COURSE AT GODDARD STRAIGHTENS ROAD FOR TROUBLED TEENS
PLAINFIELD -- Marcel Henderson, a 16-year-old from the Boston suburb of Roxbury, just ended a 10-day stay in Vermont. He returned to his rough, crime-ridden neighborhood, he said, with strength and confidence he has never known before.
"Before, I felt strong,but in the wrong way," Henderson said. "I felt like I had to dominate people to earn their respect."
Henderson, whose brother died of gunshot wounds he suffered in a street fight, said that just a short time ago he sold drugs to make spending money. But he doesn't think he'll have to do that anymore.
"Now I can get respect for who I am, not what I did. I feel strong enough to handle everything," he said.
Henderson was among about 50 Boston area residents ages 14 to 20 who came to the quiet of the Goddard College campus in Plainfield for the Youth at Risk program, a rigid 10-day schedule of group activities and classroom sessions. The sessions teach youth how to gain control of their lives by making them take responsibility for their own actions and interact with others, program organizers said.
Programs typically consist of 50 to 80 participants, who must be referred to the program through other agencies, such as court diversion or probation officers, and must apply to get in. Applicants must promise to participate in all the program's activities and a year of follow-up counseling.
The program is sponsored by the Breakthrough Foundation, a California-based group which, through a variety of programs, teaches participants how to overcome attitudes that prevent them from leading the kind of lives they want.
Two counselors, Dave Fisher and Art Schuller, both from the San Francisco area, worked with the youth in Plainfield. Fisher is a family counselor and has worked with juvenile delinquents, and Schuller is a psychiatrist. Both have been involved in programs like Youth at Risk for about 10 years.
Goddard College was one of six sites for the program across the nation. Other sites are Bridgeport, Conn., New York City, Boston, Oakland, Calif., and Seattle.
The youths who gathered at Goddard had problems ranging from drug abuse to the inability to get along with their families. Dan Miller, president of the foundation, said 43 percent of them had been arrested before, one-third had run away from home and three-fourths had been suspended from school.
At first, it was common for the youths to resist help.
"I didn't like it here at all," said Joan Harland, 16, of Boston. "I'm a smoker and the first day I had a nicotine fit and was yelling at everyone." Harland described herself as the rowdiest member of her group of friends back home.
But by the ninth day of the course, Harland had decided she wants to return as a volunteer next year. "Now I don't want to leave," she said.
By the end of the course the participants learn to trust and Support each other. Classroom sessions, in which the youths are faced with their mistakes, and challenging physical activities that require them to trust and support each other alter their often cynical views of others.
"You build a sense of team and a sense of community," Miller said. That sense is something absent from the participants' everyday lives.
Physical activities include a timed one-mile run and an obstacle course which includes crawling through tunnels, zigzagging around trees, slipping through inner tubes and climbing over a 7-foot barrier -- all while connected by a rope to six or seven other teammates. Each teammate is responsible for all the others because if one cannot navigate the course, none of them can.
As the teens wound through the course last week, fellow participants and scores of program volunteers clapped and cheered them from start to finish. Once they crossed the start line breathless but exhilarated teammates hugged each other.
The atmosphere in the classroom was calmer, but just as supportive. The youths sat in rows of chairs and one by one they rose to take responsibility for mistakes, such as fighting with another participant or being late for meals, made since the last class. Staff members had recorded the mistakes in a book and by the end of the class, everyone -- teens and staff members -- had to admit their mistakes.
The staff also praised progress and participants thanked each other for support.
According to Dennis Reina, coordinator of admissions at Goddard who initiated the move to hold the program in Vermont, "They get to examine what it is to be productive human beings." At first, they are convinced that their own lives cannot work, be said.
"I feel great with all the support I'm getting from other people, " said Harland. "It gives me a chance to clean up my mistakes. They say if you acknowledge mistakes here, you can acknowledge them anywhere."
Communication, above all else, is the highest priority.
Myles Borden, 17, credits his experiences in the classroom for erasing his fear of communicating. "Now I can stand up and talk in groups. I couldn't before," he said. "I know if I can talk to a group, I can talk to my parents."
Borden said that before the course he shut his parents out, even when they offered help. "I was embarrassed and afraid of getting punished," he said.
According to studies of previous participants, the Breakthrough approach works. Claremont College's Center for Applied Research found that, before the course, the 1984 participants reported they had committed 2,129 delinquent acts. After the course, that figure decreased by 50 percent, the study said. Arrests also decreased. The 1982 participants, for example, had been arrested 75 times in the 2 1/2 years preceding the course. During the three years after the course, there were 42 arrests.
Margot Nicol-Hathaway, 17, of Cape Cod said she always has been withdrawn and had problems with her mother. But during the program at Goddard, she became the leader of her obstacle course team.
"I've never led anything before. Normally, I'm always last, in the back, but now I feel more confident about myself," she said.
Back at home, she is going to try to iron out her feelings toward her mother. "I've always kept things inside and resent things she's done in the past. I accept her as my mother, not as my enemy. I've never said 'I love you' and really meant it."
Zacqueline Brown learned trust. "It feels like people are really here to help you," said the 15-year-old from Boston. "Even people you don't know are willing to help you."
To sustain the impact of the program, treatment extends beyond the 10-day program. "This is meant to be a catalyst, not an end result," Miller said.
Follow-up treatment lasts for a year after the program, a time when participants perform community service and achieve personal goals set at the end of the course.
For every four participants, one adult trained to work with troubled youths also must go through the program. That adult, called a "facilitator," goes through all aspects of the course, including the obstacle courses and classroom sessions, and will meet regularly with the four teens during the next year.
"The temptations are pretty significant when they get back. There's a period when they try to tell people what happened and it's impossible," Miller said.
