By John McGreevy, TJJD Communications

The Gainesville State School once again held its popular event, Family Days, on June 24 and 25. The students of the school their families to come and share a meal, participate in song, and enjoy the relaxed atmosphere and family time. 

Stephen Claybrook, Family Reentry Enrichment Specialist at Gainesville, hostedand designed the program to be a campus-wide event. Claybrook’s vision that “no youth eats alone” is about forging new relationships.

Thirty Texas Juvenile Justice Department volunteers and as many staff offered their time to work the event and this made it possible for every youth to have family, a volunteer, or a staff member to share the special day with them. 

This year’s event was the largest yet, with more than 350 youth, family members, volunteers and staff taking part in the food and good times.

Over 675 hotdogs were served, alongside chips, cookies, popcorn, and homemade cotton candy was served. There was also entertainment provided by the school’s choir led by Kevin Hill, Volunteer Services Coordinator as well as the vocal group, Power of Harmony. Power of Harmony performed at the Family Day event at the school in November of last year.

“Seeing families enjoy the food and fun is worth all the effort, time and planning it takes to put an event like this together” said Claybrook. “We are fortunate to have an administration that supports our programming and sees the need for family reunification.”

Claybrook extended a special thanks to the Power of Harmony and Dennis Castiglione, who brought the choral program to the school, as well as the Vocal Majority, who volunteer weekly to work with the choir. He also thanked the hardworking TJJD Volunteers, Hill and Rebecca Williams, Texas Model FIT Leader.

“Many of our mental health professionals and staff from other departments assisted as well,” Claybrook said. “Without the teamwork and dedication to the youth assigned to the school, an event of this size could not become a reality.”

By John McGreevy, TJJD Communications

TJJD and juvenile probation departments in counties across the state rely on partnerships within our communities to help better serve their young people. In the case of the Wharton County Juvenile Probation Department, a key partnership has been with the Just Do It Now, Inc. organization and their Yes We Can Intervention and Prevention Program.

“Just Do It Now is a faith-based organization and I think that’s one of the key factors in making a difference in these youths’ lives,” said James Perez, executive director of Just Do It Now. “We try to take a Christian approach to teaching the kids. We want these kids thinking in the right direction, thinking about college, about life after high school, but also teaching them the day-to-day living habits and treating each other with love and respect. We talk to our staff quite a bit about it.”

“We can send food home with the kids,” Perez continued. “We have clothing drives and jacket drives. We try to make sure these kids have these essential needs in their homes. I think they’ve grown to appreciate the extent to which we go to make sure they know that we really are trying to set them up for success.”

Just Do It Now, a 501(c)3 non-profit, was founded in 2000 by the late Greg Baines. Baines was a local businessman and ordained minister who had overcome his own battles with substance abuse and saw Just Do It Now as a means of bringing the community together to tackle challenges they and their children faced.

The non-profit group's acclaimed Yes We Can afterschool and summer program serves kids ages six to 18. It provides programs for the youths’ education, a healthy lifestyle, mental health, as well as a variety of teen programs that include preventing teen pregnancies and STDs. All these things impact the youths’ lives on a daily basis, said Barbara Fortenberry, assistant director of Just Do It Now. “We provide food for them, we provide mentorship and tutoring for them, as well as individual and specialized programs geared towards helping educate them toward healthy lifestyles.”

Yes We Can has been funded by a TJJD state of Texas grant of $168,217 annually since 2012, and is completely free and available to any child in the community, though the program focuses on low-income neighborhoods. The program serves between 45-50 youth daily in the summer to 80-100 daily during the school year. Roughly 175 kids are being tracked in the program on average.

Billie Jean Bram, chief juvenile probation officer for the Wharton County Juvenile Probation Department, first approached Just Do It Now, and it was the first grant she applied for when she became chief. “I thought maybe I’d get some gas money for this program because I think it’s really worthwhile what they’re doing there.”

Bram wound up getting more than just enough to cover some gas money for the program and this led to the effective operation that Yes We Can has become.

“We were already operating an afterschool program and Ms. Bram offered funding for us to specialize in certain areas to provide more programs to more kids in the community and we could help them learn to make better decisions that could help keep them from entering the juvenile justice system,” Fortenberry said.

There were also practical advantages to what Yes We Can was doing for the community. “What really made me think this program was worth fighting for is the fact that if you figure out how much money you were actually spending per child you’d realize it’s not that much money,” Bram said. “If we have to put a kid in a detention facility it’s $125-150 a day. Long-term, this program is a whole lot cheaper.”

