 Good morning. Buenos dias. Let's, let's kick this off this morning. This is a spectacular crowd. I mean, we had a way to get you sit up front. That's a really good idea. My name is Fernando Geraldo and I'm the Chief of Santa Cruz County Probation and we're very happy to see you all here and take part in this. I'm just looking at the group of folks, many of you I know and have worked with over the years. There's a lot of new faces here. I'm really happy to see what I believe are students, probably from a lot of different schools, so thank you. Yes, okay, at least one was brave enough to raise their hand. So that's fantastic because I hope that this can be a learning experience for you. That's that's part of why we're here today. So it's an honor for me to be able to open up our work with James Bell and W. Haywood Burns Institute but I have a few remarks prepared that before we go into that. For most of my nearly 20 year career at Probation, we've been working alongside our partners and community partners to improve outcomes for youth and families in the juvenile justice system. I'm proud to say that as a result of our innovative work, locally over the past 20 years our department is a national model site for the detention reform through the NEKC's Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative and some of you may know that. 17 years ago we started towards a path of transforming our system by safely reducing unnecessary detention for youth, developing community capacity to create detention alternatives, improve conditions of confinement for youth in custody and also work on the very important issue of reducing racial and ethnic disparities throughout our system and throughout the justice system. Along the way our work has been supported by the NEKC Foundation as well as funding from a variety of sources state and federal, one of those being the Board of State and Community Corrections DMC which is a disproportionate minority contact grant that we are supported by that for six years and we continue to support our work to reduce disparities currently with other funding. For us locally this has resulted in several years of technical assistance with the W. Hayward Burns Institute to increase our internal capacity to collect, analyze and interpret data to make informed decisions regarding practices and policies to engage internal and external stakeholders in the work of reducing disparities and to provide assistance to other jurisdictions working in this very important area. While we have made significant progress and influence a number of jurisdictions across the country we still have work to do. The overrepresentation of youth of color at all points in our system continues to be an issue. This morning the population in juvenile hall was 20. For the past month the average daily population has been 14. It's nearly a historical low for us in many years so that's that's really good news far fewer youth and attention but I will share this of those 20 youth 18 youth were youth of color Latino youth that's 90 percent of the youth and detention are youth of color so that is something that we need to continue to work on. So this is part of the reason we are here today a discussion about racial ethnic disparities that exists in the juvenile justice system is often overlooked but is of the utmost importance. Unfortunately this topic is often you know overlooked ignored or denied we as practitioners students community members policy makers need to make sure that we are deliberate and creating equitable opportunities for youth and families we serve. We must take action and begin by carefully examining our systems and we're talking today about the educational system and the justice system by using data and making decisions through a racial and ethnic lenses. The topic of racial elected disparities in the education and justice system often makes people a little uncomfortable maybe defensive maybe feel guilty but this is okay because we should be uncomfortable with information I just gave you about the 90 percent of youth in detention that are Latino. This is something we continue to work on but we can't do it alone that's why it thrills me to see all of you here. This is collective impact. I'm honored to have James Bell executive director and founder of the W. Haywood Burns Institute join us this morning to discuss the very important topic regarding Asian or ethnic disparities and a few moments we will officially introduce Mr. Bell. We extended an invitation to have James join us because it is a very important time here in the community of Santa Cruz. Many of you may be aware that the criminal justice council or known as also as the CJC convened a youth pilot violence prevention task force about two years ago. I have been fortunate to be part of that along with Medjun Joseph the community organizer and staff from the applied survey research. Through the commitment of a broad cross section of community stakeholders and policymakers the task force is on its way to developing a three to five year strategic youth violence prevention plan. Many of you here today are participating in the strategic planning process some of you since the start when we identified important indicators that we believed could gauge the level of well-being and safety and the safety that our youth are experiencing in the community. The first major achievement was the status on youth violence report which we released last December and it reported out on those indicators of well-being. Since the release of the report we've been working fast and furiously using the results based accountability process RBA. We might talk a little bit about that today and we've done this to identify the results that we want for our community with respect to preventing youth violence. Many of you here today are participating in the three work groups or our members of the steering committee that are accomplishing and contributing so much by bringing your knowledge expertise and passion to the youth violence prevention plan so I thank you for that. In a moment Megan will describe the work of the task force in more detail. As we begin the youth violence prevention strategic planning process we're very close to start writing the plan. We must be sure that any interventions or practices