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Since 1967, Job Corps has been a fixture in Marion, Va. The residential campus on Main Street has trained generations in health care skills. Despite bipartisan support under previous administrations, the Trump administration is trying to close it.
By Laura Thompson and Jaysun Silver
Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO
Rehab and juvenile detention didn’t bring Crystal Sierra to the milestone she’s about to celebrate: One year of sobriety.
For that, she credits Job Corps, a federal vocational program for troubled and low-income youths. President Donald Trump’s administration has been trying to cut or close it for months.
“I feel self-doubt, in the sense of, if we really were to shut down and I really had to go back home, would I be able to stay sober?” Sierra, 18, said in an interview in early September. “I’m doing so good right now, and I have the support I need.”
The Blue Ridge Job Corps has occupied the former Marion College campus since 1967. Laura Thompson // VCIJ at WHRO
Sierra was sitting blocks from the Blue Bridge Job Corps campus in downtown Marion, where she has been living since January. She came to the residential program for young women after a cycle of drugs, detentions and suicide attempts, which made her believe she’d “never make it past 18.”
Job Corps, she said, “saved me countless times.” If it closed, “I just knew I was going to be losing such a big part of who I’ve become, and who I’m so proud to be.”
Sierra is one of about 25,000 Job Corps students across the country stuck in limbo as the vocational program for troubled young adults fights for survival in Congress and courts.
In May, the Trump administration announced a “phased pause” of all 99 Job Corps centers nationwide that are run by contractors, as part of its sweeping cuts to federal spending. The White House called Job Corps “a failed experiment to help America’s youth,” and said these centers would close within 30 days.
Most Job Corps centers are in small, underserved towns like Marion. Virginia has a second contractor-run center, Old Dominion, in Monroe, a town of 4,000 people outside of Lynchburg. A third site, Flatwoods, is operated in Coeburn by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Job Corps has 24 sites run by the Agriculture Department. Over the summer, the Labor Department proposed closing all of those, too.
Two federal lawsuits have helped Job Corps stay open, but its school year and future have been disrupted. Since the announced cuts, Blue Ridge has lost staff and students, according to interviews with students and town officials.
Republicans in Congress are ready to cut 50% of Job Corps’ funding in its next budget.
A bipartisan amendment would “block future closures unless the Secretary of Labor certifies they will not increase youth unemployment, homelessness, local government costs, or risk public safety.” The U.S. Department of Labor has proposed cutting Job Corps’ budget by about 95% before ultimately closing all of the centers. Smaller block grants for vocational training would replace the program in a new federal initiative called “Make America Skilled Again.”
Blue Ridge may not survive.
A tractor carrying hay passes the Smyth County Courthouse on Main Street, a few blocks from the Blue Ridge Jobs Corps campus, in early June. Laura Thompson // VCIJ at WHRO
Marion, an Appalachian town in Southwest Virginia with a population of 5,700, dates its history back to 1832 and touts itself as the birthplace of the Mountain Dew formula.
Marion is the county seat of Smyth County. Politically, it’s solid red: Trump won 80% of the vote in the 2024 presidential race. One in five Marion residents lives in poverty.
Blue Ridge Job Corps opened in 1967. The residential school trains young women for health care professions with classes in basic medical care, and clinical and administrative work. It draws students from across Virginia and the country. The program had nearly 100 enrolled students and more than 70 staff members before the Trump administration’s pause.
Marion Mayor Avery Cornett, in his office in September, says closing the Job Corps center could have a “generational impact” on the community. Laura Thompson // VCIJ at WHRO
The facility does not receive any state money. Serrato, a privately-owned contractor based in Arizona, received a $32.8 million federal contract to operate Blue Ridge from 2022 through 2026. Serrato officials did not return requests for comment.
The Blue Ridge campus occupies a central spot on Marion’s Main Street, just a few blocks from the Town Hall and a short drive from health care clinics that rely on Job Corps students. The fears about Job Corps’ future are felt in all of those places.
“We are a small town in Southwest Virginia. We need every business, we need every institution of education,” said Marion Mayor Avery Cornett.
Cornett teared up in his office while talking about what’s happening to the Job Corps program he grew up with.
“You're taking the bread out of people's mouths,” he said. “You're taking opportunities away from not just the students, but their families and their children that are yet to come. I mean, it's a generational impact.”
