Second Chances: How CDOT and the Center for Employment Opportunities Have Partnered to Help Recently Paroled Individuals to Build Careers in Maintenance
By Catherine Kosse, Process Improvement and Change Management Intern
March 10, 2020
About a year ago, former OPI Intern, Niles Koenigsberg, wrote an article about the Maintenance Parolees program: a collaboration between CDOT and the Center for Employee Opportunities (CEO). CEO is a nationwide organization that offers recently formerly incarcerated individuals with ongoing support to build careers and financial stability to increase their quality of life and reduce the possibility of recidivism. CDOT and CEO have been working together to provide work opportunities for formerly incarcerated individuals on CDOT supervised crews to work on highway maintenance projects like cleaning graffiti, removing vegetation, and cleaning bridges.
In an interview with Jori Ernst, the Section 10 Superintendent and the Program Manager for the Partnership, Jori explained how the program has developed in the past year. Since January 2019, this program has expanded by growing the maintenance area from the Denver Metro Area to maintenance patrols from Pueblo to Greeley, and as far west as the Eisenhower/Johnson Tunnel. The Parolee Maintenance crews perform almost everything that the CDOT Maintenance crews do, except for plowing and driving. The Parolee Maintenance crews can also be found in CDOT shops, washing plow trucks or shoveling snow in the HQ parking lot. In Fiscal Year 2019, the program had 239 participants who worked 42,263 hours on 106 CDOT structures and who picked up 3,738 bags of litter.
A parolee maintenance crew with a CDOT supervisor
CDOT has picked up 4 parolees from this program to work as temporary workers in the motor pool and is working with the CEO to hire a trainer to help the parolees to earn their Commercial Driver’s License permit. Once they have their CDL permits, they are eligible to be hired by CDOT to become temporary Maintenance staff and gain crucial experience to help them become better job candidates for later positions. Valerie Greenhagen, the Regional Director of Center for Employment Opportunities, explained how CEO continues to serve the program participants when their work on the Maintenance crews ends: CEO helps identify full-time job opportunities for participants and tracks their work performance afterwards using paystub data. After completing the CDOT-CEO program, 159 participants found full-time employment and 55% of trackable participants also achieved 180 days of full-time job retention.
The future of this program looks bright- 8,500 people are released to parole in Colorado each year and gainful employment helps parolees to avoid recidivism while helping to build futures. The work that the CDOT Maintenance crews perform benefits the participants, CDOT, and communities across the Front Range. Executive Sponsor Kyle Lester, formerly the Executive Director of the CDOT Division of Maintenance and Operations, hopes to continue the partnership with CEO into his next position as the Senior Vice President of Maintenance at Denver International Airport (DIA) and to support maintenance crews in the DIA area. In the coming year Jori and Valerie hope that the program continues to expand and that the opportunities for success for parolees continue.