New Haven Independent

Dawson, who coordinates youth policy for the city’s Community Services Administration, was the guest speaker Monday night at the team’s April meeting, at East Rock Magnet School. Dawson explained the city’s strategy for dealing with tweens and teens: to provide safe spaces for them to gather, to engage with positive adults, and to have age-appropriate programming.

Dawson suggested the “you got a friend downtown” line to team members who speak to young people they know who might want jobs or other youth services. Dawson is the “friend” at City Hall, who will help them fill out forms or provide information about summer jobs, after-school programs, or the Street Outreach Team, which works with the city’s most at-risk youth.

“How do we move from looking at young people as merely a public safety issue to viewing them as a resource for the city?” he told the two dozen people at the meeting. “Are we fully there yet? Nowhere close, but over the last year we wanted to focus in on employment for young people.” He said last year City Hall’s Youth@Work was able to provide summer jobs for 1,200 teens. So far 800 youth have applied to the program, and he hopes to match last year’s numbers.

Someone asked if the Street Outreach Team has done any work in East Rock. Dawson said no, because, unfortunately, other neighborhoods have more kids at risk of committing or being victimized by violence, and the resources are lacking to cover every neighborhood. But he asked, “Are there kids just hanging out? Do we need to open a school” to provide a venue for safe, engaging activities?

Ted Gardner (pictured), the block watch captain on May Street in Cedar Hill, said he knows of several kids “who are at risk immediately. They don’t respect what the block watch is trying to do, they disrespect those who have taken the initiative to reach out to them, to try to have a dialogue with them, and they just seem like they don’t care. We want to nip this in the bud before it escalates, because we’re only at the end of April. When the schools get out, they’ll have more time on their hands.” He said he’d like to help them out with mentoring, getting back in school, and finding jobs - maybe get them involved in the neighborhood green space program and the block watch.”

Another person at the meeting asked if the kids have a place in their neighborhood to gather. Dawson suggested East Rock Magnet School. Gardner said he’s been in touch with school authorities to use the library.

Later in the meeting, Alderman Roland Lemar (pictured) reported that 30 people have signed up for the East Rock Magnet School school-based building advisory committee that will begin meeting May 21. “The purview of that committee is to worry about the design and relationship to the streets in the area of the rebuilding of this school, which will start next fall. We already have the money allocated from the state legislature. This school, unfortunately, has seen lack of student involvement, and some of the teachers we’ve got here now love the school and want to stay here but they’re having trouble recruiting teachers into this environment. This process is a great thing for the neighborhood and will certainly be a more visually pleasing building than this” (the current one).

Lemar also lauded the efforts of the State Street Merchants Association, which on the previous past two weekends led successful neighborhood clean-ups.