
                         THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
                 Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, June 19, 1994                    TAG: 9406170022 
SECTION: COMMENTARY                     PAGE: J4    EDITION: FINAL  
SOURCE: Medium 
DATELINE: 940619                                 LENGTH:

GRASS-ROOTS BOOST FOR NORFOLK INNER-CITY TEENS\

{LEAD} Thanks to a church-initiated, business- and neighborhood-backed effort, selected teens from Norfolk's impoverished Park Place section will be gainfully employed this summer. None has had a job before.

The teens will receive guidance in addition to jobs at Park Place or Ghent businesses. Volunteers will prepare them for the workplace and meet with them weekly.

{REST} Fifteen teens were selected from about 60 nominated by principals in Park Place-area schools. Each has signed an employee-responsibility pact with the Southeastern Tidewater Opportunity Project Inc., the regional anti-poverty agency. Each agrees to be punctual for work and training, to maintain a positive attitude and to obey instructions.

STOP will be the designated employer, paying wages and taxes and worker's compensation premiums and keeping the books - thus relieving participating businesses of these burdens. Funds to pay the youths are coming from churches, businesses and individuals. Additionally, each business putting one of the teens to work will toss $750 into the kitty. That's two-thirds the cost of a minimum-wage employee for the two months the teens will be employed.

Officially sponsoring the program is the Park Place Academy, an embryonic citizen organization fostered by the Urban Ministry Committee of Norfolk's Christ & St. Luke's Episcopal Church.

Along with the city government and Park Place civic and business groups and other churches, Christ & St. Luke's has for months been helping residents of crime-plagued Park Place improve their lives and prospects. The church has sponsored two Habitat for Humanity houses, which are built in part by the families that buy them. The church's Park Place ``homework club'' tutoring program had a busy first year.

The small-scale Park Place summer-jobs program is a well-thought-out pilot project born of the energies and funds of scores of ordinary men and women. How fruitful will it be? A preliminary answer should be apparent at summer's end.

Until then, the program's startup alone attests to a rich reservoir of grass-roots imagination and good will without which the spiritual and physical regeneration of inner cities - indeed, the emergence of healthy communities anywhere - is impossible. by CNB