MOSES LAKE — Dylan Sanders credits Job Corps with showing him a path forward.

“I graduated high school and I wasn’t really doing much,” Sanders said. “I was working at Walmart as a cashier, but that’s not really what I wanted to do. I wanted to get an education, but I didn’t want to go to college. I heard about Job Corps and (I looked into it) and saw they offered computer networking, which is exactly what I wanted to do.”

Sanders was representing the Computer Networking program at an open house Wednesday at the Columbia Basin Job Corps Center in Moses Lake, giving visiting students an idea of what Job Corps has to offer. About 200 students from high schools around central Washington had come through the open house in the first hour and a half, Community Liaison Susan Mann said. Students took a tour of the campus, located in the Larson area across from Big Bend Community College, and then fanned out among tables and displays, inside and out, where current students told them about the programs the center offers. Students from the construction trades – plastering, carpentry, cement masonry – had small workspaces set up in the closed-off driveway to demonstrate the skills they were gaining.

Sanders is about 75% of the way finished with the initial networking program, after which there are several ways students can continue. He could go on to learn cybersecurity, which is preventing computer systems from being hacked and personal data from being stolen; systems administration, which goes into greater depth in networking and hardware than the basic program; or go on to college. Sanders was planning a fourth option, he said: going to work as a corporate IT person. The certification he’s earning, he said, will qualify him for that.

Sanders has always been something of a computer geek, he said. His classmate Jonathan Lusk, from Tacoma, got into the networking program after completing another Job Corps program, in office administration. Once he’s finished he’s going to go on to Big Bend through a Job Corps advanced training program and eventually become a programmer or a systems engineer.

“I’ve had a lot of success here,” Lusk said. “I got my GED here, and my typing has gone from 30 words per minute to 118 words per minute.”

The whole thing is free, Sanders and Lusk said. They have food and housing at the center and receive $45 every two weeks in pocket money. Once a week a bus takes them into town to do whatever shopping they need.

The Columbia Basin Job Corps Center offers 12 training programs, but there are more than 100 training fields offered at 121 Job Corps centers around the country, Mann told the Columbia Basin Herald in an earlier interview. Students from the Curlew Center in northeastern Washington and the Fort Simcoe Center west of Yakima were at the open house as well, promoting the programs in welding, truck driving and others that Columbia Basin doesn’t offer.

Myles Boswell, originally from Tacoma, was in his third or fourth month of the welding program at the Curlew Center, he said. He’s always wanted to learn to weld as an art form, he said.

“I was always looking for how I would (get the training), and when I heard about Job Corps, it was like, ‘OK, free education right there,’” Boswell said. “A lot of people spend a lot of money to end up doing something they want to do.”

Plastering instructor Gary Wilkey had his students showing visitors how to plaster different wall surfaces. Wilkey had graduated from a Job Corps center himself in 1975, he said, and after 40 years in the trade, he was now preparing the next generation of plasterers. The students get part of their education maintaining and improving the buildings on the campus, they said.

Job Corps is a year-round program, Mann said, so students can get in any time, although some programs like computer networking have a waiting list. Some of the students at the open house may not be interested right away, she said, but that can change.

“I’ve learned through the years that students will find out today and may not apply today, but a year, two years, three years when they are having a hard time finding that good-paying job, they’re like, ‘Wait, what was that about Job Corps? Let me check it out again.’ Then they come through and they’re ready for that training.”

    Jonathan Lusk, left, and Dylan Sanders man the display for the computer networking program at the Columbia Basin Job Corps Center’s open house Wednesday.
  

    From left: Columbia Basin Job Corps students Kiona Parr, Eljay Hughes and Matthew Schmidt demonstrated the training they were receiving at the open house Wednesday.