http://www.charlotteobserver.com/277/story/1078569.html

Culinary school's mission: Serving up jobs - and hope

By Greg Lacour

Special Correspondent

Posted: Sunday, Nov. 29, 2009

It was 12:54 p.m. on Thursday, just before the bi-weekly Bistro lunch for the public at the Community Culinary School of Charlotte. Ron Ahlert, known to everybody as Chef Ron, barked instructions to his students, who, like students everywhere, hadn't learned all they needed to.

"Walter," he snapped at one, who had sampled a bit of the prepared food ahead of time. "We do not put anything in our mouths over the food line. Except air.

"Martin," Ahlert said, turning to another student wearing a soiled apron, "turn that apron around. It's offensive.

"Six minutes before lunch, and I don't see one utensil on one table on this side," he exclaimed, addressing everyone. "Let's go, let's go, let's go. I'm smiling, but I'm not happy."

Ahlert is a voluble and robust man, but he isn't always in drill-sergeant mode. He loves his students. He also wants them to do things well so they can find work. He's the Community Culinary School's executive director and head chef, running a 12-year-old nonprofit with a specific mission: take people who for whatever reason are having trouble finding work and train them in the culinary arts.

The school has graduated about 600 people, more than half of whom, Ahlert said, have found full-time work preparing food - through catering or working at restaurants and country clubs.

Yet times have changed, as have the kind of people who enroll in the school's rigorous 12- to 14-week program. Until a couple of years ago, the school primarily served stereotypical unemployables: people who served time, who were struggling with addictions to drugs or alcohol or both, who had few if any real job skills.

But lately, with a moribund national economy, Ahlert is seeing a new kind of student. He or she was a truck driver, or a line worker at Pillowtex, or a pipefitter, or a security guard. He or she might be working another job and trying to support a family while attending classes in the hope of launching a new career.

The recession has brought these people to Ahlert's school, and he's sensitive to the change. It's affected the hire rate at a place that prides itself on training instantly employable workers.

In mid-2008, he said, more than 70 percent of the program's graduates found full-time work in the industry within four months. The number is down to about 60 percent. Until recently, virtually all of the students came from center city Charlotte. "Lately, folks have been driving in from Shelby, Hickory. That's in the past year," Ahlert said. "The demographics are changing. The barriers (to employment) are broadening."

It's a familiar tale to people who run job-training organizations in town. Last year, Jacob's Ladder Job Center, a Charlotte agency that often refers clients to the Culinary School, served 665 people - 40 percent more than in 2007, said Executive Director Steffi Travis. This year, the agency hit that number by the end of October.

The predictable slip in the agency's hire rate came in early 2008, Travis said. "People began staying with us longer, and it was a real strain on our budget," she said. "Suddenly, people were staying with us for 20 weeks, where before it was four to six, eight at worst. ... We're bulging at the seams."

Ahlert said his student body "really started to transform" in the spring of 2008 - when more and more people just looking for new job skills, and with no criminal or substance abuse past, began enrolling. The student body is now about evenly divided between the traditional and new kinds of students.

The school tries to help by employing students and alumni at Encore Catering, its money-generating arm. It also offers tutorials in the basics of job and life skills. "Believe it or not, you take someone who's made $11,000 a year all their lives, and they all of a sudden start making $20-something-thousand, they're going to need help managing that money," Ahlert said.

The school is getting ready to graduate its 35th class and enroll its 36th in January. One member of the 35th is Albert Williams, a 27-year-old Kingstree, S.C., native who said he enrolled after his sister told him about the school this summer.

Williams had never run afoul of the law, never had a drug or alcohol problem. He was just stuck in a third-shift job handling packages for FedEx Ground, and he loved to cook. "Anything," he said. "But mostly chicken."

He has studied graphic arts, and he says he can apply his visual sense to food presentation. His dream is to host his own show on Food Network, but he understands he might have to settle for less. "As far as my other job, there's no future in it," he said. "I want to do something I love."

A few minutes later, it was time for Bistro. The menu included open-faced sandwiches with salami and cream cheese, roasted pork butt, turkey, macaroni and cheese, tossed salad, pasta salad, pecan pie, broccoli-and-cheese casserole. A crowd of about 60 people came - some from the nonprofit Siegle Avenue Partners, others from the Mecklenburg County Sheriff's Office work-release program, which refers people to the school.

"It's a great program," said Rey Savory, a Sheriff's Office counselor, as he tucked into his plate in Ahlert's office. "Their track record is great as far as teaching their students skills and placing them in the workforce.

"Of course, with the economy, everything's tougher now."