Mayor John DeStefano used his seventh inaugural speech Sunday to announce a long awaited new youth policy for New Haven. The policy includes the revival of community schools and doubling the number of summer jobs available to teens. Leaving aside some of the stickier details (like how to involve parents), and sugarcoating the depth of the problem, DeStefano nevertheless made an impassioned call on New Haveners to join in a crusade this year to make life better for kids.
“Today I call on each of you to join me in dedicating ourselves wholeheartedly to a greater challenge — a challenge to make New Haven the most nurturing, supportive and caring environment for our youth,” DeStefano said at the festive ceremony at the newly rebuilt Celentano School inducting him and 30 aldermen to new two-year terms.
(Click here to read the full text of DeStefano’s speech.)
The speech climaxed an event at which youth was the central theme. Poster-sized photos suspended above the stage (see picture) showed kids and swimming and rock-climbing. The mayor interurpted his speech to enlist Celentano School children to distribute forms for the hundreds of people in the audience to volunteer to become mentors in after-school programs. Almost all the speakers, including the priest giving one of the inaugural prayers, mentioned the need for the city to do better by kids.
Four-Month Turnaround
The theme marked a dramatic turnaround in City Hall. Just four months ago, the mayor said the city didn’t need a new youth policy. Then the issue surfaced in elections, caught on in the community, and he responded. Plus, he’s running for governor this coming year; he can’t afford to have crime continue to worsen in his home city after so many years of improvement.
Probably because of that gubernatorial run, DeStefano on Sunday didn’t come clean about the depths of the problems facing kids in his city or the recent spike in violence and crime. Instead, he spoke of the progress the city has made under his administration in slashing the school drop-out rate. He portrayed his new initiative as an effort to build on success. “We need to reexamine our own expectations,” he said: cutting the drop-out rate further from its current 17 percent, increasing the 80 percent matriculation rate of high school seniors to pos-secondary schools, pushing the number of annual graduating high school seniors above 1,000.
But the unfinished business of neglected youth was the clear if unspoken subtext of the day.
The city has to start looking out for its kids “after 3 p.m.” (i.e. after school), as the event’s co-chair, Cynthia Rojas of the Citywide Youth Initiative, put it in an introductory speech.
The Ghost of Comer
The plan DeStefano announced Sunday represented only the beginning of a policy. He announced a new committee chaired by Rojas and two others to help draw up a long-range youth policy, along with the Board of Aldermen.
Sunday’s announcement featured three key plans.
Plan one: “Open schools.” New Haven used to call these “community schools” when child study expert James Comer inspired the city to experiment with them in the 1960s. DeStefano said six schools would stay open after regular school hours. They’ll house rec programs for kids as well as other community programs. The idea is to use schools as around-the-clock safe, productive spaces for families in surrounding neighborhoods, places where kids have something to do and parents can find advice and health care. Mayoral spokesman Derek Slap said officials haven’t yet identified the six schools or drawn up a plan for financing the project.
Plan two: Doubling the number of 13 to 18 year-olds who find summer jobs. Last summer 1,800 kids applied for jobs through the city’s “Youth @ Work” initiative. There were slots for only 470 of them. DeStefano called for “aggressively pursuing funding through grants and partnerships with the business and institutional community” to meet that goal.
Plan three: “Mentor New Haven.” That’s what DeStefano’s calling a new drive to convince adults to volunteer at least two hours a month in the new “open schools.” That’s why he had the Celentano students hand out the volunteering forms during his speech (in photo).
“I have filled mine out,” DeStefano said. “I’m counting on you to fill yours out.”
What’s Next
In addition to getting these three plans up and running, the DeStefano administration has major pieces of its initiative yet to fill in. The biggest, and trickiest: How to deal with children whose parents wrestle with substance abuse or other problems often leaving the children unprepared for school; and how to enlist parents in general to take more of a role in the schools.
Also, the Board of Aldermen plans to approve soon a $1 million plan to pump money into youth programs — presumably some of the very programs that would fill the community schools.
One longtime Dixwell activist present at the inauguration, Ed Grant, gave the mayor points for putting a youth initiative in the forefront of public policy for 2006. He also noted the breadth of the challenge.
“He’s banging up against a big one here,” said Grant, who entered the public arena in the 1960s as part of a group of self-styled “Angry Black Men” pushing for better schools. “Getting these kids to go in the right direction is no easy job.”
I was quite pleased with the Mayor's commitment to youth. My colleagues and I worked long and hard on the proposed resolution. We thought this was an issue where the BOA could possibly make a difference. Many of us in our professional and personal lives work with young people all the time and are very aware of the obstacles they face in achieving their academic goals. I am a huge fan of menoring; my first gig out of grad school was working for the CT Commission on National and Community Service, coordinating CT's AmeriCorps programs--many of which were mentoring programs. We need to understand that we can't address youth issues in isolation--the bigger issue is that many families are in crisis. We need to address youth issues with a wholistic approach, rallying existing social service organizations to work in concert with organizations that serve youth and possibly add a youth component to their existing list of services. And at the same time press our State and Federal legislative body to see the problems of youth as a family crisis issue that requires "real" dollars to change the course of a generation of young people. There are no quick fixes, no magic potions. Just diligence and commitment over time. It is my hope that New Haveners sign up and sign on to mentoring. A caring adult can make all the difference in the world.