"Annihilating the Hillbilly"
by Jim Branscome
page 6

     Twenty-five West Virginians per 100,000 population had been killed, compared to seventeen per 100,000 nationally.  For the youth who seeks opportunity and training in some special opportunity program, such as the Job Corps, the fate may not be a great deal more encouraging.  Because of the Job Corps' resistance to establishing a Center especially for Appalachian youth, they are sent to camps both within and outside the region where the population may be largely urban and black.  Combine his unfamiliarity with urban life and blacks with his affinity for home and family, and one can easily understand why the Appalachian youth drops out of the program in equal frequency with his Indian counterpart.  Even if he lasts the program out, according to Joint Action in Community Service, the agency which contracts with the Job Corps to place and counsel graduates, it is very difficult to find him a job or to locate a person or agency willing to assist him in the mountains.
 

     For the youth who has not dropped out of school by the ninth grade and who has no prospect of attending college, vocational training represents the only channel open to him.  Many find it a wicked channel indeed.  Three years ago the Education Advisory Committee of the Appalachian Regional Commission reported that 50 percent of all vocational training programs in the region consisted of agriculture and home economics--areas in which there were almost no job openings.  Since that report the Commission and the states have required all 235 vocational programs which they have funded to teach job-relevant skills.  While only half of the schools are now open and no thorough evaluation has been reported, it is expected that the schools will be significantly better than their predecessors.
 

     As late as 1968, however, the West Virginia Commission on Higher Education reported that only about 18 percent of the students in that state had access to vocational training.  Given the fact that post-high school vocational training is still not available to the majority of Appalachian youth, this major channel of supposed opportunity still has a long way to go to overcome the serious handicaps it has represented in the past.  And with improvement, vocational education's role may be to channel all the so-called disadvantaged students into neat slots, thereby diminishing not only the student, but vocational education as well.  Additionally, so long as vocational school graduates must leave the mountains to find jobs, the region will remain a loser.   It is already estimated that 900,000 high school graduates will have to leave the region to find jobs in the decade of the 70's.  They will thus become the people the cities do not want and the people the region cannot afford to lose.

         next      photo Charleston Gazette