Outreach Counselors Steer Troubled Teen-Agers’ Lives Back on Track

Police, school and probation officials in Burbank are cooperating in an innovative program for students who may be on the road to a life of crime by getting tough with the youths and their families before serious crimes are committed.

The Outreach Center, formed in February, is a coalition of four counselors: a county probation officer, Burbank police detective and two child welfare and attendance specialists from the Burbank Unified School District. The center might be the last opportunity to help troubled Burbank students whose next move could be to run away, drop out of school or commit a crime.

“It’s just not possible to teach reading, writing and arithmetic and ignore depression, teen-age suicide, alcoholism and child abuse,” said Timothy Crowner, director of pupil services in the Burbank Unified School District.

Outreach cajoles students and their families to meet with its group of four counselors as often as needed. It lacks legal power, but if sweet-talk doesn’t work, threats such as the pressing of criminal charges and placement in foster homes are used to force families to meet with counselors and follow the staff’s recommendations. Also, parents can be taken to court and held responsible for their children’s actions under a recent state law.

Students and families might even have to sign a contract to stick to agreed rules. Counselors can suggest community service to students, monitor them at school, find them summer jobs and refer them to special counseling. Adults could find themselves in parenting classes and family counseling.

“It’s a real hard position where the family realizes there’s nowhere to go and they’re going to have to comply or they’re going to get in trouble,” Crowner said. “We always have the door open for them to take a positive direction in their lives--and we’ll get out of their lives.”

With a variety of youth experts, the center looks at youth problems in a broad context, said Marissa Rosoff, a child welfare and attendance specialist for Burbank schools. The family is asked to attend Outreach sessions because they will either be affected by the student’s problem--or may be part of the problem itself.

“When we’re there, we’re there very hard,” Crowner said. “It would be better if we could have a softer approach but . . . they just need somebody to come in and be a little forceful with them and get their lives back on track . . . treat the whole family as if they’re all adolescents.

“There’s a psychological effect on the client knowing that we work together. He’s getting a clear message from all agencies--the same message.”

Some students come from homes with adults too tired from earning a living to pay attention to their children. Others have parents who are unskilled at handling teen-agers’ problems. The center has so far counseled about 45 students and their families.

The center’s clients have manifested their difficulties in different ways: One 17-year-old boy carved a satanic symbol on his arm; an 11-year-old boy defied teachers and other authority figures, telling them to “shut up”; a 14-year-old girl failed half her classes and--with help from her sister and mother--kept it from her strict father; a 15-year-old girl ran away from home because her parents wouldn’t let her spend more time with her boyfriend.

Outreach’s work is part of a growing recognition that people in need, such as at-risk youths, must cut through a maze of agencies to get help.

Next to a shortage of resources, “the single most difficult and unsolved problem is how to get multiple providers to serve a common client,” said Leonard Schneiderman, dean of UCLA’s School of Social Welfare.

“The reason it’s difficult is that in the whole history of social policy, we tend to pass laws and create programs that are designed to solve a specific problem,” Schneiderman said. “So for every problem, there’s a program. The trouble is the neediest and most vulnerable part of society have all those problems. Wherever they go, no one agency has the authority that’s necessary to help them.”

Andre Navarro, a 10th-grader, had been skipping school regularly before the Outreach Center caught up with him in April. Since then the center’s counselors have been working with his mother and keeping tabs on when Andre skips school, who he hangs out with and what nights he fails to come home.

His mother had urged her son on several occasions to quit his gangs and even attended a church meeting where police advised parents on how to treat problem children. And about two months ago, she started taking English classes so she could understand what Andre’s teachers and counselors were saying about him.

She asked that her name not be used because she is not proud of being the mother of a gang member, she said.

Despite counselors’ efforts to reach Andre--to the point of driving him and his mother to the center when they missed the bus--the 15-year-old later said he didn’t think the sessions had helped.

“It just gives me more problems,” he said. “I just want to get it over with. I’ll just do it for my mom.”

But Rosoff said she sees a sign of progress in Andre’s attitude: He realizes the effect of his actions.

“There are consequences for his decisions that affect his mom,” she said.

During a recent Outreach session in a Burbank school district office, Andre smiled and seemed willing to accept community service as a punishment for his truancy.

“Your mother’s worried about you,” Rosoff said.

Andre didn’t deny it.

“Sometimes he don’t come to sleep at home,” his mother said. “Sometimes he calls me and says, ‘Mom, I’ll see you tomorrow.’ ”

Since that meeting about three weeks ago, Rosoff said, Andre has been in school more than out, and his mother has notified Outreach when her son fails to come home.

“The most frustrating part is parents that would rather turn the responsibility for their children onto an agency,” Rosoff said. “We can’t do it. Problem solving has to start at home. What we try to do is discover what’s going on in a particular family and match services available. It’s detective work for us, trying to figure out what works for the family.”

The demands of counselors’ regular duties compound the tough task of changing young lives. At times job emergencies crop up as they did on a recent Friday: The detective had to cover a child-abuse case and Rosoff rushed off to interview a troubled teen-ager.

But Outreach organizers said the effort lessens each agency’s individual workload and is more effective because it reaches students before they clog up the courts and jails.

The project “was an idea generated almost out of necessity,” Rosoff added. “We realized we worked together so frequently. It’s more economical if we’re in the same place at the same time. We saw so many of the same kids.”

Organizers said they also found that having agency representatives in the same room deters families from playing games to get around complying with rules. Some family members were able to evade orders because the Burbank Unified School District lacked the enforcement power of police and probation, while the other two agencies lacked the schools’ ability to supervise students five days a week.

“We’re surrounding these young guys and I always say we’re putting them between a rock and a soft place, make it hard for them to be bad, make it easy for them to be good,” Crowner said.

He believes the Burbank project could become a model. The center has received inquiries about the program from other regional agencies, such as the Los Angeles Juvenile Court and the county Office of Education.

“There’s a growing recognition that we’re not meeting the needs of youth,” Crowner said. “We know that youth are in school all day long and we know they’re not supervised as well as outside the school environment. It’s very important for society to intervene. They’re going to be an enormous burden to society.”