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As a middle school student in Florida, Dana T. Bedden found himself at a crossroads – facing the end of a shotgun and the word “freeze” when undercover cops caught his friends stealing a vehicle’s hubcaps.
He was with a group going to see a wrestling match. When the idea of the illegal activity came up, Bedden didn’t want to be a part of it but “wasn’t smart enough to walk away,” he said.
“One foot in, one foot out,” Bedden, superintendent of Richmond Public Schools, said Tuesday at a program that brought together city leaders in health, juvenile justice, public safety, substance abuse treatment, trauma medicine and other areas to discuss public health approaches to preventing youth violence.
The Youth Violence Prevention Consortium, which had been scheduled for months, took on additional meaning in light of violent protests in Baltimore over the death of a black man whose spine was severed while he was in police custody.
Richmond has not had similar incidents, but officials on Tuesday spoke about violent episodes in the schools; a youth behavior risk survey that shows many children report getting in fights and not feeling safe at school; and worries that the city’s entrenched poverty is a breeding ground for social discontent and unrest.
Bedden described his own brush with the criminal justice system as one of those defining moments in childhood that can go either way. The incident briefly earned him the nickname “Jailbird” after his parents called the school to tell his teachers and his coach, who did not kick him off the team but made him earn his way back to the starting lineup.
“Your superintendent was handcuffed, chained to another prisoner,” Bedden said Tuesday, telling the story initially in third person as that of a character he called “John Doe.”
Later in the talk, he revealed he was that scared kid who did a stupid thing. The difference, he said, was that the police officer who took him into custody took the time to look at his record – he didn’t have one – reached out to the school system to find out what kind of student he was, and found out more about his parents, who were called to come get him.
Bedden said his coach told his mother, “If I put him off the team, I’m giving that group of people more access to him.”
“I tell you that because we have a bunch of maladjusted students, but we also have more students who just make poor decisions,” Bedden said.
In Richmond, homicide is the leading cause of death in youth ages 10 to 24, said Dr. Donald Stern, Richmond City Health District director, opening Tuesday’s meeting with sobering statistics.
“In most of the rest of the country, it ranks second to third. It’s Number 1 in Richmond city. We have one of the highest hospitalization rates in the state of Virginia for injury-related causes. Males experience the greatest burden,” Stern said.
“Men tend to be the primary perpetrator against other men and women, impacting the well-being of children in our community. Adverse events of childhood, including loss of father at the time of birth, or due to incarceration or due to death, continues violence on into the next generation,” Stern said.
The meeting was convened as part of the health district’s efforts to develop a communitywide approach to prevent youth violence, work being carried out with a four-year training and technical assistance grant from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Stern said in a survey of close to 5,000 middle and high school children in the city schools, 15 percent of high school students and 25 percent of middle school students reported at the time of the survey that they had carried a weapon – gun, knife or club – on school property in the past month. In addition, 39 percent of high schoolers and 69 percent of middle schoolers reported they had been in a physical fight in the past 12 months.
“There’s been a video in the news recently about another high school outside of Richmond. What’s that all about?” Stern said, referring to the video of a student brawl at Varina High School in Henrico County.
“Fifty-five percent of the students in Richmond Public Schools said they feel safe at school. That means 45 percent don’t feel like they are safe,” Stern said. “This isn’t about blaming the schools. This is a culture in our community of violent behavior that’s used as a means of addressing problems that our youth are facing.”
Participants at the meeting spent part of the afternoon exploring how to work together better and hearing more from keynote speaker Steven C. Teske, chief judge of the Clayton County Juvenile Court in Jonesboro, Ga. Teske has gained national attention for some of his juvenile justice system reforms.
Teske said youth who are traumatized go on to traumatize others.
“We have to be smart about the way we respond to youth violence because violence we now know committed by youth, most of it is coming from trauma, and we have to get to the heart of the problem,” Teske said.
T.L. Smith
28 April 2015
http://www.richmond.com/life/health/article_8ff3498c-dbc0-5b76-b4ba-09b802ae673c.html
