Blog: Texas

Missing school matters, for obvious reasons. The first and most compelling, is that if kids don’t learn to show up, it will impact their ability to successfully shape the course of their lives, and showing up for life is a learned skill. Central Texas students (and this number shocked me!) miss 2.4 MILLION days of school each academic year, costing a loss of more than $34 million dollars annually for our schools. Children suffer academically when they aren’t in class. Chronic absence is an indicator for future drop out rates. Individual classrooms are affected by absence as students miss participation in key elements of their learning. So why do kids miss so much school?
According to Communications Director, Rick L’Amie of the E3 Alliance, when kids were asked why they missed so much school, 49% of them said, it’s boring. At MAP, we think there’s more to it than that. We work with at-risk and disenfranchised youth on a daily basis, and in our work we explore a lot of serious life circumstances and issues with these kids. What I find is that our kids (and I suspect many are like them) often find it difficult to articulate the challenges they face in their daily lives. A 10 year old who misses school because her older brother got in a fight with a neighbor’s kid across the street and the fight led to retaliation which resulted in her house getting burned down and the family having to flee the neighborhood in fear, is not going to verbalize the complexity of that situation. It’s easy to say, I’m bored. But what that kid is also saying is, nothing I’m learning here feels relevant to my life experience.

It's hard to sum up a year's worth of work in four minutes, but that's exactly what a group of young people from the juvenile justice system did this summer when they participated in a film-making workshop with the Media Awareness Project. The project was created in partnership with Texas Network of Youth Services (TNOYS), an organization working to create a Texas where all youth have access to the resources, support and opportunities they need to thrive. TNOYS brings together people and organizations to promote youth advocacy, strengthen professional development and create youth engagement.

Youth Voices in Juvenile Justice from Media Awareness Project on Vimeo.
This project was a great fit for us at MAP, because we share the belief that teaching youth to advocate for themselves and for the issues that affect them is a strong foundation for helping them examine and process the intricate stories of their lives.

In September 2011, Phoenix House, one of the nation’s leading non-profit providers of substance abuse treatment, received a two-year grant from the Department of Justice to address the issue of youth violence using a curriculum called the West Side Story Project. For the past year, Phoenix House has been working with young adults at six of our program sites to deconstruct cultural stereotypes, build relationships with members of law enforcement, and promote peaceful conflict resolution – using themes and content from the musical West Side Story.
Funded via the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), the West Side Story Project got its start in Seattle in 2007, with the goal of increasing the capacity of law enforcement agencies to positively interact with at-risk kids through community partnerships. Phoenix House is fortunate to have had the project’s creator, Anna Laszlo, guiding our implementation of the grant across the country. Our work would not be possible without the participation of police departments in Arlington, Virginia; Dallas, Texas; Los Angeles and Santa Ana, California; and New York City and Suffolk County, New York.

The Texas Juvenile Justice Department released an encouraging report detailing the success of their Juvenile Justice Alternative Education Programs (JJAEPs). These programs have been providing education for students expelled from traditional schools since the 1996-1997 school year.
The Texas Juvenile Justice Department found that the JJAEP has been improving over the past several years--test scores are up, costs are down, and behavior has improved. See the list below for details on the report’s major findings (via the report):

A new report provides a comprehensive picture of the conditions for certified juveniles awaiting trial in adult county jails, based on a survey of 41 jails across the state of Texas.
The University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School Senior Lecturer Michele Deitch (along with coauthors Anna Lipton Galbraith, a master of public affairs student at the LBJ School, and Jordan Pollock, a student at the UT School of Law) has released “Conditions for Certified Juveniles in Texas County Jails,” the second in her series on juveniles in the adult criminal justice system in Texas. The first report, “Juveniles in the Adult Criminal Justice System in Texas” was published in 2011, and compared the significant differences in programming and services for the two populations of youthful offenders—those who get sent to adult prisons after conviction, and those who receive placements in the juvenile system.

Feel good story of the day: A juvenile hall facility in Texas is using foster dogs to teach its teens compassion, respect and responsibility.

The Victoria Adopt-A-Pet Center and the Victoria Regional Juvenile Justice Center joined together to launch the Dream Seekers Animal Rescue and Training Program, which seeks to teach incarcerated teens about care, safety and training of pets. The hope is that through this program, the kids will develop patience, tolerance, responsibility, accoundability, dependability and compassion. The program is an extension of a previously established community service program where the teen inmates volunteer at the Adopt-A-Pet center once a week. 
Two of the participants, Devin Olguin and DeAndra Moffett, were featured in this recent AP story about the program and its impact. They are currently taking care of a daschund/terrier mix named Alice.  From the article: