SUN VALLEY : Conference to Address Issues Affecting Youth

Racism, peer pressure, crime and a variety of issues bearing down on adolescents will be addressed at a special conference including all Valley junior high schools next week.

“I feel that all junior high school students are at risk by nature of their age and the need to identify with a group, the need to fit in,” said Rhondi Mitchell, dean of students at Richard E. Byrd Middle School. The Sun Valley school will be host of the Valley Youth Leadership Conference with the San Fernando Valley Interfaith Council on May 25.

The conference, whose theme is “Making It All Come Together,” is a follow-up to a similar conference last year after which students said such sessions are needed more often. Organizers now plan to make the conference an annual event. A survey asking Byrd Middle School students about their biggest concerns was used as the basis for the conference topics.

The Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission and other local human relations organizations are also helping to put on the conference.

The conference deals with four broad areas, including conflict management, such as dealing with fights and weapons on campus; prejudice and racism; improving communication, and developing self-esteem.

Each school has been invited to send four students and a teacher to participate in the conference, and Mitchell hopes that it will inspire the students to set up peer counseling programs at each school where kids will be trained to help others of their age deal with all of these issues.

“We’re hoping that by talking about some of these things we will show them we are more alike than different,” Mitchell said. But the pressures that students face are very strong, she said. They must cope with crime and gangs in their community, as well as prejudice in their own homes.

“Many of the students are first-generation (Americans) and their parents come from other cultures and with a different lifestyle,” Mitchell said. One of the workshops in the conference is titled “My Parents Don’t Understand Me.”

“We found the main issue facing students is safety,” Mitchell said of the survey of Byrd’s 1,500 students that showed many are concerned about crime in the community. But peer pressure also affects them in a variety of ways.

“Drugs, alcohol, even good grades,” Mitchell said. “They feel pressure to not be good students.”

But with the conference, Mitchell is hoping that the lessons will be learned and that when faced with racism, prejudice or in dealing with other problems students will “have the nerve to stand up for what is right.”