Summer time jobs are a ceremony of passage for many highschool college students, and this 12 months 13 of them had jobs with the town of Key West as a part of the Idle Palms Youth Employment Program.
The undertaking is a partnership between the town and A Optimistic Step of Monroe County, a nonprofit group that works with among the highest-risk youngsters and their households within the Keys.
Since 2010, A Optimistic Step has labored with the town to supply paid summer season jobs in metropolis departments for Key West Excessive College college students aged 16 and up who’re returning to highschool within the fall. This 12 months’s program, which runs by means of Aug. 1, has employed 13 college students in 5 metropolis departments. Town pays about half of the scholars’ salaries and A Optimistic Step raises cash to cowl the opposite half.
“It’s very gratifying to look at every summer season as the scholar interns develop higher confidence together with necessary work and social abilities,” A Optimistic Step founder Billy Davis mentioned in 2023. “We see them discovering beforehand unrealized skills and discarding previous patterns of low expectations. Whether or not they go on to varsity or immediately into full-time working life, they’ve turn out to be extra conscious and assured of their strengths, self-worth, and talent to contribute as an expert.”
Most of the working college students contribute some or all of their earnings to their households, and with this in thoughts, salaries in 2023 had been elevated to $17 per hour and orientation was shortened from two weeks to at least one to offer the scholars an additional week of incomes time.
Extra data is at apsmc.org.
