Seven years ago, Toyotetsu was struggling with hiring and retaining skilled workers.
The market in San Antonio, where the automotive parts company is based, is competitive and unemployment was particularly low. Plus, the company’s campus is not located on a bus route, leaving out potential workers who don’t have reliable transportation.
To help solve this problem, Toyotetsu partnered with what was then a new initiative run by Bexar County and TX FAME, a manufacturing industry training program that offers a 10-week bootcamp in which people are paid while they learn. The county was testing whether the program could help residents with criminal records, and Toyotetsu ended up training someone with a past violent offense. Leslie Cantu, vice president of administration at Toyotetsu, thought he would be with the company for six weeks and that would be the end of it.
She was surprised to find out that when a permanent role opened in the maintenance department, the manager wanted to hire him full-time. Today, he’s still with the company and in a leadership position.
“That experience got us thinking,” Cantu says. “We found a diamond in the rough that we probably would have overlooked had we not had this very chance opportunity.”
The Big Idea: From there, Toyotetsu developed a strategic partnership with the Bexar County Reentry Center—and it’s one of a handful of employers now in talks with Alamo Colleges as they work to expand their support of students with criminal backgrounds.
The partnership is part of a larger effort at the colleges to not only better support underserved students, but to also broaden the college district’s role in lifting up the local community. Alamo Colleges is one of 15 colleges and districts participating in Achieving the Dream’s Community Vibrancy Cohort, which seeks to reimagine the role community colleges play in the health and economic success of their local communities.
Before their work started with Achieving the Dream, San Antonio College was already in the process of establishing an associate’s degree program at Dominguez State Jail. Julia Stotts, director of strategic planning and partnerships for the Alamo Colleges Foundation, says the initiative prompted the colleges to think about how they could better serve this population after they were released, too.
“We really tried to identify the populations that we were not strategically focused on in terms of what services they need to be successful in higher education and employment,” Stotts says. “The earlier we can catch these students who are having these challenges, the better off they’re going to be.”
Identifying Students, Clearing Records
Nearly one in three American adults has a criminal record—just shy of the number of adults who have four-year college degrees. And many are effectively locked out of living-wage jobs as a result.
The Background: Concern about that grew over the past decade or so, amid increased advocacy around punitive hiring practices and plummeting unemployment that made cities and states increasingly desperate to find new pools of skilled workers. In 2023, the federal government restored access to Pell Grants for incarcerated people to pursue degrees and other credentials, in part with an eye toward improving employment.
But justice-involved individuals are still likely to encounter many hurdles in finding good jobs. These include workplace policies that bar people with records from working certain jobs, gaps in resumes, and even knock-on effects of arrests and imprisonment like trouble finding housing and transportation.
Reducing those barriers has become an increasing focus of many philanthropies and colleges. Jobs for the Future and Ascendium Education Group, for example, just announced a new $19.5M initiative, Fair Chance to Advance, that will provide four states with funding and technical support to improve connections to employment after incarcerated individuals are released. Alamo Colleges similarly gets tools and training for its work with justice-involved students through ATD’s Community Vibrancy Cohort, though that initiative is focused on a wider range of issues.
The Details: At Alamo Colleges, staff work with Easy Expunctions to clear students’ records, and also provide targeted career counseling and connect students with employers that are willing to give a second chance.
One of the first challenges Alamo Colleges faced was finding the students who had records—a question the colleges didn’t previously ask. Starting with two of the five colleges, they asked students who participated in housing, food, and emergency assistance programs if they’d ever had an interaction with law enforcement that could have resulted in a criminal record. They then connected them with other resources if the students answered yes, and soon word began to spread on campus. A task force is now considering ways to ask that question earlier in the enrollment process.
To reach the wider community, Alamo held a workshop with simple advertising: “Do you have a criminal record that’s holding you back?” Stotts says about 25 people showed up to the initial workshop—mostly older adults, and many the parents of current students. What surprised Stotts is that not only did many not realize their records could be expunged—opening up more career paths—but many didn’t even realize they could enroll in college with a criminal record.