policies used to address youth violence consider the impact that they will have on youth of color. There are strong and supportive voices in our work groups who have appropriately insisted that any new interventions or policies adopted by the plan also consider and address racial and ethnic disparities. I'll now have Megan Joseph the director of community organizing through the United Way come up and talk a little bit about the youth violence strategic plan in a little bit more detail. Good morning. Who else is really excited to be here. I am too. When I first got here about three years ago to Santa Cruz County I kept going around to everywhere that I had to speak and said there is so much going on here. There's so many collaboratives. There's so much work that people are doing together and that theme has not stopped. I was just talking with Sam Farr the other day our congressman and for this effort we're doing key informant interviews with a lot of elected officials and he said the same thing he said if there's so much going on in Santa Cruz County and if we could break down the silos and you could do what it looks like you want to do in this plan you're going to be light years ahead of everybody else. I think that's a pretty good omen for our plan but it takes a village and it doesn't take just a plan. A plan is necessary but not sufficient to actually reduce youth violence so I want to put a caveat on this planning process that we know that's what it is. It's a planning process and after that it's going to take all of us and more to implement it and I'll talk more about that as well. So along those same lines as there's so much going on here Fernando and I sat down about two years ago and he was tasked with bringing this task force together into the CJC and we both said there's so much going on here. How do we break down some of these silos and figure out who's on first and who's doing what and why and how it all fits together so that we could have a comprehensive plan. And that is why we brought people together so let me go through some of the slides. We brought people together to really decide what we wanted to do as a collective group to have the impact that we wanted to have rather than so many efforts happening amazing efforts but disconnected efforts. This is the mission statement for the group that really came out of our first summit in 2012 and emerged out of the work groups. So in equitable and united county where all youth are engaged in family school and community all youth have a sense of safety and well-being. Youth feel they have a voice or an empowered to use it and we're all youth are able to access opportunities for successful transition into adulthood. And you'll see that each of our work groups in the work we're doing addresses each one of those pieces of our mission statement. So it's lofty. Some would say it's a vision statement and we're committed to making it happen. So some of you were at this original summit where we teed off on this conversation. I think it was the first time or at least the first time in a while that everyone came together from across the county across sectors from law enforcement to former gang members to youth the teachers and everyone in between to talk about what was really going on. We provided a venue for people to say what they thought the barriers were. What weren't we talking about as a community that we needed to talk about. And what were our successes already that we could leverage. And we brought all of that together and actually formed our planning process. Any good planning process starts with understanding what's already happening. So we spent a full year with our amazing partners applied survey research with a lot of support from probation with support from Packard with support from the local chiefs Association and endless hours of in kind time and support from the community to select indicators that we thought were important. And we're not just talking about crime rate. We're not talking about what's going on for the youth and their behavior. We're talking about our community's behavior. What are the adults doing that are getting in the way. What systems and policies we put in place that are blocking our youth success. What is our community doing in our environment that we can change. So we wanted to look at it all. We wanted to look at how to support families how to support schools. The whole gamut a very holistic view. So we put that together. There's executive summaries and the back table and that full report is available on applied survey research and United Way's website if you're interested. Once we got that lay of the land we were able to move into developing the strategic plan through our community summits and work groups that have been amazing at being consistent and coming every month to work with us. We're starting to develop our planning and we are using results based accountability. What the heck is that. It's a very complex yet simple system and people that have gone through all these work groups are kind of saying that they're starting to be like oh I kind of get it now. All right. And what it really does is it aligns a large group like we have under a set of results so that we can all be moving forward together. And once we've identified the results then we identify the indicators that we'll use to measure those results. What are the trends in our community. Why is it that one youth is doing better than another. And then we tell the story of that once we see what the data says what's the story behind the trend. A data point is a data point. It needs a story and there's a hundred different stories to one data point. So what do we agree on. What are the trends that we agree on in this community that tell the story of what's happening right here. And then we're going to move into a process around November December of picking strategies that's going to be the hard part right. We all have programs we love. We all have programs we think work. We all have things that we'd like to see happen. And that's where we come together and really ask the hard questions. What's really working. What do we want to see leverage that's already working here. And what do we need. What are the gaps. And what do we want to recommend. That will then move to the CJC for approval. We'll be going to each jurisdiction to have them adopt the plan. So we want as much buy in from you and everyone else in our community as possible so that this can be owned by everyone and that we can all go out there and then implement it. And then we'll be implementing the strategic strategic plan from April 2015 on. And that's where we'll really need you to come walk with us. So we've got three main areas that we're focusing on underneath that we've got a lot of sub areas. So the one of the main areas is promoting positive child and youth development. So how do we support youth to be successful. These are some of the areas that fall underneath that. And we do emerging with a set of results that we've all agreed upon in a set of indicators that will be publishing soon. We also have fostering safe and vibrant neighborhoods. So we know that it's not just supporting youth but it's also creating an environment in their community that supports their success and that supports everyone's safety. So we're looking at these issues under that topic area. And then ensuring supported and functioning families we knew in our community that we also needed the family to be involved. This is the area where we have the least data the least number of indicators but we know it's important and so we're going to make it happen. So we're looking at family caregiver engagement support access to services and other issues. These were some of the general findings. And again you'll see it's interesting but it doesn't tell a story yet. And we want to flesh this story out with everyone here. So we see that there was a rise in juvenile misdemeanor arrest for weapons. We know that's going to be a big piece of our plan. We know that might not even be on here but we know that our youth employment rate is down by nearly 25 percent. That's definitely going to be something that we're looking at. We know we have disparities in graduation rates. So there's a lot of issues here and in the plan that are already arising as we know there's something here and we want to find out more about it. So ultimately like I said before this is a planning process and it's necessary. It's an absolutely necessary tool in our toolbox for ending and preventing youth violence. But it's not sufficient for sustainable change. We know that we need to then go out there and work together to implement this plan to the best of our ability. And we think that efforts like these like bringing James in to talk about critically important aspects of this plan that we know if we produced a plan that didn't talk about critical things like truancy we'd be doing the entire community and injustice. And if we don't if we have a plan that's produced in a few months that doesn't talk about racial and ethnic disparities we are doing the community a huge injustice. So we're here trying to put the pieces together and we're really grateful that you're here with us. Thank you. I always wanted to hang out backstage and that was that was very cool but don't get any ideas. I'm okay and I can finish this. I just raise of hands for those of you that participated in the youth violence prevention task force come on raise them up look at all that wow that's pretty cool and I think there'll be perhaps some new ones that we can engage in this really powerful process. So thank you what you saw there is really your work in the three areas that we're focused on and the results so just you should all give yourself a round of applause because it's amazing. Now it's time for it to introduce our special guest that we have today. We find that little bio here now you're wondering what I did back there. James Bell is the founder and executive director of the W. Haywood Burns Institute since otherwise also known as the BI that's what we like to use here because we're I think we're in with the BI. Since 2001 Mr. Bell has been spearheading a national movement to address racial ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system. The BI which is named after civil rights pioneer W. Haywood Burns was recently awarded the prestigious MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. The award is presented to select organizations worldwide that have made a remarkable impact in their fields. Mr. Bell and his colleagues at BI work with juvenile justice systems across the country to reduce the disproportionality of youth of color. Mr. Bell guides the BI's community justice network for youth also known as CJNY, a national network of programs working successfully with young people of color. Mr. Bell also works closely with the Casey Foundation's juvenile detention alternatives initiative JDAI. Jurisdictions in the MacArthur Foundation's models for change initiative. He received his JD from Hastings College of Law. Now we're really lucky here at Santa Cruz because we've been working with James for as long as we've been doing detention reform. Prior to his work with the Haywood Burns Institute or founding the Haywood Burns Institute we were working with him at the start and our formal chief Scott McDonald I talked to him last night and reminded me that and I was just a little guy probation so you know I wasn't aware of exactly what was going on 20 years ago but James was instrumental in helping us start our reforms way back then so it's just not nearly in the last seven or eight years that we've been working with James. Many of you have heard James speak. He's been here before, worked with our department. We've put together a lot of community groups and stakeholder groups to engage you all in this important process. Today I also we have a little surprise for James. We want to celebrate the work that we have done and what we can we will continue to do. So I have something here for James. Where did James go? Is he here? He's backstage too. James this is pretty cool. We have a I have a proclamation from you from the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors and I want to read it to you. And it says here don't read the whole thing. Okay I won't. Honoring James Bell and the W. Haywood Burns Institute. And this is really about honoring the work that we have done in a number of areas over the years with the B.I. And it's signed by the chair of the board of supervisors Zach Friend for today's special event. So this is