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.