Perez said that while Yes We Can offers so many programs and activities, the time the kids spend at the center allows for more flexibility than the average school day. “We’re not in a school environment where it might be a rigid forty-five minutes for each class,” he said. “We have these kids for a few hours, we eat with them, we play with them, and we work with them on their schoolwork. Thanks to the TJJD grant, we’re able to transport them home from the center to wherever they live. We’re able to bond with the kids.”

Yes We Can keeps kids busy and out of trouble

Instructing the young people on manners and basic courtesies has been a cornerstone of the program. Insults, bad language, and even the phrase “shut up” are discouraged while less disrespectful alternatives are introduced. “A big component was that they wanted to teach things like social skills, how to interact in public, and how to be respectful,” Bram said. “There are generations of parents who weren’t parented, they never learned the difference between an inside voice and an outside voice and to say ‘yes, sir’ or ‘yes, ma’am’. We’re trying to show them that courtesy is very important. That was one of the first things that had an impact on me when I got involved with the program, because I thought that it could be something that would really help keep kids from coming into my (juvenile justice) system.”

That thought has proven correct, too. Bram estimates that since 2012 there have been fewer than 20 kids who’ve come from Yes We Can that have entered the juvenile probation system.

“The program is centralized in the lower-income side of town,” Bram said. “It has more high-risk families and kids. The program is within walking distance for many of them, but if they need to be picked up or taken home that’s done for them.”

“The kids like to go there because they get fed, for one thing,” Bram continued. “That’s a big thing. There’s always somebody there that actually cares for them, they help them with their homework, and in the summer months they play games with them.”

Not only does Yes We Can offer high-quality programs to the children, but Perez credits the staff at Just Do It Now for playing a large role in the lives of the kids. “We’re all very involved in our community in various ways and the kids know that they can depend on us,” he said. “They can come to us with any of the needs that they may have and we do whatever we can to make sure those needs are met.”

As for incentivizing the youths to visit, it doesn’t get more basic than a healthy meal. “For a lot of kids, the meal they have at the center may be the last meal they have for the day, so we make sure to provide a high-quality meal for them every day,” Fortenberry said. “They know there’ll be food; they know they’re going to be treated with love and respect; they know that there’ll be members of the staff that have been here for a long time, that they can rely on us, both here and outside the center. We show up for them and they know they can depend on us.”    

During the summer, the program has functions and activities going on throughout the day. During the school year, the students can take the bus to school from the center and back again after school. Around 6 pm they’ll be bussed home from the center.

“Over the summer, on spring break, and even the Christmas break, we try to offer as many field trips and activities as we can,” Perez said. “We want to keep them occupied and involved and to keep fostering the bond that we’ve developed with these kids.”

Fostering bigger dreams

“The saddest part about working with at-risk communities is that they don’t have dreams, they don’t know what to dream of," Perez continued. "When you’re worried about just feeding yourself you can’t possibly be thinking about a career and having a house – you’re too worried about your basic essential needs. We try to help the kids get past those fears and insecurities about food, shelter, and clothing and allow them to grow and develop psychologically and spiritually through these bonding events and activities that we have.”

"We want to inspire them to dream big."

During the summer, Perez said, “we go to the movies once a week, we go to the local swimming pool, we get tickets to Astros games, we really try to foster the bonds we’re developing with these kids. We try to inspire them.”  

To that end, the organization is involved with athletic programs such as basketball, football, and track. They provide transportation to and from these games and competitions. Sometimes, they’re able to do even more and combine inspiration as well as athletic activities. “Our Athletic Director was able to take a group of boys from our basketball program to go to Louisiana Tech and spend a few days in the dorms where they got to have basketball practice and life leadership training,” Perez said. “Spending time on a college campus shows these young people what’s possible for them.”        

Best of all, the Yes We Can program is there for as long as a youth wants to be a part of it.

“There’s no exit from this program,” Fortenberry said. “You stay with it until you age out, and the goal is for you to become a mentor in the program with the younger kids as you get older to show them that ‘Hey, this can work for you’ and we’ve been able to do that.”

Over the years, the community has been hit hard by natural disasters. “We’ve had floods, hurricanes, a lot has happened here,” Bram said, “and every time Just Do It Now and the Yes We Can program has been the stable thing in the community for these kids.”

