5/29/2005
For Women in Need, a Way to Something Better
By JOSEPH P. FRIED




SHE "wanted better," Audrey Buckmire says in explaining why taking care of other people's children from morning till evening provided an unfulfilling present and what she viewed as an unpromising future.

Besides, she says, it left her virtually no time for her own little girl.

And so, a year after resolving to seek more financially and psychologically rewarding work, Ms. Buckmire, 34, is about to take the next crucial step in her quest for "better."

In about two weeks, she is to become a summer intern in a program for potential legal secretaries at the Manhattan headquarters of a prominent international law firm. If she does well in the paid internship, the firm, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, may hire her in September.

But it has not been a direct line from nanny to legal office for Ms. Buckmire, a Brooklyn resident who immigrated from Grenada 10 years ago. In between has been a nine-month program at the Grace Institute, a nonprofit, 108-year-old school in Manhattan that provides tuition-free training in skilled office work to low-income women who are unemployed or have poorly paying or dead-end jobs.

The school, on the Upper East Side, places about 10 percent of the 500 women who enroll each September in paid internships at law firms, banks, hospitals and other organizations, where they begin by spending one day a week during part of the school year to prepare for their full-time summer stints after graduation.

"I didn't have the funds to go to college," Ms. Buckmire said recently as she recalled her quest to find other work. Her first charges had been two children on the Upper East Side. When they no longer needed full-day care after three years, she did the same work for two children in another family in the area for four years.

After that job ended for the same reason last June, she took it as an opportunity to try to change course from what she sometimes refers to as "baby-sitting."

"I also needed more money, and I wanted to spend more time with my daughter," she said, recalling a schedule that had her departing for work at 7 a.m. and returning home at 7:30 p.m.

Ms. Buckmire said she and her husband separated in January 2004, leaving her with the expenses they previously shared. Those included rent of $600 a month and day care for their daughter, Danielle, now 3, which grew to nearly $800 a month after the separation. Ms. Buckmire was earning about $500 a week at the time, or $26,000 a year. The average pay in 2003 for full-time, legally employed child-care workers in the New York City area was $22,000, according to Michael L. Dolfman, regional commissioner of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

After taxes, rent and day care, Ms. Buckmire said, she had about $300 a month, and "some savings," for everything else. (Her husband began paying for the day care last September, she said.)

A friend told her about the Grace Institute and its free courses in computer training, business math, business writing and general office procedures. She passed its entrance test in reading, math, English-language skills and typing.

Half the applicants to Grace are not accepted, many because they fail the test, said Noreen Haider, admissions manager of the school, whose founders included W. R. Grace, the maritime mogul who served two terms as mayor of New York in the 1880's.

The test subjects were familiar to Ms. Buckmire. In Grenada, she had worked as an office manager for a real estate firm after finishing high school, and then, with on-the-job training, she worked as a bookkeeper for an auto repair business there and for a carpentry operation in New York.

But she had much to learn in terms of advanced office skills, including computer programs like Microsoft Word and Excel.

If Simpson Thacher hires Ms. Buckmire after her summer internship, her starting salary will probably be in the high $20,000's, said Anita L. Jaffe, the firm's director of secretarial services. Though this would not be much higher than her previous income, she would have benefits she lacked as a nanny, like health insurance and more agreeable work hours. The firm currently has seven interns from Grace, and usually hires about five from the school each September, Ms. Jaffe said.

"I'm thinking positive," Ms. Buckmire said.

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