- back I’ve heard from the officers is that they would like to have an- other option other than jail.” After reviewing several appli- cations, Multnomah County has recently selected a social services Moore has been leading discussions on Vanport with The Skanner News during the screenings of “The Wake of Vanport,” the oral history project cap- “ agency to preside over LEAD en- rollees. “Case managers will also do service brokering,” said Abbey Stamp, executive director of Multnomah County Local Public Safety Coordinating Council. “So “ — LEAD aims to remove the con- viction barrier that often hinders offenders from landing jobs and homes. Such convictions can also increase tensions between police and communities, especially peo- ple of color. ‘We have a high disproportionate num- ber of individuals of color, especially people from the Black community, be- ing arrested and being referred to my office for prosecution consideration’ not necessarily offering services through that same agency, but be- ing very thoughtful about fit and needs, so that folks get services and treatment through a variety of agencies in our community.” Underhill estimates that rough- ly 500 individuals per year – about 80 percent of them home- less – could be offered the LEAD program which, in the long term, would save money that is typical- ly spent on juries, court-appoint- ed lawyers, and trails. Designed by the National Sup- port Bureau – a partnership be- tween the Public Defender As- sociation and the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice “We have a high dispropor- tionate number of individuals of color, especially people from the Black community, being arrested and being referred to my office for prosecution consideration,” said Underhill. Nationwide, African Ameri- cans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites, ac- cording to research by The Sen- tencing Project. The Rev. Dr. T. Allen Bethel, senior pastor of Ma- ranatha Church, says the picture is not much brighter in Portland’s Black community. Read the rest at TheSkanner.com like to see a historical interpretive cen- ter in the Delta Park area. For Moore, a history center would be a way to provide an ongoing explana- ‘It’s an insult, it’s an insult to the people that were involved, it’s an insult to Kaiser, it’s an in- sult to everyone that they named it Delta Park’ turing Vanport survivor experiences. During these discussions he has found a lot of support for the idea of renam- ing Delta Park. The Skanner News, in partnership with the North Portland Media Train- ing Center, has been collecting commu- nity input on changing the name. Both Kregal and Moore would also tion of the city and its impact. Kregal believes that people need to visualize the former city in place to re- ally get a sense of what happened. “I think they would be amazed if they could visualize what was down there, it’s shocking,” Kregal said. “If you look down there and imagine, all that housing and all those streets Lee Moore leads discusssion at the April 2016 screening of ‘The Wake of Vanport’ and all that stuff and then it’s gone.” For more information or to get in- volved in this effort call (503) 285-5555 ext 521.