The program has evolved. “Over the years we’re seeing more community support and as the needs of the kids have changed, we’ve had to change with them,” Fortenberry said.

This comes in a variety of ways that includes food, clothing, housing, helping the kids get scholarships and helping family members find jobs.

“It’s worked out really well,” Bram said, “and I continue to partner with them because I truly believe this program is a benefit to the community.”

By Barbara Kessler, TJJD Communications

EDINBURG, Texas - If you’re a parent you know that discussing parenting techniques and quandaries with others can be a minefield. For every issue confronting a parent, there are dozens of possible paths, a raft of people with opinions, and hundreds of pieces of advice, much of it conflicting and some of it confusing.

You might not feel comfortable opening up about your family’s issues, especially if you had a child in juvenile placement.

But the folks at Hidalgo County Juvenile Probation Department have seemingly found a formula to put parents at ease and enable a free-flowing and productive dialogue about parenting. They’ve discovered that parents do want to talk about their family issues, and even yearn to talk about them, when they are provided with a welcoming, caring environment, a peer group, and trained – but neutral – staff to lead the discussion.

The Hidalgo Family Empowerment Program, now in its second year, has even more moving parts than that, but those are the basics. Families come together once a week to discuss how they parent and communicate with their kids and how they might improve their approach. The siblings come too, and everyone moves toward an adjusted family dynamic that aims to increase the odds their child will succeed when they return home – and everyone else will be better off as well.

The state grant-funded program, which receives $366,980 yearly over six years, has served 50 families since its start in January 2022. Most of the parents are court-ordered to attend the family skills sessions, meeting alongside other families one evening each week for 14 weeks. Some families volunteer to participate and a few have signed up for repeat classes. All the adult participants, parents or guardians, have a child who’s been adjudicated and is in residential placement for six to nine months. They are encouraged to come to sessions as a full family so the siblings still at home will benefit too, effectively adding a diversion facet.

Certain components are key, such as the parent peers and the trained facilitators, said Hidalgo Chief Juvenile Probation Officer Maryann Denner. It’s also critical that neither parents nor facilitators are there to deride anyone.

“We’re not telling them, you’re doing this wrong and ‘you! you! you!,” she said. “We’re here to work together to give you some guidance, to help your child. We’re not here to tell you you’re a bad parent, or to judge anybody and they realize that after they’ve been here.”

The first meetings can be tricky, though. “At first they do feel accused,” said Lina Briones, a Probation Officer Supervisor, who along with several others trained as a facilitator. But by the second meeting nearly everyone relaxes and realizes the program aims to help, not chastise, she said.

Denner and her team knew when they sat down years ago to brainstorm a plan to bolster reentry services that they wanted something structured and highly educational but relatable. Denner told her colleagues, “We need to better work with our families and educate them. We aren’t dealing with what happens when the youth comes home.”

They found what they needed in the evidence-based Strengthening Families Curriculum, a life skills and parenting program that’s been well-reviewed by groups from Oxford University, the White House and OJJDP. SFC experts, including founder Dr. Karol L. Kumpher, trained the Hidalgo team leaders, who now operate the sessions at the Hidalgo JPD offices in Edinburg. The team consists of a full-time coordinator, two full-time case managers and a supervisor, all of whom have backgrounds as JPOs or JSOs. Additionally, several Hidalgo JPD staff, including many JPOs, stepped forward to train and serve as facilitators for the Family Empowerment Program.

The Hidalgo facilitators arrive at each evening session arms laden with stacks of worksheets and lesson plans. These materials will assure the dialogue is meaningful and the discussions are directed. At the same time, facilitators meet the arriving families not in the manner of a school principal, but more like lay ministers in a church narthex, shaking hands, asking after family members and bending down to greet the littles.

The warm opening is not strictly strategic, the team grows fond of the participants. But keeping a positive vibe is important. The curriculum raises thorny issues, like how parents sometimes don’t listen and talk over their teenagers or let their teenagers run over them. It also covers how young people evade scrutiny and accountability. The facilitators will talk about barriers to communication in families, such as not making eye contact or only engaging when you need something from the child (or parent).

Getting to Know the Families

On the April evening we visited, the meeting room purred with the sound of families conversing. The eight families in this cohort had been meeting for four weeks and they quickly tucked into the complimentary chicken and biscuit dinners from Raising Cane’s. The program wisely kicks off each 2 ½-hour evening session with a quick meal or box lunch. Many of the parents are fresh from work and most have hungry children and teens in tow.

