I haven’t written about the job that I held for the past year for several reasons. For one, the fact that I worked with minors makes confidentiality a big concern legally and ethically. Secondly, my position was very emotionally taxing and I often didn’t feel like re-living particularly stressful days. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I did not feel comfortable expressing what was going on from day to day out of fear that I would only be conveying the sad parts of the work. I didn’t want to give anyone who was reading this the feeling that every day was full of despair, because it would probably be the frustrating things that would motivate me to write. Now that I am finished with my year of AmeriCorps service, I think I can begin to reflect on the experiences.
Right around this time last summer, I was deeply entrenched in a battle to win a job. As I fought to distinguish myself from a myriad of other recent college grads with similar degrees, I quickly ran into that eternal catch-22: No one would hire me because I had no experience, and I had no experience because no one would hire me. I admittedly had set my sights high in the nascent stages of the search, but a slowing economy mixed with a specific field of interest forced me to lower expectations. I had graduated with a degree in Political Science, and unlike most who major in this field, I was not interested in using it to get my foot in the door to law school. The jobs that I applied for were primarily related to politics.
I had interned in California State Senator Christine Kehoe’s local office, and made several connections to offices around San Diego. Despite positive references from my supervisor, I was not getting any job offers from these leads. My initial frustration quickly gave way to fear that the committment I had made to stay in San Diego had been a poor decision.
I had one interview for a US Congressman in the San Diego area, that left such a terrible taste in my mouth that it forced me to reconsider the direction of my search. The district office director of Bob Filner sat across from me and told me that I was qualified to be the Congressman’s Director of Constituent Affairs (a title that sounds far more prestigious than it would have been, since Senator Kehoe’s office gave me the same basic tasks associated with that position). I was excited despite what would have been extremely poor pay, until the guy asked if I had any questions. I had learned from what was quickly becoming extensive experience in interviewing that it is a good idea to be preparred with some basic questions. I had impressed the man interviewing me by proving that I knew all about Filner’s positions on varying issues, his voting record, and his connection to the Veteran’s Affairs Committee. As I had never actually met Congressman Filner, the first question I could think of was a natural one: What is Mr. Filner like to work for?
The answer was as unwelcome as it was shocking. He went on to explain that Bob Filner is, to use his own words, an “asshole.” He does not appreciate his employees, rarely smiles, is known to yell and succomb to uncontrolable fits of rage. The man could clearly see that the look on my face had gone from excitement to utter confusion. He explained that most employees just had to learn to put up with the grumpy old man, because while he was an asshole, he fought hard for his constituents and was, by many accounts, a fantastic politician. He then asked if I thought I would be able to handle such a work environment.
I tried to find the best words to be polite, but there wasn’t really any eloquent way to put it. There was not a chance in hell that I would be interested in getting yelled at and live in fear for eight hours a day that a piece of punctuation that I had missed could result in a 10 minute tirade about what an idiot I am. Especially not for near minimum wage. I politely explained that such a position was not for me.
Back to Craigslist, to Career Builder, to Monster I went, and this time with a different perspective. I found a listing for what was known as the Choice Program, which was run by the San Diego State University Research Foundation and partnered with the juvenile court system. As I sat in an information session, I knew immediately that this was a job that had been waiting for me all along. A day of shadowing an employee and an interview later, and I was hired.
Essentially, the Choice Program is whats known in the Social Services as Case Management. I would be working with kids who were on legal probation for various reasons. As a case manager, I would guide my clients through the court system and act as a mentor. After a somewhat cursory training, I was given two partners who would be covering the same area of San Diego as I was.
My case load started small why I learned the ropes. The ropes, in this case, were pretty confusing. I had to learn the basics of the entire juvenile justice system and familiarize myself with the resources available to kids through government programs and local non-profits. I had to learn about systems in place at various schools for dealing with truancy and behavioral issues. All in all, it was a daunting learning curve, and I was terrified for the first month.
The key to getting comfortable was learning your many roles as a big brother, an advocate, a friend, and a resource. You had to be a friend, but also an authority figure. I guess you really had to be a parent in a lot of ways. That seems most fitting, considering that most of the problems that my kids had were the result of poor parenting, (and in some cases, no parenting whatsoever). One of the most prevelant and surprising issues I had to deal with was parents who had simply given up and convinced themselves that they were powerless. There were cultural obsticles as well: Many illegal immigrants never went to school in their home country, so they did not understand the importance of a high school degree in this country. Consequently, they often encourage their kids to drop out of school and get a job to help support the family, without recognizing that their child would be able to make more money with the degree.
I lost all respect for the juvenile justice system very quickly. It became clear that the system serves only to support itself. The courts will keep a child on probation over trivial matters, even after I would advise the judge that my client be taken off. I would never advocate that unless I was thoroughly convinced that it was the proper course. Nevertheless, prosecutors and probation officers understand that without kids on probation, they have no jobs. So even if I helped someone get through all 60 hours of community service, got them to go to school everyday for the whole semester, and kept them out of trouble, some piece of non-sense like an unpaid fine from the original trial would extend their probation. This might make sense if an extension was placed until that fine was paid, but the court doesn’t know how to extend probation for a day while mom goes and writes a check. They only know how to extend it three more months, costing the state and the family more money.
Probation officers would only meet with their kids once a month, so they often had no idea what was going on with their kids. We essentially did the exact same thing as these probation officers, but for a third as much money, and while seeing the kids every single day of the week, either at school or after school. It became clear to me that the single greatest issue for my clients was that they had no advocate prior to being referred to my program. The judge hands them court orders that are so complicated at times that you need training to even understand the legalese. The public defenders which most families are forced to use have no understanding of their clients’ situations without the reports that we would write. In a single day, they are given literally dozens of cases, which prevents them from fully understanding each case.
Nine out of 10 kids appeciated having a friend that would spend time with them and listen to what was bugging them. Even if they didn’t appreciate the mentoring aspect of the program, they certainly appreciated having someone help them with legal advocacy aspect of their probation and arranging community service projects that would help them complete their required hours.
There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think about that interview in Congressman Filner’s office, wondering what my life would be like if I had forced myself to put up with a boss like that. As things turned out, I was spending my days hanging out with kids and offering what lessons I could. I was learning about the legal system, the education system, and local politics. A year’s worth of experiences would never fit into a brief overview like this. Individual stories that made the year so personally rewarding are confidential anyway. I can say that I learned a lot about myself and about our shortcomings as a society with regard to how we see our role in shaping kids. We are reactive by nature. Catching a criminal is way more exciting than preventing one from ever exisitng. Think about how many police shows are about crime scenes and detectives catching criminals versus how many shows there are about teachers and mentors who influence at-risk youth.
I’ll end this by sharing one of my favorite stories that I heard back when I volunteered at the Youth Leadership Institute in the San Francisco Bay Area in high school. A guy that I worked for there told us a parable about a village on a river. One day, a man was fishing in the river when he saw another man floating down stream. He swam out to grab him and found that he was dead. Over the next few weeks the village found more and more people, some dead, some nearly dead. They helped those they could by setting up a hut for those they found. The moral of the story was that while helping these people that they found in the river was certainly a noble deed, no one ever bothered to step back and ask where all these people were coming from. The truly noble thing would have been to go upstream and address whatever was causing all these people to get sick in the first place. This is the attitude that our society has about kids. Rather than be proactive, we are reactive. We build prisons faster than schools because we think its hard to change someone. After the job that I have had for the past year, I am here to tell you that it is not nearly as hard to change a kid as people seem to think.
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