an honor. We're pleased to just have been working with you and continue and look forward to it James. Here you go. Thank you. What a nice surprise. Hope it helps me with my parking ticket that I'm going to get. Y'all ain't got no parking around here man. I thought San Francisco was bad. So good morning everybody. What a pleasure to be here. And to be invited it's always an honor to be invited to speak to people who. Many of you in this room. Could be up here speaking as well. And so I always see it as a privilege to be able to give these remarks. And to have people sit and listen to my thoughts and my musings. So in that regard I'd like to thank Fernando. Sarah. The criminal justice council. The youth violence prevention task force. For inviting me to share some ideas and information. With you about the landscape of youth justice. And education throughout the country. And where Santa Cruz County may fit into that mosaic. I want to begin by saying that no model system. Injustice or education. Exists. Without there having been a healthy tension. Which was mentioned earlier I'm so pleased you guys mentioned that. Between community folks. Young people. And the system shock callers. This tension when healthy keeps child serving systems dynamic. Active. And engaging the issues. That are court required for us. To have a civil society. That meets the challenges of the second decade. Of the twenty first century. I believe the Santa Cruz has managed this tension pretty well. Certainly managed it better than Cook County. Where people just throw grenades at each other. But make no mistake about it. The healthy tension. Is required. So I thank the community groups. Be you. Law enforcement. People that have. Vested interests in young people but come from different perspectives. To try to make sure. That we have the kind of civil society. That we need. Addressing the needs of children in this county. Can not be quarantined from the larger tableau. That all youth serving professionals. In the communities they serve have to engage. In the words of our attorney general here in California Kamala Harris. Nothing is more important than how we keep our families and each other safe. Today we are smarter. And more informed about how this is done. But the question is are we wiser as people. Or are we wiser as institutions. So I would like to begin my remarks by recommending that asset based approach. That the youth violence prevention. Process is focused on. The asset based approach to children youth and families. As one that is forward looking. And I would argue necessary at this time in our nation's history why do I say that. Because as many law enforcement officials. School superintendents. Child welfare administrators have said in a variety of jurisdictions across the country if you're listening they are saying we cannot arrest. Incarcerate. Adopt or suspend and expel ourselves out. Of the issues presented by young people and families in need of services and interventions. You just can't do it. There's not enough cells. There's not enough policemen. There's not enough kids to suspend. We have to do something differently and I'm going to make that case. Increasingly in California. And across the country. Those families and communities. Will be people of color. As you can see. In California. Seventy percent this doesn't show you that but you can see by twenty forty people of color. Now we Californians. Have been a majority state of people of color for about ten years. We are joined by three other states in the nation. Hawaii. New Mexico. And Texas. So. We at the Burns Institute have shed the use of the word minority. Because what hell sense does it make to say. Majority minority. That's just not future oriented. And it's stupid really. And in California in particular where we live. With people in this room. Seventy percent. Of the people under twenty five in this state. Are young people of color. Seventy percent. Of the people under twenty five. Numbers like that require that in child serving systems. The equity mandate. Should be also given. The proportionate emphasis. That our population requires. In fact fairness and equity should not be seen as some kind of luxury as some kind of thing on the side as some kind of bonus you get when you buy the DVD player. No but it is a necessity. It is more importantly actually the preferred approach. To community safety. Which is the case that I'm gonna make today. Our work involves engaging communities. And systems professionals. To change hearts. Mines policies and practices so that when a five year old throws a temper tantrum in preschool sorry. There we go. Handcuffs will never be a part of the adult response. Now doctor Bob Ross president of the California Endowment. Wrote in the L.A. Times recently. Imagine walking into a newborn nurse reward at an American hospital. And you see one hundred babies in their bassinettes. You are then informed that sixty five of these babies. Will then spend their time in jail or prison. Our country's future. Is inextricably interwoven. To these sixty five young people. These sixty five bassinettes. Are apart. An integral part. Of our country's future. We will not succeed without them. You cannot run a country. On the elite institutions in this nation. We cannot do it. Two books from different political perspectives addressing this issue are relevant. Robert Kagan. A noted neoconservatives book entitled the world America made. And for read Zechariah. A noted progressives book entitled the post American world. Two point oh. Both examine the challenges facing us as a nation. Our values and the accountability of our democratic institutions as the world becomes smaller. And more interconnected. Smaller and more interconnected. Some's going on when you can get peaches in February. Even though these two men. Have different perspectives. They both agree that the institutions and structures that form the backbone of the American experience. Must adapt to the realities of a globalized rapidly changing world. The backbone that supports our values as a republic. Our fairness and equity in civil societies public institutions regardless of status. The delivery of health care. Education. Mental health. Child welfare and justice should never be determined. By someone's geography status