Palmer Job Corps Center to resume student enrollment after five-month pause

What you need to know:

• The Alaska Job Corps Center in Palmer will soon resume accepting new students after a five-month pause in federally mandated background checks triggered a drop in enrollment.
• Officials aim to return to full capacity of about 220 students within a year. 
• The update follows a Senate Appropriations Committee vote to continue the nationwide Job Corps program through at least 2027, pending final approval.

PALMER – A Job Corps center in Palmer will soon reopen to new students after a five-month federal pause on background checks halted in-processing and caused enrollment to drop by half.

New student background checks restarted last week, officials with the Alaska Job Corps Center said in Tuesday. The checks are a program requirement to protect student and staff safety, they said.

The change follows a Senate Appropriations Committee vote late last month to continue funding the program through 2027, they said.

The Department of Labor, which administers the program, first paused the background checks in March ahead of a May announcement ordering the full closure of the program, Palmer center officials said. New student processing did not restart when a temporary restraining order halting the closures that was issued in early June as part of an ongoing lawsuit that alleges the shutdown directive was illegal.

The Don Young Alaska Job Corps Center in Palmer provides free GED high school equivalency and trade school certificates to students ages 16 to 24, most of whom live on the 19-acres campus, Job Corps officials said. About 80% of the center’s students are from rural Alaska villages where no similar educational programs are available, they said.

About 105 students are currently living at the center, less than half of the program’s capacity, John Alcantra, a community liaison for center, said in an interview. Reopening the background check pipeline will allow the school to return to full operations, he said.

“We hope the numbers will rebound fairly quickly because there’s people in the hopper,” he said.

Under normal circumstances, students enter and exit the program on a rolling basis, with two to three cycling out each week, Alcantra said. The in-processing stop meant no new students arrived as current ones left, he said.

Now that the pause is lifted, program officials expect enrollment to climb gradually, with a target of 175 students by late December and 226 within the next 12 months, he said.

The funding uncertainty early this summer also caused a staff shortage, with about 25 of the roughly 100 employees leaving for other work, he said. The center is actively rehiring to fill those vacancies, he said.

A final decision on funding the program through 2027 will be made as part of the annual federal budget process. The Senate Appropriations Committee approved $1.76 billion for the nationwide program, which includes about 100 centers. The Alaska center, which opened in 1994, costs about $9 million annually, officials said in June.

-- Contact Amy Bushatz at contact@matsusentinel.com