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Graduate Program Reaches, Teaches At-Risk Juveniles |
| By
Kimyette Finley |
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Nov 20, 2003 |
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| Dr. Marion Boss, founder and director of the Court Academy Program, visits with a youth in the Lucas County Juvenile Detention Center. |
A group of students in the College of Health and Human Services spend Wednesday and Friday evenings at the Lucas County Juvenile Detention Center. But these graduate students are not serving time — they are giving time to incarcerated youth.
The UT students are part of the Court Academy Program, a juvenile court internship that offers master, specialist and doctoral students the opportunity to evaluate, teach, reach and mentor juvenile detainees. Dr. Marion Boss is the founder and director of the program, which began in 1990. Boss went to the juvenile courts and asked Judge James Ray, the administrative judge in the Lucas County Court of Common Pleas, Juvenile Division, if she could bring graduate students to teach and work with the youths who are detained in the system.
“The UT students enrolled in the Severe Behavioral Spectrum [which the Court Academy Program falls under] are ethnically and culturally diverse to reflect the juvenile population,” Boss explained. Upon graduation, the professor of criminal justice said many of the students move into higher levels of health and human service agencies, public, alternative and private school systems, correctional settings, hospital and clinical settings, and institutions of higher education. “We read facts in books, but until you experience what you read, the information remains translucent; once experiences are reflective of research and theory, the information becomes cognitively structured, salient, vibrant and meaningful.”
Boss said she selected the Lucas County Juvenile Detention Center because she “… wanted to train graduate students to work with youth who did not want to learn and had no commitment to learning or their future. Reaching and teaching rebellious youth, with bars behind their eyes, is one of the toughest jobs in the world.” She said the bars in front of their eyes are managed by the judiciary system; the bars behind their eyes can be loosened and removed by people such as herself and the graduate students she trains in the Severe Behavioral Spectrum. In the Court Academy Program, math computation, biological and social sciences, and basic reading skills and comprehension are covered, as well as GED classes and job-training skills. The program, which is an 18-month internship for UT students, runs during the academic year and the summer.
Rebecca Battles, a social worker and a doctoral student in Boss’s program, said, “A lot of the kids are very angry and defiant. But a lot of them are gifted children — they’re really smart kids. Many of the young inmates are repeat offenders. It is not unusual to see a youth spend an extensive amount of time at the detention center, go home for a day, and then return for another extended stay. Many youth suffer from feelings of inadequacy and lack of self-confidence, succumbing to peer pressures, causing them to be in negative situations. But overall, they’re really nice kids. Some days, you just want to pull your hair out; other days, you just want to hug them and say, ‘If you would just do the things you do on the inside and act the way you act in here, life could be so much better for you on the outside.’ Most simply don’t conceptualize what they need to do to stay out of here.”
“Court Academy is a win-win situation,” said Bill Hayes, program manager of the Juvenile Detention Center. “It allows the kids to get individualized attention and achieve academically. The kids look forward to Court Academy activities and even when they get out on probation they look forward to coming back to Court Academy. Dr. Boss is very energetic, and she demands a lot from her graduate students and the kids in detention. She gives it her all. It’s her passion.”
According to Hayes, since 1995 about 130 juveniles have earned their GED with the help of the Court Academy graduate students and Boss.
“We show the children how smart they are. We prove to them they can learn and that they can move away from a lifetime of crime with hope for the future,” Boss said. “They can complete their high school diploma or the GED and then maybe attend The University of Toledo. Several youth with past Court Academy experiences are currently enrolled at UT. When a Court Academy youth knocks on my UT office door and says ‘Remember me?’ I am thrilled and realize how Court Academy does make a difference in the lives of Lucas County youth.”
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