Once students were identified, Alamo Colleges started working with them to try to remove charges on their records. In their first pilot with Easy Expunctions, 300 charges were identified among 56 students. More than a third of those charges were eligible to be removed from their record, and 16 students had their records fully cleared.
First Person: Ramiro, 45, decided to go back to school after the architecture and engineering company he worked for went out of business. He had a criminal background, which made it hard to find a new job, and he eventually lost his apartment and started living in his truck.
“One day, I just woke up and said, ‘I’m going to go to school and see what they can help me with,’” says Ramiro, who asked to be identified by only his first name. Thanks to Alamo Colleges and Easy Expunctions, his record is now clean.
Ramiro enrolled at San Antonio College to study civil engineering. He is earning his associate’s degree now and hopes to attain a bachelor’s degree eventually. The college helped him find housing and set him up with a tutor and accommodations like extra time for taking tests for a learning disability. With his record wiped, he also got an internship at the county clerk’s office to get some work experience and income while he studies.
Tying It Together: For students whose records can’t be expunged, the justice-involved task force is training a team of advisors to be experts in what kinds of career paths are open to them. Several careers with licensing requirements bar people with certain charges on their record from applying, so specialized career coaches can better guide students on what courses to study.
These kinds of wraparound services are what set Alamo Colleges’ program apart from most other higher education institutions, says Allan Wachendorfer, associate director of the Vera Institute of Justice.
“A lot of colleges offer career counseling and some might offer an expungement clinic,” Wachendorfer says, “But Alamo Colleges is tying it all together by providing that targeted career guidance, partnering to clear up people’s records, and then directly engaging the employers to help students land jobs.”
Hiring the ‘Diamond in the Rough’
Employer involvement in the program has been especially important, college officials say. Without their buy-in, the colleges can only do so much to help students with records get employed. Alamo Colleges has hosted listening sessions with employers like the Holt CAT division of Caterpillar, the H-E-B grocery store chain, Beldon Roofing, and Toyotetsu that have shown leadership in second-chance hiring.
For its part, Toyotetsu has now enrolled more than 275 people with criminal backgrounds into its training program, and many have stayed long-term. Today, the company doesn’t struggle with hiring or recruitment, and the Texas location has the lowest turnover in all the Toyota campuses.
In order to create more opportunities for formerly incarcerated people across the industry, Cantu says company leadership needs to change its mindset about hiring people with records. This includes being compassionate and seeing employees as whole people and, crucially, understanding that the barriers they face—including housing and transportation issues, in addition to the criminal background—are barriers that anyone can face at any time. This has driven Toyotetsu to partner with local organizations and nonprofits that can help set up employees for success.
“It’s about building relationships with the experts in the community that work with those populations, whether that’s helping with transportation or helping them get steel-toed shoes for work,” Cantu says. “We’ve made a very targeted effort at building those relationships in the community and connecting our potential or current employees to those resources.”
Moving Forward: For Alamo Colleges, the question now is how to translate Toyotetsu’s experience to other employers in the region—including how to get them to take a chance on justice-involved students in the first place.
Looking beyond San Antonio, Wachendorfer is hopeful more higher education institutions will develop the kind of comprehensive approach that Alamo Colleges has, but so far there are few similar programs. Some other renowned programs include Project Rebound at California State University and NJ-STEP, which partners with Drew University, Princeton, Raritan Valley Community College, and Rutgers University.
Wachendorfer sees signs of hope in the fact that Congress reinstated access to Pell Grants for incarcerated people in 2020, a policy that went into full effect three years later.
“There’s still a lot of work to do to ensure those programs are high quality and that they’re aligned with workforce needs and employers are seeing the value of second-chance hiring, but we’re seeing a clear trend of colleges stepping up to support system-involved students,” Wachendorfer says.
Editor’s Note: Ascendium Education Group, a supporter of ATD’s Community Vibrancy Cohort, is a funder of Work Shift. We maintain editorial independence in all our reporting, and you can read our policy here.
An earlier version of this article misstated the nature of the 2020 policy. It was a law that reinstated full access to Pell Grants for incarcerated individuals, not an extension of the earlier experimental sites initiative.