Addressing the Needs of Youth in Ukiah

By Benj Thomas

A draft position paper on the need to develop a wholistic and community-wide program for changing the ways in which our teenagers are growing and developing.

If elected to the Ukiah City Council in November, as part of my service I plan to work on the concerns that this letter raises.

An Open Letter to the Ukiah Community -- September 9, 2006

We need to shake up the status quo for teenagers in our community. What we are giving them isn't enough. They are hungry for experience, for meaning, for self-worth, and the consequences of this social malnutrition are severe and long-lasting. The symptoms are all around us and amply documented: boredom, rebellion, obesity and eating disorders, drug use, depression and suicide, unacceptable performance and behavior in school and in the community.

The problems don't start with our schools, nor can they be solved there. Most of us agree that schools can't do all we ask of them these days, particularly since their job has been made immeasurably more difficult by external changes in the economy, technology, and society as a whole. But this consensus has not led to any change, to any meaningful effort to reduce the expectations the community puts on its schools and teachers.

Parents and families can do some of what needs to be done, but it's harder for them now too. We have many single parent families struggling to make ends meet and even two-parent families are limited in the time they can spend mentoring their children. So who is going to do it?

To give up on addressing the unmet needs of our children would mean giving up on almost everything that we treasure in our town, in our community, in American society, and in ourselves. So who is going to do it?

The trite saying, "It takes a village to raise a child," has the virtue of many trite sayings-that is, it is true. And we in Ukiah are that village, and that means not just the teachers and schools, not just the parents, not just the police, and not just the social service agencies. What should happen is a question that needs to be answered by the entire community, the whole village if you will.

If we can agree that something needs to be done, and I think we must, then we can surely agree to start figuring out what it is that we as a community can do.

Working together as a community we can begin to find answers. Lots of people are already working toward this goal. Some of them are teachers, some are health practitioners, some are family members, including parents, grandparents and kids themselves, and some are just community-minded individuals and organizations. (I think specifically of the work being done by the Boys and Girls Club, of the difference that the new Recreation Center and the Community Coalition for Gang Prevention is making.) We can build on their experience. I hope to see a complete cross-section of those who live in or care about our City coming together to think, talk, research, and plan how we can create opportunities that promise to bring about needed change in our community for the benefit of our kids.

My own thinking is that we need to expand educational experiences beyond the teen-age ghettos that we call schools. And we need to provide kids with alternatives to the not particularly healthy hangouts where so many go in the afternoon after school. We need to provide a wide range of experiences and options for Ukiah youth. We need to ensure that teenagers come in contact with working adults, with senior citizens, with kids younger than themselves, with those who are less fortunate or disabled.

I'm not talking about a community service requirement, though I am in favor of such programs if they meet certain guidelines. What comes out of this, while it may involve service, should not be service for its own sake. It should be much more. It should be every teenager in Ukiah having extended and varied interactions with adults in the community in addition to their parents and teachers. It should also be every adult in our community seeing teenagers engaged in productive and meaningful work and learning in addition to their time at school. It should be a softening of the lines we have drawn between kids and adults, and between schools and "the real world."

Any such program will unquestionably require a significant amount of time from a very large number of adults. It needn't require much money, but it will require numerous acts of faith. But we can have faith, and we can start working on this now. Given what's at stake, I believe we have no choice.