Karin Norington-Reaves knew she had a mess to clean up, but sparking criminal prosecution wasn’t in the job description.
Tasked by Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle to overhaul the office created to help unemployed people get back to work, Norington-Reaves spent much of 2011 unearthing and supplying evidence of fraud to federal prosecutors.
“The criminal stuff I actually stumbled upon on my 24th day here,” Norington-Reaves said in an interview. “In a series of one-on-ones, the staff began to share certain things with me, and I began looking for evidence to support the allegations.”
Twelve people were fired almost immediately, as federal prosecutors began a fraud investigation, at least the third criminal investigation of the agency in a decade. On July 13, Brendolyn Hart-Glover, the former interim director of the President’s Office of Employment Training (POET), was indicted, accused of ordering the falsification of records so the program would continue to receive federal funding. More indictments of former employees are expected.
Norington-Reaves believes the investigation represents an end to a troubling series of scandals at the agency. A 42-year-old lawyer, whom Preckwinkle hired away from state government in December 2010, now hopes to focus on reshaping the agency and has plans to adopt new rules that will make area job training more effective.
After earlier scandals, including the theft of $1.6 million in loans and federal money, former Board President Todd Stroger suggested the wrongdoing had taken place under his father’s administration. A director, Karen Crawford, who was appointed in December 2006, had replaced POET management at every level. That proved not enough.
Soon after uncovering the fraud, Norington-Reaves forced POET’s staff to reapply for their jobs. Of the 56 people employed in January 2011, only 13 won their jobs back, she said. “For me personally, the hardest thing was having to terminate people’s employment,” she said. “Despite the fact that we went through fair hiring process, I had to lay off so many people at a tough time of year, around Thanksgiving. That was crushing.”
Her next move was to make all of the county’s job-training grant recipients reapply for funding, a process that should occur annually but had not for three years under the younger Stroger’s administration.
Norington-Reaves also renamed the agency Cook County Works. On July 2, she merged that public agency with the bulk of the city’s job-training programs into a single nonprofit called the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership. The merged nonprofit manages about $58 million in federal job-training funds during the current fiscal year and oversees grants to more than 60 recipients.
Operating as a nonprofit means that the area’s job-training apparatus can now receive funding from private charitable foundations, many of which have policies banning grants to government agencies.
“It’s very different from POET, which is good in many, many ways,” said Matt Weis, director of Workforce Development for MicroTrain, a Chicago-based for-profit technical training company. “Payments are coming in timely. They’re focused on accountability, both internally and externally, specifically among training providers, which is a long time coming. It’s literally a difference of night and day.”
For Matt Zwartz the process was more like a nightmare. Laid off in August as an information technology director at JMB Insurance, the 57-year-old was trying to get into a job-training program as Norington-Reaves was changing the roster of groups involved in the program.
First Zwartz had to fill out an application, then he had to take a test, and then he had to attend about three months of soft-skills workshops on things like resume-writing and interviewing. And then he inexplicably waited for another three months to get placed in a program. Norington-Reaves said such a wait is highly unusual.
“The training is very helpful,” Zwartz said. “But getting the funding is incredibly difficult. I’m taking all of these seminars and courses, three months of hoops to go through, and they tell you it’s not a guarantee you’ll get the money. Well, then, why are we doing this? It made no sense at all.”
Norington-Reaves has yet to make two tough policy decisions that will affect how much and when service providers like MicroTrain get paid and which people get into which programs.
“Since the recession, you really put a lot of pressure on providers, who aren’t given a lot of resources, to really produce these placement numbers,” Weis said. “In order to maintain their operations, they’ve resorted to giving people services who have a lot of work experience. (It) has really left a whole portion of the population in the dust.”
The effect Weis refers to is called creaming — or when service providers only admit the cream of the crop so they hit their performance targets.
Norington-Reaves said the new workforce board, which totals 28 members because of onerous federal regulations, will create a new “assessment tool” to ensure all people, from ex-offenders to highly skilled workers, get into a program that fits their skill level, much like schools track children from gifted-and-talented programs all the way to special-needs programs. Details are far from ironed out.
“I really struggle with the whole creaming concept because, on the one hand, we absolutely have to provide employers with employees … who are conscientious, diligent, report to work every day, do their best, etc.,” Norington-Reaves said. “Just because it’s the public workforce system, we don’t want employers to assume our graduates have certain deficiencies or are not going to meet any of those characteristics … On the other hand (if you raise the admission standards so high), the public policy question is: Is the government essentially subsidizing private industry by doing that?”
If her first challenge is to put the unemployed into the right programs, the second is determining what a successful placement looks like. Currently, under local policy, if a worker enrolls in a manufacturing training program but gets a job as a waiter, the job-training provider is still paid for that placement. And if a worker enrolls in that same program but drops out halfway to take a manufacturing or any other job, the program also is paid. Job placements do have some bearing on an organization’s funding for the following year, but it is far from a performance-based system.
“A lot get trained in manufacturing and get something in housekeeping or a restaurant,” said Oswaldo Alvarez, Erie Neighborhood House’s director of workforce development. “They count it as a job placement, but it wasn’t really because the person really could have gotten that job on their own. Changing the rules would be beneficial to my field, but as a director of a workforce program, this would mean I have to start operating more as a technical and vocational school than as a community-based organization.”
Rather than train someone on how to weld or design software, community-based organizations often teach soft skills, such as interviewing, resume-writing and basic math. In her prior review of all grant recipients, Norington-Reaves did cut off funding to some community-based groups because of poor fiscal management.
“We are essentially redesigning the public workforce system,” Norington-Reaves said. “We are fully aware there will be some unpopular decisions. But these decisions are not based on popularity, but what is best for the client population as well as perspective employers. We’re going to be data-driven and demand-driven.”
Melissa Harris can be reached at mmharris@tribune.com or 312-222-4582. Twitter @chiconfidential or Facebook at facebook.com/chiconfidential.
