Santa Rosa boot camp for future builders emerges from business, nonprofit partnership

Like a lot of home construction projects, the job quickly grew, requiring the replacement not only of a deck but of its foundation, too.

But for seven young men, that just meant there were more things to rebuild at the modest tract home in Santa Rosa’s Rincon Valley. The seven, all recent high school graduates, are replacing the deck as part of the first-ever Pathway to Paycheck Boot Camp, a new program spearheaded by business leaders and educators who want to help prepare the next generation of construction workers.

“It was cool to see a project from the beginning,” said Anthony Bongi, a recent Casa Grande High grad. “It’s actually pretty satisfying.”

The two-week boot camp is the culmination of the new North Bay Construction Corps, an 18-week program where high school seniors learned both the skills and the mindset needed to succeed in the building sector. The program came about after construction industry leaders teamed up with educators to fashion a new level of training.

“There’s a definite need,” said Doug Hamilton, president and owner of Oak Grove Construction in Petaluma. The seven young men all have “risen well above the bar” set for them, he said, and he predicted that all will be offered jobs when they are interviewed by local builders at the end of the boot camp.

The construction corps is supported by the Career Technical Education Foundation, a Santa Rosa-based nonprofit that is backing similar outreach efforts for such sectors as manufacturers and food processing companies. Other partners include the North Coast Builders Exchange and the Sonoma County Office of Education. The impetus for such efforts is partly due to the expected exodus of aging workers. County economic development officials this spring estimated that 50,000 baby boomers will retire here over the next decade.

Keith Woods, chief executive officer at the Builders Exchange, a Santa Rosa trade group, said the construction industry around the country is attracting just one new worker for every five who retire.

The construction corps “needs to grow so we can offset that,” Woods said.

Seventeen high school seniors enrolled in the construction corps when it began in January. For 18 weeks, the students met for two hours on Monday nights and once a month for a half-day on a Saturday. Of the original participants, seven - all males this time around - have gone on to take part in the boot camp.

The construction corps students became certified to operate forklifts and scissor lifts, and learned how to safely operate both power and hand tools. They also received an introduction to plan reading and listened to overviews of the plumbing and electrical trades.

For the boot camp, the builders teamed up with nonprofit builder Habitat for Humanity, who located an elderly couple in need of a deck repair-a realistic project for the amount of available worker hours. Different companies donated materials and provided a half-dozen journeymen carpenters to spend a day or two each supervising the job.

The young men, Bongi said, dug holes, poured concrete, set piers and installed wood girders and joists to support the new Trex deck.

“This is what the real world of construction looks like,” said Kathy Goodacre, executive director of the career tech foundation. She said leaders hope to double the size of next year’s construction corps participants.

For their efforts, the young men each will received a stipend of $750, said Bill Hartman, the program coordinator and a construction/wood shop teacher at Rancho Cotate High School.

Hartman said the corps can help set realistic expectations for young workers. Too often his best students would get hired by a builder but then quit a few months later because they weren’t getting to do the kind of work they wanted. The corps students, he said, learned to expect at first to do the less-desirable jobs and to understand that they will advance in their work duties, “but you have to earn it.”

Bongi said he won’t be seeking a job just yet because he plans this fall to attend Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and study construction management. Even so, he considers the construction corps and boot camp well worth his time, especially getting the chance to hear firsthand from so many company owners and tradesmen.

“The common theme,” he said, “was work ethic.”

You can reach Staff Writer Robert Digitale at 707-521-5285 or robert.digitale@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @rdigit.