Metro Sees Future Among Young Workers

Quentin Langston, 15, left, and Patrick Allen, 19, clean a bus at the Bladensburg Bus Division in Northeast as part of Metro's Summer Youth Program. (Photos By Lois Raimondo -- The Washington Post)

Allen, for example, is working on a team with five other youths at the huge garage, wiping the dirty windows with paper towels, spraying cleaner on the metal finishes before polishing them and picking up the trash.

Ronell Hardy, 16, a rising junior who attends Friendship Edison Public Charter School, wakes up at 4:30 every morning and leaves his house about an hour later to be at the garage by 7 a.m.

"My mother signed me up for it last year," he said. "She wanted me to do it. And it's fun coming to work."

Everett Ford Buchanan, 18, a graduate of Frederick Douglass High School, said he hopes eventually to work with Metro.

"I'm used to being a neat freak," said Buchanan, who is working in the program for the second time. "I'm always cleaning things."

Some of the youth who took jobs under the program are now full-time employees.

Tiffany Jones, 21, spent four summers working in administrative jobs. Now she is a car cleaner for Metro at a facility in West Falls Church.

"I was very hyper when I came in," she recalled. "No one could tell me anything. I thought I knew what I was doing. But the program showed me that there was a bigger picture and changed the way I looked at life."