THE fate of more than 6,000 young people who should have started work next week, under the National Youth Service’s (NYS) Summer Employment Programme (NSEP) is uncertain as government has not yet approved funding for the programme.

A budget of $50 million was submitted by the NYS earlier this year to the Ministry of Education, Youth and Culture and the Ministry of Finance.

“We thought the Ministry of Finance had signed off on the programme, (but) we have not (yet) been given a budget,” NYS executive director Rev Adinhair Jones said.

Director of communication at the Ministry of Education, Youth and Culture Dorett Campbell said the ministry could not comment on the status of the funding for the jobs programme.

However, despite the uncertainty, the NYS began interviewing students for the programme last week, out of a total of 9,000 applications.

Last year, the NYS was granted $35 million which was used as salary for 4,500 students selected from 12,000 applications across the island. Nearly half of the applicants, 2214, were from Kingston and St Catherine.

“The financial constraint in government is the principal problem and we are now trying to determine, working with different scenarios, how to maintain the programme at least at the level of last year,” Jones said in a statement.

The summer employment programme started as a national project of Prime Minister P J Patterson in 2001. Its aim was essentially to provide job experience and well needed back-to-school funds for students in fourth, fifth and sixth forms as well as to help clear up work backlog in government offices.

Since then, the NYS has placed more than 15,000 participants in private and public sector positions at a total cost of $135 million.

In a special show of support last year, seven members of parliament partnered with the NYS and pledged a combined contribution of $1,200,000. But a report from the NYS showed that up to September last year only three of the seven had paid up.

Interviews for the government and private sector jobs ended last Friday and NYS staff were yesterday doing final screening to identify the best candidates for the positions.

Many applicants benefit from these interviews, Rev Jones said, as a deliberate effort is made by NYS staff to acclimatise, especially new job applicants to the business of job interviews.

“We … treat the interview as providing interview experience for the students – in terms of how they do their grooming, present themselves, how they present resumes, interpret and answer questions orally,” Jones said.

“That doesn’t mean that if you wrote a poor resume you won’t get the job, though,” Jones stressed.

The first group of roughly 1,000 students is scheduled to begin work on July 5 in primary schools across the island.

Their job will be to assist teachers in the government’s remedial summer classes that are held for students who do poorly in the Grade Four Achievement Test. Specifically they help with stimulation, class control and one-on-one tutorials.

The second and third groups follow closely on July 12 and will be placed in predominantly clerical positions in both public and private sector companies.