After 2 meetings, goals still eluding youth panel
Two meetings in, the committee of residents tasked with advising Little Rock officials on how best to revamp the city’s efforts to reach at- risk youths has yet to agree on concrete goals.
According to a schedule developed by an out- of- state consultant firm hired to partner with two local entities and guide the committee, the group was supposed to identify and prioritize goals by Tuesday and then come up with strategies to meet those goals at the next group meeting in July.
The Youth Master Plan Advisory Committee is tasked with recommending a three- year Youth Master Plan to the city by the fall after four group meetings. The plan will address how to spend the $ 5.5 million the city’s Community Programs Department is allocated yearly, as well as recommendations on partnering with others to provide services to the city’s youths.
During Tuesday’s threehour meeting, committee members didn’t agree with representatives from the consulting firm, Ohio- based Advocacy and Communication Solutions LLC, on how the process is going.
Consultants had committee members rank a list of statements based on how well it is being done today, how important it is to accomplish within one year and how important it is to accomplish within three years.
Items to be ranked included employers hiring ex- offenders; the entire city being engaged and aware
of resources; having schoolbased health centers in middle and high schools; having parenting programs accessible to every teen parent; a service referral process being in place; leveraging outside grant funding; and targeting youth with incarcerated parents.
The committee wasn’t pleased with the list. Those are more strategies than goals, several said.
“These are not goals. They don’t tie in basic results we want to achieve. My concern is we are going to come back in July and have a set of goals based on this that have no relationship to what I think we need to be doing,” said Ron Copeland, the University District director at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Laveta Wills- Hale, a network coordinator at the Arkansas Out of School Network, said Tuesday’s exercise was “lacking the glue by which this gets framed and gets connected in a kind of sequential, linear way.”
She requested an overview of what the city is currently doing with the $ 5.5 million budget and a report from the Community Programs Department director about how well she thinks the department is doing.
Mark DeYmaz, founding pastor of the Mosaic Church of Central Arkansas, suggested the group meet without the structure of the consultants planning the meeting.
“Put us in a room for two days, say you got $ 6 million and let us come up with something,” DeYmaz said. “Because this is the same stuff for the past 20 years. It’s all the same. We need fresh thinking — fresh thoughts.”
On Tuesday, committee members were told that Little Rock is home to about 47,000 children — and 43.4 percent of them live in single- parent households. In 2010, 23 percent of Little Rock children were living in poverty. Last year, 75 percent of students in the Little Rock School District received free or reducedprice lunch and 341 were homeless.
“For me, the story that the data tells is that we’ve got a lot of opportunity because we don’t have a huge number of young people that we are working with,” said Corey Anderson, executive vice president of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, which is partnering with the consultant team to help the committee develop a master plan.
“So that means if we focus, we can make some really good progress,” he said, adding that solutions the committee develops need to be integrated into the schools.
In addition to the Rockefeller Foundation, the consulting firm is also partnering with Philander Smith College.
Joseph Jones, founding director of the Social Justice Initiative at the college, is in charge of several focus groups to take place with youth and adults in the community. On Tuesday, he presented results from two focus groups, which involved 34 students.
“There’s a deep sense of alienation that they feel in school,” he said. “They had a very scathing critique of their relationship with their teachers, their relationships with the administrators, their relationships with even the officers that are in their schools. They went as far to say they don’t believe teachers even care about them. … This theme kept coming up over and over and over again.”
More than 2,000 arrests were made in Little Rock public schools from 2010 to 2012, the committee was told. So while juvenile crime as a whole in the city has decreased ( 1,777 charges filed against youths in 2011 compared with 1,064 in 2014), arrests in schools are still high.
City Manager Bruce Moore told the group that he and Police Chief Kenton Buckner are already talking about how to change that.
“That’s our school resource officers mainly making those arrests. That’s not the purpose of the program. We’re not there to arrest kids. … We are going to change that dynamic,” Moore said.
Paul Kelly, a senior policy analyst at Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, said his first goal when he was appointed to the city’s Children, Youth and Families Commission in the 1990s was to stop the city from spending $ 500,000 of youth prevention and intervention funds to purchase a helicopter.
“We’ve moved a little away from that, but we still have $ 300,000 spent on school resource officers increasing arrests. What kind of s*** is that?” Kelly said.
“After 20 years, still no one can answer this question: What is the city’s policy for administering and allocating prevention, intervention and treatment funds? Twenty years we’ve been doing it and we don’t have a policy. And we are wondering, then, why we are not getting where we need to go,” Kelly said.
On Tuesday, committee members were told that Little Rock is home to about 47,000 children — and 43.4 percent of them live in singleparent households. In 2010, 23 percent of Little Rock children were living in poverty.