Laura Bruton, North Texas Job Corps are committed to service

by LaToya S. Watkins of North Dallas Gazette

Bruton is the deputy center director of the North Texas Job Corps.

Laura Bruton

Laura Bruton, deputy center director of the North Texas Job Corps, grew up in the Hamilton Park area of Dallas. She set off for college not far from her childhood home at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas as one of the small group of African American students to call SMU their college. Bruton completed a B.A. in social sciences there and went on to the University of Texas at Austin where she obtained her M.A. in social services.

Bruton shared, "After I finished college I was doing what all young people that finish college do. I was looking for that next step in life."

Bruton found that step in McKinney at the North Texas Job Corps as a job counselor and was later promoted to manager of counseling, which is where she stayed until she was contacted by the Atterbury Job Corps in Edinburgh, Indiana. From Edinburgh she was called to Batesville, Mississippi to become a deputy center director, and from there Bruton's career led her to Memphis, Tennessee to serve as director of a brand new center.

"These were all very country places," Bruton chuckled. "Me and the kids that were from big cities like Chicago would all get so excited about the wildlife and country living. I had a lot of fun."

Bruton was high in demand with job corps, and she traveled around the country to help direct and better develop centers all over.

Still, Bruton left Job Corps to begin her own consulting business and remained in Tennessee to do so. Three years after venturing out on her own, she decided that she was ready to go back to work again and began searching Job Corps position postings all over the country. A listing in the North Texas Job Corps brought her full circle to where she had first started after college.

Bruton is now second in command at the North Texas Job Corps. She has direct oversight of academics, social development, training and trades, and transportation. When the director is unavailable Bruton is first in command.

"Even though my mother is deceased," Bruton told North Dallas Gazette, "I'd have to say that she has been and is my biggest influence in life. She always believed that we could achieve and be whatever we aspired to be." Bruton added, "And she would tell me and my sibling too, 'you can go to whatever school you choose to go, you can do and be anything you want to be.'"

Bruton is a member of the Chi Zeta Omega Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority as well as the Hamilton Park Methodist Church. She revealed that she believed that if helping people had not been the calling placed upon her by life, she would probably be performing on Broadway with the rest of her family.

"It is my other passion," she admitted. "I come from a long line of performers. My mother and sister were in Broadway musicals, so that's probably what I'd be doing too."

The North Texas Job Corps Center has been training young adults for the job files for nearly 45 years. Job Corps offers vocational training for young adults between the ages of 16 to 24. The main goal of the Job Corps is making people employable. Job Corps actively recruits through television advertisements, schools, community centers, church organizations, and workforce programs.

For more information on North Texas Job Corps Center visit northtexas.jobcorps.gov/.