On this night, there’s an extra treat. A Pokeman-themed birthday cake tantalizes beneath a Happy Birthday banner on a table arrayed with goody bags.  Later, between discussion sessions, the facilitators sing happy birthday to a bright-eyed girl, who’s come with her mother and siblings. Her dark hair held back with a perfect red ribbon, she’s clearly happy to be recognized for turning 9. During the sessions for adults and older siblings, she, her sister and a third small child skip off with one of the facilitators to a room where they color and play games.

In the first sessions, the families break into adults in one room and siblings in another. The youths’ first topic is a Q&A on listening. A facilitator asks how they feel when someone doesn’t listen to them. The answers come easily: “Disrespected.” “Sad.” “Frustrated.” “Annoyed.” And suddenly, as if a volume switch has been flipped, the room noise ratchets up a notch.

The facilitator continues, and the talk moves into another facet of effective communication, how to use “I” language to frame how you are feeling without blaming anyone for that (“You make me mad when you take my CDs.”) or having them deny your emotions.

“When you use the word ‘I’ you are expressing your feelings and you have a right to have those feelings,” says the facilitator.

Earlier Angelica Garcia, the Probation Supervisor who oversees the grant program, had explained that the families really open up once they see that the probation staff is there in a supportive role and not to “check boxes” or record the behavior of their youth. “It’s a deeper relationship,” she says. “It’s not a Parole Officer hat. We get to know the families on an intimate level.”

Sebastian Ardila Gomez, a JSO who is among 25 staff who have trained to work as a facilitator, says he loves working with the families in this program. “You can tell at the end, they haven’t just learned, they’re using the tools we give them.”

The parents and the kids report back that the other is listening to them, he said. “The families are actually talking. There was no communication in the beginning” but afterward, the families are talking and tuning into each other in myriad ways.

“Sometimes they’re just playing video games together or finding other ways to spend quality time, even if it’s just making PB&J sandwiches together,” Ardila Gomez said.

Across the hall, the 10 parents or grandparents at this evening’s session are deep into an exploration of the challenges of talking with teenagers. “My daughter would change the subject when I was trying to get to the bottom of an issue,” says a woman who’s here with her husband and two children.

Ardila Gomez, the facilitator, nods, ticking off the “roadblocks to communication” that teens or adults may use with each other – “Blaming. Changing the Subject. Sounding Hopeless. Defensiveness.”

The worksheet offers a few more: “Mind-reading,” “put downs,” “sarcasm” – and that king of roadblocks, known to parents everywhere if they’re honest about it – “Long-winded statements that come across as nagging or beating a dead horse.”

Ardila is alternating in Spanish and English, sharing what the parents are saying and summarizing some of the discussion. “We don’t want to block conversation,” he notes. “And for that to happen, you have to change how you talk to your kids.”

A mom chimes up. “Well, we get input (from the kids), but it’s still a dictatorship, not a democracy. Otherwise, there would be chaos!”

Ardila Gomez smiles but doesn’t argue. The back and forth continues. Dads and moms are clearly engaged and while some family members are quieter, nearly everyone has something to say, especially when they break into small groups.

“I go in there and sometimes it gets emotional because this is the first time some of them have actually had someone listen to them,” says Denner. They’re grateful and it helps them open up, learn and practice new skills.

“Families need to be held accountable, too,” she said. “Some of them have let their kids run over them.”

Talking and Listening

Soon the parents and teens and children reunite in the main meeting room. They are told to mix it up, so that everyone will talk to someone they don’t know and practice some of the listening and conversation openers they’ve been studying. They’re also instructed to stay away from family issues and talk about fun matters. Again, the room is abuzz. People are smiling and leaning in to listen to their temporary conversation partners.

At the end of this exercise, the adults and siblings report that it was easy to talk to someone outside their family by asking about their hobbies or favorite music and how they spend free time. The implicit messages here are fairly up top – show interest in what people care about and you’ll find them to be a fountain of information, or at least amenable to conversation. And psst, this might work with your own family members!

Briones says she saw that the youth and adults were engaged and talking “equally.” Ardila notes that adults may have to work harder. “Sometimes with a kid we have to fish for the answers. ‘How was your day?’ ‘How was it at school?’ It takes a bit more time, but it’s doable.”

Julia Neeley, coordinator of the Families Empowerment Program, says the families who’ve been through the program have told her it opened up lines of communication.

