Are They Flourishing or Failing?

Sloan Koester, seven, and her brother, Carter, five, have built a house for Dumpster, a squirrel that frequents their yard. I have my doubts that Dumpster is just one squirrel. There have to be dozens of them leaping across the lawns of north Naples.

Dumpster’s home is a hopeful, soggy cardboard box. Should he choose to stay there, he will have plenty of dirt to scrabble around and nest in. There are large leaves "so he can hide from predators," Carter says. There’s an open bottle of water for him to drink. And he’ll have acorns, sort of. Actually these are sweet kernels from a screw pine in the yard.

It is said that children repeat what their parents model for them. And Sloan and Carter’s mother, Julie, is doing everything she can to give them an ideal upbringing—lots of unstructured play time, home-cooked meals, generous stocks of Play-Doh and LEGO toys, a sand box, a climbing tree and a rope swing. So it makes a weird sort of sense that they built this house for Dumpster.

I’m on a quest when I meet the Koesters. I’m trying to answer the question "Are our children getting the lives they deserve?"

There are more than 60 million children (under the age of 15) in the United States. That’s one-fifth of the total population. Any other group this large would have a vote. In fact, they would be a formidable lobby. Instead, adults must speak for them.

"I go up to Tallahassee and I feel like Don Quixote sometimes," says Jacqueline Griffith Stephens, who directs the Children’s Advocacy Center of Collier County. The center works with abused and neglected children.

"There’s a lot of emphasis on roads, transportation, growth. And those are important, but, bottom line, we need more emphasis on taking care of our children. Quite frankly, there’s a lack of interest."

Hence this quest. In trying to answer the question, I’ve interviewed teens in Immokalee, built paper airplanes with fifth-graders in a science class, ridden LeeTran buses, tutored elementary school kids (in math—not my strong suit), and talked to children and adults—parents and principals, psychologists and social workers.

"The job of the child, no matter what animal species we’re talking about, is to become an adult," says John Van Lente, a Fort Myers social worker who works with children and teens. "In order to do that—to quote Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—they need food, shelter, clothing and safety." Van Lente is referring to a prioritized pyramid of needs developed by psychologist Abraham Maslow—from physiological ones (at the base of the pyramid) to the need for self-actualization (at the top).

Most children in Southwest Florida have their basic needs met. But not all do.

"Many of our kids come to school hungry," says Maria Jimenez, who directs the Immokalee Community School, a Redlands Christian Migrant Association charter school.

According to the study, 17,000 children in the county do not receive dental care. Twenty-five percent did not receive adequate pre-natal care. The study identifies gaps in all areas of child well-being. (For more of its findings, see p. 88.)

As a result of these gaps, "by the time they enter kindergarten, four of every 10 children are deemed at risk of failure, a pattern that gets worse with age," the study says.

JeanCarlos Tavares is in first grade at Villas Elementary School in Fort Myers. He lives with his mother. His father "has left," I’m told. At home, they speak Spanish. Unless he gets extra help with reading and comprehension, he is likely to fall behind in school.

"From the beginning, I knew I needed help in this classroom," she says. "If a child cannot read, he cannot succeed in any other academic area or in life."

So Duncan matched JeanCarlos with a reading mentor. Sam Burnett, an executive who works a few blocks away, comes to Villas Elementary on his lunch hour once a week. He’s a volunteer for the Reading Mentors program, offered by the School District of Lee County.

When he appears at the classroom door, the students greet him in a loud chorus: "Hi, Sam!" They know he is there for only one of them. There is status associated with having a reading mentor. You get your own special visitor and one-on-one attention.

"The attention is just as important as the tutoring," Burnett says. "It builds self-esteem."

JeanCarlos sidles up to Burnett proudly. "Are you ready?" Burnett asks JeanCarlos, and he nods.

After JeanCarlos has written two or three words, he wants Burnett to tell him which one he likes best. Burnett points to the most neatly written version. Then JeanCarlos asks, "Which one is the ugliest?" And Burnett is honest. He chooses one. "That one could be better."