ability orientation. Services in North County and South County should not be determined by where you live. Not only is it unfair but it renders us unable to compete. As a nation and here I would say as a county. Now it may have bureaucratic short runs it may be convenient it may feel good for the minute for the short term but in the long run. We as a society will pay. What do I mean. This is the first time since World War two. Where in we are no longer the world's leaders in education. Or middle class income. According to a recent study reported by the New York Times. It's the first time American middle class is not number one in the nation. So we used to say. Yeah we're dumb but we're rich. Because we've been behind in education for a while. Can't say that anymore. Yeah we're dumb and we're getting poorer. I believe that the words of my friend and colleague Paul Farmer. Are instructive when he states that the protection of rights are not accidents. They are not random in distribution or effect. Rather they reflect symptoms of deeper pathologies of power. And are intimately linked. To the social conditions that so often determine. Who will suffer abuse. And who will be shielded from harm. Who will suffer abuse. And who will be shielded from harm. Which takes us to girls night out. Last year. Newspaper article. I think you guys can read this. We got five teenage girls busted during a girls night out. When the CHP pulled them over in a Toyota. Weaving between lanes at two twenty in the morning. Fifteen year old girl driving she shouldn't have been driving. She only had a learner's permit. Other girls were fourteen sixteen two or seventeen. They found marijuana that they tried to hide in the Snapple bottle. Girls told their parents that they were going to each other's houses. But instead went to a hooker bar not hooker hooker. And you know. In San Francisco. Officers issued the girls a citation and released them. As you sit here. I want you to shout out to me. What race or ethnicity you think these girls are. Okay. Which is the answer I get everywhere I show this slide. In the nation and the world. We can't have this people. Would this happen with five Latinas. Absolutely not. We all know this. We cannot have this be the truth. I'll give you another anecdote in this who. Will be shielded from harm. I have a friend. Like Fernando we've gotten up there in age now. So my friends are actually some of them are shot callers. Right. And. You know Fernando still trying to keep it real by playing in the band but we all know that you know. He's probation officer so you know he ain't gonna play but so good. So. So. He's a chief probation officer in the major city. He's white. He's been on the job for two months. Tells his daughter sixteen. Who's going out with two of her friends. Says now I've been in this job two months. You know we have a curfew in this town. I don't want to read my name in the paper tomorrow morning. And this daughter looks at him and says oh don't worry dad. Those laws aren't for us. The kids know it. You think the kids don't know it. That you don't think the kids know when they see this who this is. And that this was five kids of another race or ethnicity. That they in fact would not get a citation and go home. For so for some folks the changes in demographics seem scary. Bringing us to a us against them mentality. Or a zero sum game. And that is every advancement for a person of color means that somebody white has to lose. Look at the jobs that are happening. Manufacturing on a downward slope. Government jobs downward slope. What's on the upward slope services. This is a changing economy. And in that kind of meta economy. The natural instinct. Is to stiffen. Restrict. Look for custody and control. And I'm saying today we must resist that urge. Here before we as a country were willing to pay any price we believe was necessary. For a seductive but what I believe is a hollow phrase. But it's very seductive. And it's law and order. Who doesn't want law and order. Who wants anarchy and chaos. It's very seductive to say law and order. And pay we have. Between nineteen seventy one and two thousand. The expenditures for incarceration. Have increased a whopping three hundred and thirteen percent. You can see. All the money that is being spent. There. Look at this gigantic ski slope. In terms of who's behind bars. If you look we have in the correctional population. Not the two million behind seven million. In the arms of the justice system. Between the two million. And the two million behind seven million. In the arms of the justice system. Between the two million. And the two million behind seven million. All of that. Seven million people. Who effectively you've locked out of the job market. You've locked out of further education. And you want to compete. That's what happens when you lock people out. And that's what happens. When you lock people out. If you have that great talent here. It is. A global economy. And what we do matters. So unless you think this is a liberal versus conservative issue. Conservative Republicans opined in the Washington Post. That states can and I'm quoting. Save costs. With out compromising public relations. And going further to say that spending $68 billion on corrections should trouble, I quote, every American. I invite you to go to write on crime. Look at here, in one of their publications, why fewer prisons are good for Texas's economy. Now when you start talking fewer prisons in Texas, oh my God, the worm is turning. So if we choose to perpetuate the status quo, we will do so at great expense, and we will miss the opportunity to improve public safety. Indeed, of all people, the Tea Party has trained its eyes on justice and corrections by calling the prison system a government program that is too bloated and in need of reform. The Tea Party is equating the justice system to food stamps. Government program needs to be reformed. The worm has turned. Now we as a nation have endured 400 years of experience with incarceration and its 60% failure rate. Interesting that we never asked the incarceration system to be evidence-based in order to get their funding. But those same county executives will ask our programs to be evidence-based to the umpteenth degree. Hmm, something a little funky about that. The