Crystal Sierra grew up in Woodbridge, about 20 miles south of Washington, D.C. She arrived at the Blue Ridge Job Corps campus on a snowy day in January, with less than three months of sobriety. She said she learned about the program from a worker at a juvenile detention center where she’d been held.
“I didn’t tell anyone off the bat — like, yeah, I just came here from jail,” Sierra said.
Blue Ridge has female-only dorms, and the program focuses on training for health care jobs, in a town where health care and social assistance are major employers. Young men can enroll in classes as well, but do not live on campus.
“Southwest Virginia and rural America struggle to hold their heads above water. The loss of Job Corps would be just another anchor pulling us down.”
Sierra, an only child, said that within her first few months, she found friends who felt “like sisters,” and she planned to start training to become a licensed practical nurse.
By May, she was living in an honors hall and had become a “big sister,” a leadership role that had her welcoming new students. She gave them a tour just one day before the Trump administration announced the Job Corps pause.
Sierra said that, after the program’s director broke the news to stunned students in an auditorium, she ran upstairs and called her mom in tears. “I was in shambles,” she said.
Ken Heath, Marion’s economic development director, says the Job Corps center is an important part of the town’s economy. Laura Thompson // VCIJ at WHRO
She started a GoFundMe campaign, hoping to raise $60,000 to get hotel rooms for students who would be homeless if the campus closed. It brought in $2,000.
Sierra put out dozens of calls and emails — to homeless shelters, nonprofits, even the Virginia Lottery — asking for either resources or help in spreading awareness about the program’s potential end, she said.
“What everyone was telling me was just, ‘There’s nothing we can do,’” she said. “‘Our budget got cut too. We’re in the same boat right now.’”
Ken Heath, Marion’s economic development director, estimated that Job Corps helps to bring more than $5 million a year into Marion. The town’s annual budget is just over $20 million. He said he doesn’t have “any idea” what would replace the contributions of Job Corps’ staff and students.
“Every time you take a group of people away from a community, that's less revenue for the businesses, and that's never a good sign,” Heath said.
“Southwest Virginia and rural America struggle to hold their heads above water.” The loss of Job Corps, he said, would be “just another anchor pulling us down.”
Job Corps’ financial problems became clear in the final weeks of President Joe Biden’s administration. In December 2024, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that it would pause two centers operated by contractors and enter negotiations with other contractors to cut costs.
The department noted that Job Corps’ annual budget from Congress, $1.6 billion, had remained flat for years despite rising costs and inflation. “In the last four years, the Job Corps Program has taken a principled and balanced approach to its budget management to more efficiently deliver services in the face of limited funding increases from Congress,” the department said in a statement.
The new Trump administration could have signalled new hope for Job Corps. The administration’s new labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, was recognized as a “Job Corps champion” in December 2023, when she was a Republican congresswoman for Oregon. Chavez-DeRemer vowed at the time to “continue doing my part to expand education and career training opportunities for students.”
But this April, just one month after her Senate confirmation, the Labor Department issued its first-ever “Job Corps Transparency Report,” a critical review of the program’s performance. The report said that the average cost per Job Corps graduate surpassed $155,600.74, while the program had an average graduation rate of 38.6%.
Chavez-DeRemer issued a statement saying that “our in-depth fiscal analysis reveal (sic) the program is no longer achieving the intended outcomes that students deserve.” She later testified to Congress that the Labor Department had “worked together” with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on the transparency report.
The National Job Corps Association (NJCA), a trade group based in Washington, D.C., disputed the report’s findings. It said the Labor Department had focused on a single school year, and its findings were contradicted by other statistics about Job Corps’ performance, including data from the first Trump administration.
Job Corps’ defenders have also argued that, unlike a conventional school, graduation rates aren’t a full measure of Job Corps’ success.
In June, NJCA and Job Corps contractors filed a class-action federal lawsuit against the Labor Department in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York. A class-action lawsuit from Job Corps students soon followed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. Both lawsuits accused the Trump administration of illegally violating its own regulations in its efforts to stop the Job Corps.
In late July, the federal judge in D.C. ordered that the centers remain open while the suit proceeds. The Labor Department appealed the order, and both cases are ongoing. The department did not return requests for comment.
The judge’s ruling allowed Blue Ridge and other Job Corps programs to begin the school year. But the problems weren’t over, and that was clear once the students returned.
