07.28.08

Few college professors find themselves knocking on a student's front door, asking the parents inside if their son was just killed in a shooting. But Bob Markholt did it just a few weeks ago, after one of his pupils was gunned down in a car on Interstate 5.

And it wasn't the first time.

The vast majority of young men he works with at Seattle Vocational Institute are high school dropouts, many of whom have criminal histories, some with gang involvement. Background checks bar nearly all of them from living-wage jobs.

Yet to date, Markholt, the coordinator of the school's pre-apprenticeship construction training program, has ushered about 250 such students away from their pasts and into lucrative careers in construction - a vast improvement, he believes, over their other likely options: minimum-wage work or a return to life behind bars.