ideas presented by being asset-based affords an opportunity to be smart on crime, but more importantly to me, tough on results, which this planning process seems to be trying to be. It brings into sharp relief the choice between employing the status quo by using retribution and detention or invested in proving investing, excuse me, in proven public safety outcomes driven by authentic methods to change behaviors at its quo. And this picture here from the Chengmei home was taken at the turn of the century. It doesn't look much different than detention now. And of course, our famous boy on the crate. What we need are methods that include a range of approaches from mindfulness and spiritual connections to traditional therapies and relations. Jurisdictions like Santa Cruz and others are challenging themselves to assemble the elements that form the alchemy for positive behavior change for proven risk young people. That is you recognize trauma, you provide wraparound services and the thing that I think is hardest to do you improve your systemic infrastructure to rid it of structural racism. Prevention intervention. Now no system has all the answers and the panels that will follow my presentation will highlight the difficult issues here and the successful issues here from detention reform to direct files to police community trusts, all of these issues that are difficult. All of these issues should be approached with a clear eyed kinetic energy geared towards enhancing assets rather than focusing on deficits. And with so many young people, if we work with them, their deficits are so easily on display. Actually, what they've learned is to lead with their deficits. Come on, Iggy, you stupid. You know you're stupid, man. Do that stupid thing you do. Yeah, that's it. Oh, I think that's my phone ringing. I thought I turned it off. I hate when people sell phones go off. So rather than this easily looked at deficits, I always encourage probation officers and social workers that for every deficit they cite in their report, they must cite an asset. If you can't find a young person with assets, you don't know that young person. If you can't find a community with assets, I don't care how beat down, how far down it seems. I don't care if a flower ain't grown there in three years, there's an asset. It assists because what we really want to provide is tools for young people. Let's address the education sector for a moment. Here are the myths that exist in the school setting. One, race categories of biological realities, we are fundamentally different types of people. I just can't, yeah, I can't even say how I'm just objected to that idea. Inequality today, now this is the one that lives. This is the new 20th century. It's economic, it's not racial. I just want you to show me a neighborhood where most of the people that have all the money are people of color and the white folks are poor. Okay, so I'll go. I might even try to find a crib there, but it's not happening. Myth three, some groups are smarter than others. Oh, I'd hate to be just an average Asian student. Oh my God, that's where the Asians have to live. Smart. They're just smarter than everybody else. Don't understand what's wrong to Latinos and blacks. Look at them. Achievement is a result of cultures approach to school. This means that just showing disparities is not enough to trump the reality to deal with those myths. What we really want to provide is tools for young people to participate in this. Positive, autonomous decision making and behavior. Autonomous decision making. It consists of having young people be motivated from within as those people who have been successful are motivated from within. There was at some point a moment when your friends did something and in order for you to be sitting here today, you stopped or you're not doing it anymore. At some point you have to stop smoking weed and study for the biology exam. That's what makes you successful because if you take the biology exam high on weed, who knows? What your results may be. Highly unlikely to be effective. We want autonomous decision making where young people make the decisions themselves. It consists of having young people be motivated from within, promoting quality such as creativity, leadership, altruism and civic engagement. That's what we should be having young people do. In order to engage this approach, the justice sector in particular could look to other sectors to find innovations. Indeed, some folks find the words justice and innovation to be oxymoronic. But working with strength affords the opportunity to make them synonymous. From the business world, Fernando has already stated what they've done here and what you guys are doing is ahead because you're using data to drive decisions and I'll talk about that. From our work in approximately over 120 counties over the last decade, we have learned just how poor data collection is. Some systems cannot answer basic questions about what you come into contact with the law, what offenses they're being admitted to detention for, how long they stay and what interventions are tried in order to get them out and if these interventions are effective. They just don't know the basic stuff of what they should know. Anybody here familiar with a food chain called Chipotle? Raise your hand if you've heard of Chipotle. Okay, you've heard of it? I ain't going to ask you how many people I eat there, but that's okay. Now, a few years ago, you may know, Chipotle began working on creating another new restaurant chain. Anybody know Chipotle's new restaurant chain? Shout it out if you know it. Okay, can you imagine Chipotle going into another chain, a multi-magazillion-bagillion-dollar industry and a new venture without data? Can you imagine Whole Foods not deciding in Santa Cruz County where to put their store? Was Whole Foods banging on Watsonville's doors for a store? Is Nordstrom banging on Watsonville's door for a store? But Mickey D's is. This is data. So Chipotle's new chain is focusing on Pan-Asian food. So we got the Mexican down. Now we're going for the Pan-Asian. They have opened 10 and it's called Shophouse, SHOP, H-O-U-S-E, Shophouse. They've opened 10 shophouses in a few locations, clearly not here, where the data tells them they will be successful. If we can do