Eli, please understand where I am coming from:
There is a fire burning outside. In almost every shul there are unemployed people. When the father of the household is out of work it has a terrible effect on shalom bayis. Helping the unemployed baalei mishpacha is a more critical issue than giving a teen the year in Israel experience.
Unless the work is manual labor where the teen is physically exhausted, there are many hours in the night to party. As the supervisors working underneath me are instructed, “I don’t pay for nor value HARD work, I value SMART work. If the person can juggle his duties to do an hour work in 20 minutes, that person is using time wisely and can accomplish more and deserves a higher salary, than a hard working shlepper”. Jobs offered to teens are dead end jobs which don’t teach them what it means to work for a living.
Therefore, a fair alternative is to work with the teens to figure out what they plan on doing with their lives. If they have a desired profession, let them take two or three college courses. This will keep them occupied all day and most of the evening to study.
If they have no profession in mind, you have your work cut out foryourself. Take them to a career counselor for guidance and implement a plan for a realistic long term plan. As Rabbi Finkel here in Chicago says about helping teens, if you work on rebuilding the external things in life and put them on track for life, Yiddishkeit will come back too. Mapping out a plan is the first and surest way to be successful.
mom12:
Working with rehabilitation of people is not for everyone. For every one employee who works out there are five that fail royally. If a person hurts the feelings of a client/patient of such a camp, there is nobody that person can ask mechilla from. Only the yechidei segulah should ever go into such a field. Those who do are truly gifted special people who I appreciate their devotion immensely.