LVTI grad back home and working at YMCA

LYNN – Devin Woolridge has come home to Neptune Boulevard.The Lynn Vocational and Technical Institute graduate is back on the street where he grew up living in Neptune Towers and learned responsibility and community service attending and later working at the Greater Lynn YMCA.The former janitor and counselor has worked his way through the ranks of the organization and has decided to make a career out of a love for children as the YMCA’s new Early Childhood Care Site Coordinator.As a child, Woolridge would walk to the YMCA and play basketball and hang out with his neighborhood friends and as a teenager he worked at the Y, starting as a janitor in 2001.He graduated the marketing program at LVTI in 2003 and went on to achieve a degree in fashion merchandise from Fisher College in Boston four years later.Despite a desire to enter the fashion industry, Woolridge decided to return home because of the sagging job market and took a job working at the Saugus branch of the Greater Lynn YMCA.When the site coordinator position opened up, it was a perfect opportunity for Woolridge to return home to Lynn.”No one is really looking to buy expensive clothes and shirts right now, there isn’t many jobs in that market,” Woolridge said Wednesday. “So I came back here. It’s different, the building has changed, the staff has definitely changed, but there are still some councilors here that I worked with when I was a councilor, now I am their supervisor. But they have all been great with it.”As site coordinator, Woolridge works under Child Care Director Tony Bellerose to help supervise the staff and plan programs. He deals closely with parent issues and makes a conscious effort to ensure that everyone – from kids to counselors – are having a good time.”It is a big difference from when I was a counselor,” he said.Woolridge has only been on the job for two weeks, so he hasn’t had much of an opportunity to implement his own programs, but when the time is right he hopes to put his own mark on the early childcare program.”I am in a dance company called Phunk Phenomenon,” he said. “I used to do hip hop classes here before I left, I hope that I can bring that back.”