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Chapter 16 – Section 3
Young People and the Courts
Male Speaker: Some people like Folgers, the smell of Folgers in the morning; I like the smell of wood so.
Female Narrator: It looks and sounds like your everyday run of mill wood shop.
Male Speaker: What happens first is the thinking; it’s going to change your angle measuring, cutting and building.
Female Narrator: But here at the Alexandria Seaport Foundation they are building boats and rebuilding lives.
Male Speaker: The sign says, “Doing big things with little boats.”That’s what we’re doing.
Female Narrator: Forty-three-year-old Joe Youcha is the foundation’s executive director — and a lifelong boat builder. He created the Seaports apprentice program back in 1993, intending to use boat-building as a way to get rudderless teens back on course.
Male Speaker: It was kind of like you are going to do what with who and what are they going to get out of it?
Female Narrator: Thirteen years later more than 250 kids have come through the program from high school dropouts to former gang members.
Male Speaker: Resources the gangs have to work these kids are you know, drugs, sex, money and violence and what we have is we have money.
Female Narrator: They spend half a day building boats and spend the other half in class learning intensive Math, Science and English.
Male Speaker: Schools don’t pay kids to learn, we do.
Female Narrator: But these teens had better toe the line.
Male Speaker: If you are late you work at minimum wage that day, if you miss a day you work two days at minimum wage. If you have three violations within a two week pay period you are fired.
Female Narrator: Eighteen year-old DeJuan was referred to the program through his parole officer.
Male Speaker: One thing that I got out of this even with the little correctional facilities couldn’t do is some actual discipline. I know for afact if I was not here then I would probably be deador doing a long time.
Female Narrator: The foundation has a success rate of 75 percent, three quarters of those who complete the five month program graduate with a general equivalency diploma in one hand and a carpenter’s union card in the other. Retired juvenile court judge Steve Rideout says the Seaport Foundation has helped cut Alexandria's delinquency rate in half.
Male Speaker: They become employable instead of a burden on our society where we got to lock them up. So we need those kinds of programs to help those kids because we can save them.
Female Narrator: And while money may be a major motivation the seaports volunteer staff provides something else these teens desperately need, role models.
Male Speaker: The young hair gets to rub up against the grey hair. And then what happens is, those kids start picking up some of the attitudes. What we do, fundamentally, is take these disenfranchised kids and get them a start on that path to the American dream.
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