Cities Seek to Stem Tide of Teen Crime, Drug Abuse

Born during a brainstorm two years ago, a method for combating the rise of violence and drug use among teens is growing ever more popular with governments in Ventura County: the youth master plan.

Such plans are meant to knit together schools, police, businesses, social service agencies and families in a safety net so tight that only the most irredeemable juvenile delinquent might slip through.

As hand-wringing over the young grows in Ventura County, master plans for protecting and nurturing youth are taking shape on planning tables from Oxnard to Ojai.

And in nearly every city, thick plans--and, in some cases, thicker budgets--are giving flesh to the popular axiom that it takes a whole village to raise a child. For example:

* Ventura’s youth master plan, though woefully underfunded, is being implemented bit by bit after the City Council approved it 16 months ago.

* Ojai recently sent out 800 questionnaires, assembled a task force of officials and citizens, held a town meeting last week and plans to release its draft plan by early December.

* Santa Paula and Moorpark are building more tightly focused youth plans designed to reduce substance abuse and its byproduct--teen violence.

* Thousand Oaks held a symposium recently on youth violence and began retooling existing school and community programs to deal with such issues as self-esteem, family counseling, conflict resolution and substance abuse.

* An entire segment of Vision 2020, the omnibus long-range study of Simi Valley’s future, is devoted to improving recreation, schooling and support services for youths.

* And the Oxnard City Council agreed last week to spend up to $1.4 million on a master plan to unify all of the city’s youth-oriented agencies among the police, school districts, churches and business community--and put a stop to the latest spate of violence.

Half of Oxnard’s 18 homicides so far this year have claimed youths 19 and younger.

“Nowadays, if you’re a youth and you make the front page, it’s likely because you got shot or shot somebody,” said Oxnard Recreation Supt. Karen Burnham, who is coordinating the city’s youth master plan.

“Basically, we kept hearing at our town hall meetings that we need to create an environment here in Oxnard that nurtures and protects our youth and brings them together,” she said. “And that empowers our youth and families to succeed.”

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Those behind Oxnard’s youth master plan want to create a citywide “campus” devoted to supporting and teaching Oxnard’s children. The plan would link social service organizations, government agencies, churches, schools and neighborhood groups to guide the city’s youths as they grow.

The plan calls for mentoring programs in which adults volunteer to teach kids a craft or a business; beefed-up recreation and after-school programs to steer them away from gang life and drug use; and a teen center to give youths a place to hang out together, away from the dangers of the street.

“It’s really pretty simple,” Burnham said. “It’s every adult taking responsibility for the youth in our community; every adult being a potential teacher or mentor or coach for our youth.”

Ojai, too has launched a master plan, which it hopes to finance with a novel method--a nonprofit fund-raising organization operated by youths and adults who would identify and apply for grant money.

Still in the draft stage, the Ojai master plan proposes to:

* Bolster after-school programs and facilities for education, culture and sports;

* Train youths to resolve conflicts peacefully and respect diverse cultures;

* Link existing youth-support programs;

* Consider establishing a teen center;

* And look into establishing parenting classes.

These types of holistic approaches toward collective child rearing have gathered steam in Ventura County for the past couple of years, as the rates of juvenile crime and drug use have risen steadily.

One statistic indicates that juvenile drug arrests by Ventura County sheriff’s deputies have multiplied tenfold, from 48 in 1988 to 519 arrests last year.

Thousand Oaks--long devoted to helping youths through its Teen Center and other programs--began in 1994 to hold symposiums on crime.

The latest, in September, focused on teen violence. Symposium participants agreed to draft an action plan, to be presented to the City Council by Nov. 12, with across-the-board solutions for attacking the problem’s root causes.

For seven years, Fillmore’s Youth Task Force has been building programs such as an annual youth festival, a taekwondo course for teens, parenting classes for adults and a self-esteem-building leadership retreat for high school students called the Higgy Foundation, named after founder Jim Higgins, the task force coordinator.

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And agencies such as El Concilio del Condado de Ventura have worked for years in Ventura County’s Latino communities battling teen ills ranging from drug addiction and teen pregnancy to illiteracy and gang membership.

But the idea for creating a youth master plan to meld together all these efforts first sprang out of a brainstorming session of the California League of Cities, said league board member George Caravalho, city manager of Santa Clarita.

The league assembled a committee called Investment in Youth that began tracing the origins of the slow rise in teen troubles--and plotting ways to combat the exponential rises in violence and drug use anticipated as the children of baby boomers come of age.

Caravalho cast a leery eye on the growing violence in the nearby San Fernando Valley: “I have two sons who are 14 and 11 now, and I was thinking, ‘What kind of a society are they going to have to deal with when they grow up?’ ” He said he began to realize that no one agency, not police, nor schools nor social services, can keep at-risk youths from falling into trouble.

Two years ago, Caravalho and fellow league members drafted the template for the Youth Master Plan that soon grabbed the attention of cities across California--including Ventura, which was already grappling with its own rash of gang violence.

By June 1995, the Ventura Mayor’s Youth Task Force had surveyed 3,800 teenagers and formulated a thick five-year plan to tighten alliances among youth-service agencies, expand after-school and night programs and facilities for teen activities, and add to job-training programs.

The will to succeed was there, says Gary Ray, Ventura’s youth services coordinator. Unfortunately, the money was not.

To date, the bulk of the plan sits on the shelf because the council failed to fund it, he said.

“Having it unfunded is frustrating,” Ray said last week. “It’s a real positive step that the City Council adopted it and that the council approved $50,000 to enact some of the policies.

“Of course, we’d rather have the $200,000 or $300,000 needed every year to implement the entire plan.”

To date, Ventura has won government grants to train at-risk teenage girls how to start a business; to expand after-school classes at three schools in the Ventura Avenue neighborhood; and to teach parenting classes to adults who “have problems controlling their kids,” Ray said.

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The rest of Ventura’s youth master plan remains in limbo.

That disappoints former Mayor Tom Buford, who launched Ventura’s master-plan process in January 1994.

Funding for other government programs is limited, and there is no current crisis to spur the council to support the youth plan with dollars, Buford said.

“I take responsibility for having created a system that created a document . . . that didn’t have enough force behind it to make its way to the bottom line on the budget,” Buford said Thursday.

“We moved forward without letting [lack of] a funding mechanism stand as an obstacle,” he said. “But if we had waited to come up with a plan until we could get the money out of the general fund, we never would have had a plan.”

Moorpark and Santa Paula officials are working with El Concilio, police, schools and community service organizations to develop more narrowly defined plans: They want to fight the roots of teen substance abuse--and thus one of the root causes of teen violence.

Members of the alliances are considering limiting the hours for liquor sales and cracking down on public drinking; pushing zero-tolerance drug and alcohol policies for schools; and even buying billboard space and radio air time for anti-drinking ads.

“We need to deal with the causes and not just the symptoms,” said Gabino Aguirre, principal of Moorpark’s Community High School. “And locking kids away, busting them and putting them away, doesn’t really do anything for them. It might provide general relief for the community, but absent some retraining for the youngster, they come back sometimes in worse shape than when they left.”