Public hearings will determine future of prevention programs
Shi Cota struggled to keep her voice steady as she talked about
growing up in Salinas. The other students at school teased her all
the time. She witnessed fighting between her parents
– when her father wasn’t in prison. He was a drug addict and a
gang member.
Public hearings will determine future of prevention programs
Shi Cota struggled to keep her voice steady as she talked about growing up in Salinas. The other students at school teased her all the time. She witnessed fighting between her parents – when her father wasn’t in prison. He was a drug addict and a gang member.
And like her father, she first found strength and acceptance when she herself turned to a gang.
“I dealt a lot with people pushing me around,” Cota said. “My mom said to ignore it, but as I got older I had so much resentment and anger.”
Cota joined a gang when she was 14 and remained active, while going in and out of jail, until she was 23. Now 31, she works hard as a single mother of two, and doesn’t always have her family’s support for her decision to leave the gang.
“My brother says I have changed and I’ve forgotten where I came from,” Cota said. “There is conflict within my family and myself.”
Cota now works as a drug and alcohol counselor with the same types of teens she ran with when she was a teenager.
“I lived a life I wish no other kids could live right now, though I know a lot of kids do,” she said.
A meeting of minds
Cota told her story before a hearing of the state Assembly select committee on youth violence prevention May 18 at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas. She was one of more than a dozen speakers to talk about the ways in which government agencies and nonprofits are working to prevent youth violence in the city – from prevention programs such as preschool services and after-school tutoring programs to intervention programs such as drug and alcohol counseling.
The hearing is the second of several scheduled throughout the state to discuss youth violence prevention, and Assembly member Anna Caballero is chair of the committee. The focus of the hearings is to look at what is working and what isn’t working in getting kids and teens to leave gangs or stay out of gangs.
“We are trying to figure out how we can focus on turning around these young folks,” Caballero said.
The first hearing was held in Los Angeles, and others will be in the Central Valley, Sacramento and Oakland in the coming months.
Sandre Swanson, an assembly member from Oakland and a member of the committee, attended the Salinas hearing.
“The word is out that we have a deficit. There is no extra funding,” Swanson said. “But we are looking at ways to reallocate existing funds…When the budget looks better we want to have a new plan, a toolkit of best practices.”
At the end of the year, the committee will release a report that recommends best practices and future legislation.
Losing youth along the way
“It’s really just a collaborative approach. We are trying to bring everyone together to see what is best for California,” said Rick Rivas, a legislative aide for Caballero. “You can’t really consider solutions for youth violence without considering a variety of areas. You have to talk about prevention, suppression, healthcare – talk about preschool.”
Many of the panelists featured at the Salinas hearing were representatives from local nonprofits, including Rev. Frank Gomez from the East Salinas Family Center of the United Methodist Church.
Gomez spent time visiting inmates at the local jail as part of his ministry.
“When I worked at the county jail, I visited a young man. He had a young son and asked if I wanted to see a photo,” Gomez said. “He showed me a photo of a young boy with a big smile, but it left me with a question. This young man that finds himself in jail was once a smiling kid, but where did we lose him?”
Gomez and his wife now run an after-school program that involves 52 children. He took the first team of students from Monterey County to the Tech Challenge at the San Jose Tech Museum, where the students competed against schools from the greater Bay Area in creating a Mars land rover.
“If programs like this do not pay attention to young children, someone else will,” he said.
None of the children in his program has ever entered the juvenile system.
John Phillips, a retired judge, has seen the way the system has failed many children.
“Building more prisons and locking up young people wasn’t working,” he said. “I grew tired of sentencing kids to prison for 30 years. And when you strip them away from the gang influence, they really were just kids.”
Phillips founded Rancho Cielo, an education and housing facility for kids on probation that is an alternative to the California Youth Authority jail cells. The ranch is on 100 acres in Monterey County and has two lakes, a horse program and a farm operation on site. The program has 40 kids on campus now and has a strong focus on job placement for the students who leave the program.
“The main thing is there is someone to talk to these kids,” Phillips said. “Some of them have never had that before.”
Connecting services
Another key to violence prevention seems to be connecting families and children to services that are available in the community. Robert Reyes serves as a liaison of sorts as the probation service manager for the Silver Star Resource Center, which offers referrals for at-risk families.
“Violence is preventable. Gang involvement is preventable,” Reyes said.
The average age that prevention programs target are kids who are 13.9 years old, while gangs have started targeting elementary school students.
“That’s too old,” Reyes said. “Statistics show that kids start thinking about joining a gang at 13 and in six months, they’ve made a choice.”
As the public hearings continue, San Benito residents are encouraged to share their thoughts on youth violence prevention with the committee by calling 759-8676.