Along the way, Burnett asks JeanCarlos questions to be sure he’s retaining what he’s read.

"What do bats eat?"

"Insects."

"Where do they live?"

"In trees and caves."

Duncan struggles to find reading mentors for her students. Nine of her 20 children have them, but all could benefit from having them. "We could be doing more, as a society," Duncan says. "The community really needs to step up."

It’s a Wednesday afternoon at the STARS Complex in Fort Myers. Ten girls gather in a corner of the gymnasium. They’re a rag-tag group, ranging in age from six to 12. Most of them wear T-shirts and jeans. One is in a school uniform. Another has her arm in a cast.

"I don’t want any mistakes today," their coach says. He doesn’t look at all like a dance coach. He’s large, slow-moving and reserved.

The girls rise, zombie-like from imaginary coffins. And then the music starts in earnest, thumping and echoing off the walls of the gymnasium. They begin to dance. And wow. Hips shaking, shoulders loose, they move in perfect rhythm. They’re all bounce, all attitude. Confident, uninhibited and unafraid of making mistakes.

Their coach can’t contain himself. He grooves with them while they dance, rocking his head side to side, rolling his shoulders and directing them with hand motions. As the song winds down, Vincent Price’s voice says, "The midnight hour is close at hand." The girls become the undead again and climb back in their coffins, and Vincent Price cackles.

"That was perfect," their coach tells them. "You nailed it." The girls are beaming. The name of their group is The Shining Stars. It suits them.

"Mastery" is a term that comes to mind. It’s one that child development experts often use. Mastery builds self-esteem. And these girls have mastered this dance routine.

Another word you hear a lot is "at-risk." STARS was created originally for at-risk children. (Though, now, anyone in the six to 14 age bracket can come to STARS.)

Gary Bostic is the center manager at STARS. I ask him to define "at-risk."

"They’re at risk of getting involved with drugs or crime," he says. "Or they could be at risk academically." Most of them live near STARS in the Dunbar community, a high-crime, low-income area.

"We want to make sure they have other choices. [We want] to get them involved in academia, sports, the arts, all that good stuff."

Bostic (The kids call him "Mr. Gary") has worked in children’s recreation since he was a teenager in Detroit. He’s 54.

"What do children deserve?" I
ask him.

"The chance to experience new things," he answers.

And that’s what STARS is all about. Every day after school, as many as 200 children pour into the complex for tutoring, homework help and recreational programs that include dance, choir, marching, swimming, baseball, basketball, tennis. More programs are in the works, including golf and drama.

"I would rather hear a child say, ‘I don’t know what to do,’ than ‘There’s nothing to do,’" says Bostic.

STARS is an acronym for Success Through Academic and Recreational Support. And it works. Four years after it opened, Fort Myers police documented a 28 percent drop in juvenile crime.

But it can’t save everyone. Bostic remembers learning about a homeless person who was using the STARS playground bathroom to clean himself up on a regular basis. Bostic went to ask him to leave.

"I didn’t recognize him at first, until he said, ‘Hey, Mr. Gary. How are you doing?’ I realized, it’s one of my ex-STARS kids. He’s 22 now. It was heartbreaking. Especially when you don’t recognize them.

"And I have a lot of my kids who come back. They come back at 18 or 20, and I won’t have seen them since they were 12 or 13. And I recognize them right off. You can still see the child that was in them. But the drugs ravage their bodies. It distorts who they were."

Why do some children fall through the cracks while others succeed? Is there anything fundamentally different about the child who fails?

Often, behavioral and other problems stem from a lack of safety. Children must feel safe in order to develop. On Maslow’s hierarchy, the need for safety is just above physiological needs. One of the reasons STARS is so successful is that it’s a safe place. Children feel secure enough to try new things. And this furthers their development.

So how safe are our children? It’s nearly impossible to put a number on safety. One indicator is domestic violence, but the numbers vary widely. Studies estimate that between 3.3 and 10 million children are exposed to domestic violence each year in the United States.