this for potential noodle consumption, we can certainly do it for depriving people of their liberty. Santa Cruz County's probation department has been working on data to assist in developing services. I want to present some national data just for your education from the justice and education sectors. Ah, referral data in the education section. You can see here what youth of color and referrals for white youth. If you notice the white youth, it's much more concrete. Smoking. You're either smoking or you're not. Vandalism. You either got that hammer and you're beating the hell out of the locker or you're not. Leaving without permission. You're either here or you're there. Obscene language? Well, we all know what that is. When you look at why kids of color referred for suspension and expulsion, disrespect. Now, that could be a wide range. That could be a wide range. Is rolling your eyes disrespectful? I don't know. I've seen some Latinas and black women that have made rolling their eyes a science. It's like 85 versions. I mean, they got it. Some of it may be disrespectful, but they ain't say nothing. There must be a class somewhere. How to be a woman of color and roll your eyes because these fools are crazy, right? Excessive noise. They're so damn loud. Threat. Loitering. Loitering. Use for data. We want to have data to inform and drive department policy, to understand your system, to define and refine your problems, to establish goals and select effective strategies, which we've heard about this morning. And of course, you want to track progress. So here's our national data. In 1985, the youth justice system for the students that are here, this is Blow Their Mind, which is a term for somebody in mind, me and Yolanda. We back in there and he's like, it'll blow your mind. Kids are like, what the hell are they talking about? My mind ain't blown. So anyway, that was like, that's okay. I don't even want to explain it. Okay. So at that time, and if there were people here working, the youth justice system was 72% white. People can't even imagine a youth justice system that was 78% white. And by 2011, it's 71% kids of color. This is a sociological seismic earthquake. Now, let's take another look at that. Suppose the chart in 1985 and 2011 was the city you lived in. You lived in a city that went from 1980, from an 85, 70% white to 2011, 70% kids of color. I mean, people of color. Huge, huge impact. If you went before and you went back later and all that that means, I just wanted to show you these rates. The US is the highest incarcerator for young people of any other place in the world. You can see we're way up here. Everybody else, South Africa, tremendously violent place is way down here. So some people consider that an unfair comparison. And I understand that. I just wanted to show you where we are here on national detention rates. This is not by percentage. This is by rates. And so you can see per 1000 on a one day count out of 1000 kids. If you're black, 167 of you are more likely to be in detention if you're Native American 88. Now Latino is low at 69. And the reason for that is because we have a country that hasn't even started disaggregating Latinos from white folks. You can go many places in the country. I was in South Carolina and I was born in South Carolina. And so I'm at a thing and in the South, even though we have an increasing Latino population, most of us still defined as black and white. So you go in and I'm doing my presentation and I say, how are you documenting Latinos? And the first thing they say is, well, we don't have no Mexicans here. I said, well, yeah, but what about any Dominicans Cubans? I mean, he's like everything is and they were like, no, we don't have any. Now I have my rent a car and I'm driving by the chicken factory. And all I see in their rubber boots walking across the street to the parking lot are Latinos. I'm like, so what do you guys just go blind for like three blocks while you're passing this factory? So first we have to begin to disaggregate Latinos and what that means. And you guys can lead the country on how to do that. There's a one day count to show you the kind of crimes that the justice system is dealing with nationally. For young people, you can see 70% 76% or technical status, property, drug public order, 24% or violent or against a person. And in most jurisdictions, the violent crimes are probably 4% of the juvenile hall for those juvenile halls that are not having kids that are put into the adult system. So I wanted to show you the top five offenses in Santa Cruz of the young people that are detained there. 10 PC 211 of robberies. And you can see their various ethnicities. Six are for placement failures. Three a wall failure to appear. And we have one child in for murder, which is usually that is always going to be lowest low. So if we took six, three and three, that's of those 12 kids. All of them are in for pissing off an adult. Not exactly a. It's not exactly a public safety issue. But somebody has said you need to be monitored. And this is not atypical. If you look at data across the country. Now let's talk about disparities in school suspensions. As you can see, first time offenders were suspended that were black at higher rates than first time offenders for same minor offenses. Now what black kids were in 2010, according to the Office of Civil Rights data, the black kids were really suspended for display of affection. So I don't know what that is. But I don't know. They must be hot to try to something. I don't know. They're disruptive, which might be a display of affection. Who knows? Dress code. And then cell phone usage. So here are the rates of suspension for these categories. Now Santa Cruz's probation department has been working on data to assist in developing the stuff that we are trying to address. Now these numbers that I brought require an approach that adopts a notion of well-being, a fashioning strength-based approach to child's basic needs regardless of circumstance. Children that have high service needs but demonstrate a low risk for public safety should be served in their communities. Communities are not only neighborhoods, blocks, meets, and bounds. Communities are shared interests and shared responses to objective conditions which need to encourage the idea of