Summer job outlook not promising
College students — you should have listened to your parents when they told you last month to start looking for the summer outside jobs with Dundee Township villages. Now, they are nearly gone.
Only Carpentersville and East Dundee may have a handful of jobs open in their public works departments. West Dundee and the Dundee Township Park District have filled theirs for the season.
“We’ll have two seasonal and two part-time jobs we haven’t filled yet,” said Carpentersville Village Manager Mark Rooney. “People can start applying now, and they will be hired in May.”
The new employees will be hired as laborers to mow lawns, perform other landscaping duties and lay asphalt on road repair projects. They will start at $10 an hour and could earn as much as $20 an hour, Rooney said.
“If someone applies and he or she has experience working the various machines, we will pay them the hire rate,” he said. “It will be good to have new employees with some level of expertise.”
Applications can be completed at the village hall or by clicking on vil.carpentersville.il.us/.
West Dundee trustees had five summer openings this year that did not pay as much, but seasonal employees would have earned more than the state’s $8.25-an-hour minimum wage.
The employees who have already been hired will earn from $8.50 to $10 an hour, said West Dundee Village Manager Joseph Cavallaro.
They too will be working as laborers in the village’s public works department.
“It does not take much to fill these jobs,” the village manager said. “We are glad we can offer employment to some residents who will be performing a valuable community service.”
The employees work from when school gets out for summer to August when it returns.
Park districts officials never have a hard time filling the 300 seasonal jobs they offer in the parks and at swimming pools, said Helen Schumate, director of marketing and communications.
“We have an 80 to 95 percent return rate with our jobs. Many of the employees who have had them in previous years want to come back and work for the park district,” she said. “That’s good for us because we already know that they have been trained well by us.”
The park district is one of the largest summer employers in northern Kane County. Two hundred of the teens it hires work as life guards and concession stand operators at the Dolphin Cove Aquatic Center in Carpentersville and Sleepy Hollow swimming pool.
Other employees work as counselors in day camps and laborers in parks and at the park districts two golf courses, Randall Oaks and Bonnie Dundee.