Taken randomly, no connection may exist between a coordinated drug bust in Palm Beach County high schools, a 13-year-old sentenced for beating another middle schooler half to death, and the fact that Floridian juvenile justice workers earn, on average, $8.36 an hour.

Those three stories appeared in the Palm Beach Post on Friday and Saturday, January 28 and 29, 2005. Sadly, they're no different than stories about youth anywhere else in the country. To me, Martin Luther King, Jr. drew a clear connection between these items when on April 4, 1967 he said: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

Spiritual death feels a lot like a bootprint on an eighth grader's face. Last June, 13-year-old Noel Ortiz kicked and stomped on 13-year-old Anthony McCray's head and chest until blood gurgled from McCray's throat. Ortiz could receive up to two years in prison.

That story was on the front page of the B section. On the front page of the entire paper, a banner headline proclaimed "High schools' drug busts snag 14." Police dispatched a bunch of 20-something undercover officers to five Palm Beach County high schools. For months of work, they charged 13 students with 33 felonies.

The insanity of the drug war continues, and as one student smartly pointed out: now dealers will only sell to people they know. This sting won't stop the drug trade, it only reinforces the youth perception that adults and authorities, like educators and cops, are not to be trusted. High school is jail for teenagers.

Now when Ortiz and these 15 teen drug dealers are in juvenile detention centers, the staff that is supposed to treat them earns about $17,000 annually. You're not going to attract top talent with that kind of salary.

Every year, many of Florida's juvenile facilities have an 82 percent staff turnover rate, according to a report in the Post. As one state senator acutely pointed out, troubled teens that lack stability at home and are incarcerated will find the same instability in the home designed to help them. Such underfunding undercuts any rehabilitation efforts.

We spend more on militarism - whether it is the war in Iraq or the war on drugs - than we do on education and youth development. Instead of providing youth with opportunities to practice success, we bomb children overseas, and shortchange their lives here. We wring our collective hands that Johnny acts out violently, does drugs, and got Janie pregnant. Perhaps it's because we're more interested in prosecuting "youthful indiscretions" rather than teaching them to express themselves.

Our republic can better the lives of young people by creating cohesive youth development strategies on the local, state and federal levels of government. A good example of this is the Australian Office of Youth Affairs, which seeks to coordinate youth policy throughout all its public and private youth development agencies.

According to the website for the state of Tasmania, the OYA is "the State Government agency with a portfolio covering young Tasmanians aged 12-25 years, the Office of Youth Affairs (OYA) aims to:

assist in the effective development and coordination of youth policies, programs and information across the three spheres of government and relevant service providers in the youth and community sectors; and
improve access by young people to government and decision-making."

Within the next 40 years, we must build something like the OYA in America. Our country fails young people when it doesn't invest in them.

2/2/05

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"Our country fails young people when it doesn't invest in them."

-- Ken Krayeske

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"Our country fails young people when it doesn't invest in them."