"We deal with 1,200 kids a year who are neglected, physically or sexually abused, and exposed to family violence," says Griffith Stephens of the Children’s Advocacy Center of Collier County. "Some are victims of crimes in their own homes. And we send these kids off to school during the day and expect them to do well on the FCAT and perform well in school."

Not only are they unlikely to perform well, but there are larger dangers, too.

"Children who are exposed to domestic violence are more likely to exhibit behavioral and physical health problems, including depression, anxiety and violence towards peers," according to a report from the Family Violence Prevention Fund. "They are also more likely to attempt suicide, abuse drugs and alcohol, run away from home, engage in teenage prostitution and commit sexual assault crimes."

Van Lente says, "I will not go to another subject with a child until first, they’re safe. I tell them, ‘No matter how much you were hurt as a child, we must make you safe today.’"

Because unless you feel safe, you can’t do a good job of becoming independent. And that becomes more and more important as the child becomes a teen.

Lauren Johnson, 15, takes the bus everywhere.

"It took me about a year to persuade my parents to let me."

She knows the LeeTran schedules and route map cold. School gets out at 1:45 p.m. Ten minutes later, the No. 130 bus to Edison Mall pulls up a block away. She could also take the No. 50 bus to Bell Tower Shops after school, but that’s a tighter connection.

Today it’s Edison. Lauren goes there a lot. Once, some teens had a scavenger hunt at Edison Mall, and Lauren was on the list of things to find. Sure enough, she was there. She spends so much time at Bell Tower that one of her friend’s fathers has dubbed her the Mayor of Bell Tower.

French class lets out, and Lauren navigates the crowded hallway of Cypress Lake High School, stopping to hug a friend, high-fiving another, meeting up with Amber, who is going to the mall with her, and dropping her books in her locker.

On the bus, Lauren tells Amber, "My sister just got a VW convertible. One of the new ones. Dude, I’ve wanted that car forever."

Getting a car is a long way off, she says. A year or more. Until then, she’ll take buses and beg rides and walk. Her shoes, gold and silver flats, are pretty well scuffed.

Her life is all about movement. Going places. We get to the mall and walk inside, and I’m wondering what we’ll do. And what we do is ... walk.

"We don’t come here to shop," Lauren tells me. "We just come here because there’s nothing to do.

"But it’s better than being at home." There, she says, they’d surf the Internet or watch a movie.

Lauren and Amber wander through Wet Seal. They swing through Pac Sun and say hello to a friend who works there. They walk some more. Sure enough, there’s nothing to do.

At the food court, Lauren settles into a chair and picks at some cheese fries topped with bacon chips. She and Amber eat in silence.

Many of us were exactly like Lauren at 15. Bored and restless. So is society failing 15-year-olds somehow? Do they deserve better? Lauren is doing exactly what she needs to do, according to Van Lente.

"The human brain starts to grow new pre-frontal ganglia at about age 13," he says. "That new neurology is what they believe takes over systematizing, organizing and prioritizing time and space.

"So, at about 13, it’s normal to reject mother and father’s way of organizing the universe. They now have a part of the brain that needs to do it themselves. The fact is—they ain’t no good at it. Sometimes they will be bored because they don’t know how to organize or sequence."

Or, as Lauren might argue, they’ll be bored because there’s nothing to do. So what’s our responsibility to a 15-year-old?

"To make sure that they have those obligations that the family needs them to have," Van Lente says. "But to grant them the privilege of trying to find new ways to organize how they get it done."

Lauren’s responsibilities include a part-time job as a hostess at the Broadway Palm Dinner Theater. She also does her parents’ laundry. For that, she gets an allowance of $30 a week. When I ask what she spends her money on, she gestures to her cheese fries.

Van Lente says it’s a positive sign that Lauren is learning organization in a mass-transit environment. Nothing’s happening at Edison Mall, so we take the No. 140 bus to Bell Tower. Lauren buys me a transfer for the No. 50 bus so I can get back to my car at the high school later.

