Run the Streets may be road to recovery for at-risk youth
Steve Buck remembers all the purple shirts. They were impossible to miss, of course.
When he went to Bartlesville a few years ago for a half marathon, people in purple shirts seemed to be everywhere. Kids. Teenagers. Adults. More than a hundred all together. They were there with Run the Streets, a program using running to mentor at-risk and introuble youth in Bartlesville and surrounding areas.
And as much as their purple shirts stood out to Buck, their camaraderie made even more of an impression.
“It really, really began to resonate with me,” he said.
Then the executive director of Oklahoma's Office of Juvenile Affairs, Buck realized the model should be copied in Oklahoma City.
Now, his hopes have become reality.
Run the Streets OKC has launched with a plan to bring together kids and mentors in early 2021. The end goal for the first class will be the Red Bud Classic in April, but really, the end goal will always be transforming young lives.
It's an objective Buck believes in fervently.
“All kids are redeemable,” he said.
But how?
That's the question forever facing Buck and others who have spent their lives working with at-risk youth. How do you help them navigate through trouble? How do you reach them?
Bob Williams has asked himself those questions, too.
The longtime juvenile probation officer who is now a supervisor in the state's Office of Juvenile
Affairs was even thinking about it as he laced up his running shoes one day more than a decade ago. He was heading out the door for a long run, but his mind kept coming back to a story he'd read in Runner's World magazine.
It told of a high school in Los Angeles using a marathon-training program to motivate student to not only stay in school but also to graduate. The cost was low, but the impact was significant.
“Why can't we incorporate that as an alternative to traditional probation for kids?” he thought.
By the time he finished his run, Williams had formulated what would become Run the Streets. It would target teens in Bartlesville and Washington County on probation in the court system as well as at-risk kids in schools. They would find adults who would commit to being mentors. Then, the kids and the mentors would meet three times a week for training runs, ultimately finishing the 12-week program with a half marathon.
Williams launched the program in 2009.
“Initially, even though people were fascinated by the idea, I think they had a hard time believing it was going to work,” Williams said.
How could running change lives, they wondered?
Williams knew it wasn't the running but rather the relationships.
“The barriers came down because … it's a side-by-side mentoring,” Williams said. “It's not like a coach where you're asking a kid to go out and do something. You're running side by side with that kid for 10 miles.”
The mentors stay with with the kids, and when you spend an hour or two running beside someone, you talk. Bonds are built, and for Run the Streets, that's where the magic happened.
More than a thousand kids have logged more than 160,000 miles over the years, and nearly 200 of them getting off probation.
“They have really built a template that works,” said Buck, the Run the Streets OKC leader. “They are very regimented in expectations of the kids. They are very regimented in expectations of the mentors. They have a well-crafted training plan.
“We will borrow as much as we can structurally from them.”
Run the Streets Bartlesville, for example, provides everything the kids need, including running shoes and socks, sports bras for the girls and compression shorts for the boys. Buck already has buy-in from Cleats for Kids, Red Coyote and Express Employment Professionals to provide the same to kids in Run the Streets OKC.
Buck knows this isn't the perfect time to launch. The pandemic has scrambled everything. Mentors and kids in the program will have to be mindful of social distancing, and races may well get canceled or go virtual.
Buck also changed jobs earlier this year as did one of his biggest allies. Trevor Pemberton was the chief district judge of the Oklahoma County Juvenile Division when Buck proposed Run the Streets OKC, but Pemberton was recently appointed to the Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals, so Buck will have to sell this idea to the juvenile division's new presiding judge.
All of those are obstacles Buck is willing to tackle.
Anytime he has doubts, he thinks about a story Williams shared.
One of the first kids who did Run the Streets in Bartlesville had been arrested after running from the police, then coming at an officer with a baseball bat. The officer wrote in his arrest report that he nearly shot the boy.
The teenager not only completed Run the Streets but also asked Williams to be the godfather when his daughter was born.
A few years ago, Williams happened to see his goddaughter at her elementary school. After they hugged and talked a moment, Williams was walking away when he overheard a little girl asking his goddaughter about him.
“That's Bob Williams,” she said. “He started Run the Streets, and when my dad was in trouble, he helped him.”
Williams acknowledges the program doesn't have a perfect success rate. Not every kid finishes. Not every kid who does stays out of trouble. But Run the Streets has changed hundreds of lives.
Steve Buck believes the same is possible with Run the Streets OKC.
“All youth have value,” he said. “Every young person that we can help find success
... those are the wins I'm interested in.”