Blue Ridge student Ni’Yana Brown gives a tour of the Mel Leaman Free Clinic in Marion, where she works as a certified medical assistant phlebotomist. Laura Thompson // VCIJ at WHRO
Blue Ridge’s administrators declined to speak on the record, citing the lawsuits. But two sources involved with the program’s operations said that it has lost more than 30% of its students and staff since the Trump administration’s announcement in May.
“It’s dwindled us down to, like, one floor of girls, when the campus used to be swarmed with girls,” said Ni’Yana Brown, 26, a Class of 2025 graduate who served as the student government president.
“There would be so much activity going on inside, outside. And then the shutdown just made everybody feel like they had to rush through.”
Brown, a single mom from Chesapeake who is raising a 4-year-old boy, works at Marion’s Mel Leaman Free Clinic. She said some classmates who were training for medical jobs are changing their plans this year, because they don’t know what will happen to the program.
“For people who want teens, adults, anyone to go into trades, and choosing to close one of the biggest trade programs in the country down — it's backwards,” she said.
Mike Blankenship, the Blue Ridge center’s director, shared similar frustrations in a LinkedIn post days after he broke the closure news to students. He directly called out the Trump administration.
“They claim to support pre-apprenticeship programs while defunding the only federally run one that works,” Blankenship wrote. “They promise investments in workforce development while cutting the lifeline that helps our students escape generational poverty. Behind closed doors, they try to eliminate Job Corps entirely, a move that will endanger thousands of lives, families, and futures.”
Blankenship declined to comment for this article.
Job Corps closures were announced in late May, with a scheduled final closing date of June 30. Jaysun Silver // VCIJ at WHRO
The threat to Blue Ridge, which trains many local health care workers, comes as Virginia is already losing rural health care clinics, following Medicaid cuts under Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. In September, Augusta Medical Group announced that it was shutting down three locations in the state, as part of its “ongoing response to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the resulting realities for healthcare delivery.”
Now, cuts to Job Corps could come next.
Job Corps’ supporters in Congress worry that the program’s future isn’t secure, even with any level of funding, since Trump has begun bypassing Congress to cancel some funds that have already been approved.
“What’s to stop Donald Trump from signing the final deal and then in a week saying, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m canceling it all again’?” said U. S. Sen. Tim Kaine, (VA-D) who sent a recorded speech to this year’s Blue Ridge Job Corps graduation ceremony.
“In Donald Trump's first term, if he wanted to cut a program, he would send a budget to
Congress saying, ‘I want to cut this program,’ and then Congress would debate it,” Kaine said.
“Now, he's just doing it on his own. So we have real reason to be suspicious that if we do a budget that adequately funds these programs, he may still choose next year to take the money away.”
Signs protesting Rep. Morgan Griffith sit at the entrance to Main Street in downtown Marion in late August. Laura Thompson // VCIJ at WHRO
U. S. Rep. Morgan Griffith, a Republican whose district includes Marion, voted for Trump’s budget reconciliation bill. Griffith did not return messages from the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO requesting comment on Blue Ridge.
Documents released through the federal lawsuit in New York show that Trump’s Labor Department had considered several options for how to dismantle Job Corps, all of which it labeled “high risk.”
The first option, outlined in an internal planning document, was to “STRIKE IMMEDIATELY” by eliminating 99 centers.
“Provide little/or no advance communication,” the document said. “No advance warning prevents leaks, averts strategic targeting from opposition.” The department anticipated “immediate” and “nationwide backlash” from Congress and Job Corps stakeholders.
Sierra's lanyard displays the sobriety keychains given to her by her mother. Laura Thompson // VCIJ at WHRO
Sierra continued her studies at Blue Ridge all summer. In November, she’ll celebrate one year of sobriety. She plans to complete her Medical Administrative Assistant program before winter break.
She wants to become a correctional nurse. She said Job Corps, and the attempts to cut it, inspired her to “work with the people that are ‘lost causes,’ so they say, because I was once a lost cause. They have a voice and they have an opinion, which should matter.”
She’s heard the Trump administration’s arguments against Job Corps and the statistics used to label it a failed investment.
The statistics don’t tell the full story, she said.
“You see this number and you’re like, ‘Oh, this program is so bad, it’s not doing anything, it’s a waste of funds.’ But then they don’t see the stories like mine, or probably hundreds of other kids’ stories just like mine.”
Reach Laura Thompson at laura@laurathompsonphoto.com, and Jaysun Silver at itsjaysunsilver@gmail.com.