Obama and jobs don’t belong in the same sentence.
A government-funded job training program that promised to turn hundreds of residents of Kentucky’s coal country into computer coders so far has spent $2 million to place 17 people in tech jobs and may have left others worse off, The Daily Signal has learned.
The program, a private-public partnership between state and federal agencies and Interapt, a Louisville-based software development company, is a product of President Barack Obama’s TechHire Initiative of 2015.
The job training program, budgeted for a total of $4.5 million, was supposed to last through 2019 and train up to 200 people from an economically depressed region of Kentucky for middle- to high-skill careers in information technology.
The program paid interns $400 a week to learn how to write software code, and Interapt promised high-paying jobs to those who successfully completed it.
But less than a year later, workers have torn down signs at Big Sandy Community and Technical College, where the program was based, and are closing shop on what appears to be a government-funded program run amok.
A total of 32 of the 49 Kentuckians who originally enrolled in the TechHire program in Eastern Kentucky, known as TEKY, have not obtained jobs in the tech industry, according to government figures.
One, Amanda Tackett, said she left another job at the advice of a TEKY instructor in order to succeed in the program. Tackett says she was cut after just three weeks, before testing even began.
An Interapt spokeswoman, however, said Tackett “left the program of her own accord very early on.”
“I have a 7-year-old daughter on the autism spectrum,” Tackett, 32, told The Daily Signal. “Her Asperger’s leaves her almost nonverbal and [with the] mindset of a 3-year-old. My hopes were to be able to help her, some way, somehow.”
Others who made it through are getting by on internships and government stipends to support their families while they search for a full-time job in Eastern Kentucky.