I had the NYA.
The National Youth Association (NYA) was established within the Works Progress Administration (WPA) on June 26, 1935. It was funded by the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935. It provided work training based on U.S. citizenship and financial need for the youth between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. They offered courses in writing, reading, and arithmetic. It also operated two programs: the Works Project Program to train unemployed, out-of-school youth, and the Student Aid Program to provide work-study training for high school, college, and graduate students.
Congress distributed federal money every school year to state educational institutions for scholarships and grants. The President at this time was Franklin D. Roosevelt and he appointed Aubrey Williams, deputy administrator of the Works Projects Administration (WPA), as the executive director of NYA. He established two committees to assist in the development of the NYA program. Even though the NYA program was divided into national regions, it operated independently at the state level. Aubrey Williams appointed Houston A. Wright as Oklahoma state director.
The state director's administration included an appointed state advisory board and local advisory committees of six to eight public officials for each county and town. Hundreds of NYA projects evolved according to the facilities, funds, materials, and manpower particular to each state, county, or community. Major projects included construction, public and semiprofessional service, and home economics. These projects helped build learning skills in road and building construction, woodworking, office work, nursing, furniture and auto repair, radio operation, landscaping, blacksmithing, welding, agriculture, and domestic science. The national WPA regulated work hours at eight hours a day, forty hours a week, and seventy hours a month. Earnings ranged from ten to twenty-five dollars per month, which often went to the worker's family.
The NYA offered self-improvement, health benefits, citizenship courses, and vocational guidance. It also provided social opportunities through community youth centers featuring athletics, hobby clubs, dramatics, games, music, and dancing. The NYA furnished educational camps for unemployed women between ages eighteen and twenty-five who needed personal and occupational guidance. This one- to four-month training period included self-government, cooperative living, and studying the problems of women in industry. The NYA utilized school campuses, but most centers' facilities were built, maintained, and furnished by trainees. Residents received a thirty-dollar monthly stipend with twenty dollars deducted to cover room and board.
The NYA tried prohibiting discrimination towards blacks. The NYA Defense Program eliminated financial need as criteria for training youth, and after that, training for the national defense became the basis for continuing some of the youth centers as War Production Training Centers. In 1943 NYA fell to national and local criticism. Anti New Dealers argued that NYA was expensive and valueless, fostered shiftlessness, and trained no more than one-sixth of jobless youth. After congressional debates, the NYA ended in September 1943. During its eight years of existence the NYA trained more than two million nationally under the Student Aid Program and employed another 2.6 million youth through its Works Projects Program. The NYA provided Oklahoma with approximately $16.2 million and benefited more than two hundred thousand youth.
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