Cover credit – Image by Freepik
Most of you would know already that a couple of weeks ago, a fourteen-year-old was found with a loaded gun inside William Floyd High School in Mastic Beach. The young man was found with the gun right before dismissal after being suspected of vaping and searched with a metal detecting wand. While most would view this situation in the black and white of charge him as an adult, lock him away and throw away the key. I feel that this situation is screaming something much more in the gray to our community and maybe yours as well. Often times, situations are trying to say something much deeper to us.
For years now, even decades, my community hasn’t been willing to admit that we have some issues that require our full attention. There’s been many cries to “clean up” our streets and build some nice-looking structures in return. Everyone is talking of revitalizing this road and that one too. We want buildings and businesses that are nice to look at with the hopes that people from other towns will come by and stare at them with us.
On the contrary, whenever we have crime that makes the news media, which is quite often, most people conveniently say, “Well this happens in every town.” Which it does, yet not in the frequency it happens in ours. Still, we just repeat the phrase over and over again. While we do have such beautiful landscapes and full access to both the bay and the ocean, that just can’t negate the other issues that are screaming to be addressed.
Our community has changed over the past twenty years and more specifically the past ten. The demographics have shifted drastically, the community I knew as a child doesn’t exist anymore and probably won’t ever again. Our needs are different, the struggles are different, the programs we need in place are different. If we simply cling to only what we knew the community to be back then, we won’t ever be effective at helping, healing, lifting up, and growing our community as a whole for generations to come. Have you ever noticed that in the word community is the hidden word, “UNITY?”
We have a wonderful and extremely large school district with over nine thousand students. We have a state renowned music program and sports teams that have showered our gymnasium with banners of league and county championships. We have so many administrative employees that truly do care and many teachers that go the extra mile for our kids and their needs. We have a second-to-none, in-school career-training program and Floyd Academy which has undoubtedly boosted our graduation rate over the past ten years.
But we also have some dire issues and needs. We have a larger percentage than most other districts of students that live in poverty and poverty usually brings with it a host of many other issues. We have many hundreds of students that go home to extremely unstable and even unsafe circumstances. We have gangs that prey on and thrive in the midst of unstable and fatherless homes. They offer to provide the family with the stability, companionship, and purpose that most kids in these environments long for. At fifteen years old and without a strong home structure, this would sound like a great offer.
On the second day of school this year, I received a call from two separate groups of kids for a ride to school. Most of the kids my wife and I work with in the community have trouble getting up early in September since they had no bedtime all summer. I usually do a lot of rides to school the first few weeks back. On my return trip, I saw a young man who we have known since he was young, who was kicked out of school on the first day this year. He was wandering the streets, so I pulled over to check on him and find out where he was going. He said, “I’m chilling, PJ,” which translates to that he’s wandering around the streets aimlessly until he finds something to do or a place to hang all day.
We have been focused on “revitalizing” everything, but programs for our most vulnerable children and young people who have real life issues and struggles going on daily. We have no community center within walking distance of our most difficult neighborhoods. No solid, thorough, and long-term mentoring programs for our kids who need it the most. We have no open door of refuge or place of complete safety for kids who have home lives that most of us don’t understand and wouldn’t want to have to. We have a racial, social, and cultural divide that is continually saying, “It’s those people’s fault.” We have no gang intervention, besides authorities who are focused on making arrests. While this isn’t a bad thing, it also isn’t getting to the very core of the kids’ issues. Most of these kids have never been loved, are dealing with traumatic circumstances on a daily basis, and don’t know how to heal, grow, and live. Many times, they use drugs or alcohol to attempt to or just to forget about everything. While they should be held accountable for their mistakes, they also deserve someone to actually love them.
Sometimes our circumstances start screaming at us. We may just see a fourteen-year-old splattered across local news that deserves a rash punishment, but this screaming circumstance is saying something completely different. This hasn’t been our first young person caught with a weapon inside our school. We need to take a look deeper, a look internally as a community and figure out if what we are currently focused on is in fact the real problem and solution. We might need revitalization from the inside out rather than from the outside in.
“We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say,
‘It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.’ Then there are those who see the need and respond.
I consider those people my heroes.”
– Fred Rogers