On the bus, I ask her what she’d change about her life if she could change anything. She doesn’t even pause to think. "Move," she says. "I don’t like it here. There’s nothing to do."

She can’t wait to graduate from high school. She wants to go to college at Full Sail, a media arts school in Orlando.

When you go to Immokalee High School, college is not a foregone conclusion. But there’s one honor-roll senior, Mayra Lucio, 18, who wants her peers to know it’s more possible than they assume. She started a group call Seniors Helping Seniors, where students can come for tutoring during their lunch period.

Today Mayra is helping a girl with an essay she’s writing for scholarship applications. The essay has to be about an obstacle she has overcome. The girl has chosen to write about learning English.

Mayra knows the drill, and she can identify with her fellow student’s challenges. Mayra’s father is a migrant worker. (She wrote her college application essay about the migrant worker’s lifestyle.) He travels with the harvests, picking tomatoes, bell peppers, blueberries or whatever crop is strong in a given season. The family stays in Immokalee during the school year and goes with him in the summers.

But, until Mayra was in sixth grade, her family moved with him.

"I was in seven different schools," Mayra says. "You’d go to one school, and they’d be repeating what you already learned. Or they’d be ahead."

Her mother, Guadalupe Lucio, put a stop to that. She decided to keep her children in Immokalee throughout the school year.

Mayra has had her sights on college since fifth grade. That’s when a teacher recognized her ability and recommended her for Quest for Kids, an organization that has granted her a prepaid scholarship to any university in Florida. She has also attended the Junior Statesmen Summer School at Yale and the Summer Migrant Institute at Florida Gulf Coast University.

"I can’t wait to graduate from high school," Mayra says.

She wants to work for the FBI as a forensic psychologist. She plans to attend the University of Florida, where she’ll double-major in criminology and psychology. After that, she’ll get her master’s in counseling psychology, then her doctorate. She is leaving Immokalee and the migrant lifestyle. And that’s what her parents want for her. Lucio wants to break the cycle.

"In Mexican culture," Lucio explains, "the kid leaves and comes back home with a husband and a child. And history repeats itself. But it’s going to stop with me."

If there’s one thing Lucio would change about her own life, she would have gotten an education before she got married at 17.

"Stupid and 17," she says.

Instead, she dropped out of high school. She had Mayra at 19, then went back for her GED. Now she’s at Edison, pursuing an education degree. She has a full-time job at Immokalee High School as an aide to a disabled student. She wants to be a teacher. It’s been tough going to school while having four children. But she’s glad Mayra has seen her struggle.

When I tell Mayra’s story to Van Lente, he says it’s no surprise that Mayra is so successful.

"When kids get into the age of mastery," Van Lente says, "they need to see parents who are into mastery—who haven’t quit learning. The child keeps growing because they see parents who keep growing."

Lucio has told Mayra, in no uncertain terms, what she expects. "At the end of her junior year, I told her, ‘I’ve been your slave, your nurse, mentor. I have carried you on my shoulders. But now I’m putting you down and pushing away.’"

Lucio puts her hands to her shoulders and mimics lifting someone off and putting them on the ground. "For one year, if you fall, I’ll pick you up. If you cry, I’ll dry your tears. But I’m going to break that cycle of the kids coming back home."

At the end of this quest, what I’m left with are images and stories like these. So I’ll share a few more with you, because I worry that I haven’t shown you enough of these children.

For instance, I didn’t tell you that JeanCarlos loves maps. At the end of his mentoring sessions, Burnett pulls out a map of the world as a sort of reward. JeanCarlos touches the different countries and sounds out their names.

At STARS one afternoon, I was in the homework room when a boy named Willie asked me to help him with his math homework. Turns out, he didn’t need much help. He was good at math. I watched him answer the questions and said things like, "Good." And, "You did it!" And he was so proud of himself.

And I’m telling you all of this, why? Because I wish everyone could meet these children firsthand. If everyone could, maybe there would be no lack of interest in children. And maybe Jacqueline Griffith Stephens wouldn’t feel
like Don Quixote when she goes to Tallahassee.