The sessions frequently stress the need for making “family time,” she says, and how important it can be to just “sit down at the end of the day and talk about your day and having at least one meal together and spending that time.”

Families are not doing that on their own, she said. They’re not “just sitting down at the table and talking about something that needs to be addressed.” But after going through the program, they see this gap and become more deliberate about talking through family issues and showing they care through regular communication with their kids, Neeley said. And this small shift in family habits makes a big difference.

It helps too that the program continues beyond the classes. The two full-time caseworkers, Ariana Abitua and Veronica Lezama, follow up with the families for nine months. They check in to help with special needs, touching base with the children’s schools and nudging the families to practice the skills they’ve learned, Neeley said.

As a result of participating in the program, families have been put in touch with critical resources, such as food pantries and donated clothing, Denner said. The grant written for the Family Empowerment Program noted that children in the Rio Grande Valley are on average more likely to experience higher levels of poverty and food insecurity than Texas youth overall. Resources relative to need can be hard for individuals to find. The family program connects participants with whatever they may need, helping them to stabilize them, she said. The program has even arranged Uber rides for some families without transportation to get to sessions.

For the Cruz family, though, with two parents and a solid income, it was the classes that made the difference.

As the evening session in April winds down, Vickie Cruz stays back to reflect. She and husband, Raul, a road construction worker, have already been through one session and had returned to reconnect and refresh.

Vickie Cruz says that many participants are skeptical of sharing their concerns with strangers at the outset of the program. But she was eager and ready to take notes. “I came with an open mind,” she said.

“It has helped us build better communication and avoid communication issues with the ones that have not yet been exposed to that (juvenile justice) environment, as the one who’s in placement,” Cruz said, nodding toward her 10-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter.

When she came to the sessions, Vickie, a bookkeeper, discovered that she’d fallen into an unproductive pattern with her child in trouble and now in placement with Hidalgo JPD.

When she heard about the blaming and dodging techniques that teens can employ, she had an ‘aha’ moment.

“I was in a position before this program, I would fall for all of it,” she recalled. “The blaming? I felt guilty. The changing the subject? I would focus on the thing she was going on (about).”

After realizing that her troubled child had been playing her, she changed her approach. She began to focus on her other two children, whom she realized had endured some neglect as the family spun around the difficulties of their child entwined in the system. All the children responded well to this new paradigm.

“There’s a lot of things that I’ve applied on a daily basis with the children,” Cruz explained. “For example, incentives. Good behavior deserves position rewards. Negative behavior does not deserve acknowledgement or any sort of, how do I say it? My daughter who’s in placement, she was getting attention for negative behavior...”

“And I caught myself leaving these two on the back burner,” she nods to her son and daughter at the table, “and focusing on her. I was enabling her behavior.”

After the class, and these realizations, the family is on a healthier trajectory, she says. Raul smiles and nods in agreement. The kids smile too.

The Family Empowerment Program will be evaluated through staff and parent reports and looking at outcomes for the child in placement. So far, Neeley reports, only six of the youth in placement whose families participated have reoffended.

Other measurements also will be considered. The program anticipates seeing improved social skills, family involvement and efficacy among parents and children as well as reduced depression and aggression among the children.

In June, the families in this current cohort will join the other families who’ve graduated from the program, attending a graduation ceremony, and receiving a certificate verifying their completion.

Denner has observed that this completion celebration is surprisingly important to the participants, perhaps because they know it took some work to get there.

“They are so excited at the end of 14 weeks when they get their certificates,” Denner said. “That little piece of paper means so much to them.”

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Photos: Top right: Ardila Gomez facilities with the parents; top left, the siblings and facilitators go over worksheets; r-Supervisor Angelica Garcia with the birthday girl and other siblings; l-the young girls color; r-Vickie and Raul Cruz speak with another parent; l-Facilitator Gloria Miranda and a sibling participant; r-FacilitatorJoshua DeLuna talks with younger family members. 

Bottom group picture of Family Empowerment staff: Top row, l-r: Estevan Saucedo - facilitator; Gloria Miranda - facilitator; Johnny Tijerina; Angelica Garcia - supervisor; Hidalgo Juvenile Probation Dept. Chief Maryann Denner; Veronica Lezama - case manager; Ariana Abitua - case manager;Claudia Aguilar - facilitator;  Bottom Row, l-r: Joshua De Luna - facilitator; Aquilina Briones - facilitator; Sebastian Ardila Gomez - facilitator; Julia Neeley - program coordinator.