community, of belonging, of language, and identity. This means that systems folk and community folk should work together. In order to do this successfully, we need to value communities and deference should be paid to community values by anyone that's providing services. Therefore, we should encourage contacts with the communities that are positive and inclusive. We must forge new relationships with community groups, relatives, caring adults, and youth serving organization. I'm going to posit to you that this is one of the only true ways, only true ways to unpack the ubiquity and hegemony of gangs in some of our neighborhoods. You must engage. It was over two centuries ago that Von Schiller gave us his immutable law of events stating that, into today, already walks tomorrow. It should be the rare exception that today's toddler or student is tomorrow's detainee. Indeed, there is a significant growing critical mass of people that are demanding that child-serving systems become transformative rather than transactional. And in that vein, I propose that child well-being is the preferred public safety strategy, and I'd like to share some of those ideas with you. We here understand that our child-serving systems are not static, inanimate, behemoths, but rather living organisms driven by societal norms that I believe are geared towards transaction and therefore increasingly missing the mark. Here on the dangers of detention, it's a source study that you can see, there are two of them now, that it does not work as a detention, it has profoundly negative impacts, and it's a predictor of commitment to state juvenile corrections, can be. And what we're learning, what we're learning, you are at significant risk of this happening, doesn't mean that it always happens. And what we're learning with the adolescent brain work that's coming out is that putting a kid in a six by nine room may not be helpful at their point of adolescent development. And if you think about your parenting skills, that's not what you use the most. Okay, Johnny, you just flip me off, go into your six by nine room where there's a computer, your TV, basically you have your own condo in your room. No, you interact, you intervene, you engage. Suspensions, similarly, do not increase school safety. This is research, you can see the sources, I'm going to cite you breaking schools rules, I'm going to break that up for you. It does not increase parental involvement, it does increase teacher turnover, and it does increase the likelihood of youth justice involvement. So these tools need to be examined. I'm not saying throw them away, do the data, see what it's bringing you. So here, in order to combat this, I would like to insert two framing thoughts. Too often, we as a society incorrectly equate punishment with safety. And the other thought I would like to inject here is the ills of humanity are best cured by more humanity. With that conceptual framework, I would like to discuss some baseline information about childhood trauma and examine how the youth justice and education systems are responding to emerging information and discoveries. In a variety of local and national studies, data reveals that almost 70% of children had experienced a traumatic event by age 16. Of those, 40% reported violence as a source of the trauma. We here know that the numbers are significant enough to warrant attention, especially for children coming from communities of concentrated poverty. It is my observation that child-serving systems encounter this information with differing levels of awareness, knowledge and skill. In order to be responsive to children and families, we need to be able to adapt to these emerging issues. So let me give you a quicky on trauma. Non-judicial drivers, and we can see here the intersection of childhood trauma, school discipline and the youth justice system. Youth of color are likely to experience all three. This is what we're learning about what we call from here to maturity when you look at brain scans of the adolescent brain. We now know more about the adolescent brain than before. Why when they're eating does it sound like Jurassic Park? It's like you're not even chewing it. And then what do we do? Sleep and keep sleeping and sleep and sleep some more. Why is it that the 14-year-old can't see that movie enough? Have you seen it 12 times? Yeah, I'm going for 13. I can actually tell you every line. It's a stage of development. It's hormonal. It's what they are going through. It's what we should know that teenagers are different. Give you another example. So not only commercially, we count on teenagers every Friday night. Who are we? We are Zocale. Who are we going to beat? Who are we going to beat? Whoever the hell they are. 17-year-old. Yeah, that's right. That sounds good. What are you going to do? I'm going to kill her. The military counts on this stage of adolescent development. Okay, boys, girls, you're 19. We're going to take Hill 55 right now. Let's go. Yeah. Now, when you're 35 and they say, okay, we're going to take Hill 55, you go, hold up, hold up, homie. Hold up, hold up. What's up at top of Hill 55? What can we expect? They got any drinks up there? Because I'm thirsty. You ain't doing the rah-rah. You're not doing the rah-rah. You ever see a pro basketball huddle when the coach is in the thing? The players are like, yeah, okay. I mean, it's like we're grown men. That's not working with us. So it is a normal stage of development, which I will not exempt. I will exempt for men mid-life crisis and for women menopause with the personal summers. Hormonal stage of life. Here is the ACEs study. Raise your hand if you've heard of the ACEs study. Okay, this is pretty good. That's about 20% of the audience has heard of it. The prevalence of ACEs. The ACEs study, let me just give you a little information about that. What time is it? Okay, great. What we're going to do is when I finish, which will be relatively soon, we'll just answer any questions that people have and then we'll give you your break. Your booty's starting to get numb, so it's okay. So the ACEs study was stumbled into by physicians that were not looking at social ills at all. The ACEs study were done on upper middle class, white folks with health insurance. It was done by Kaiser. And what they found is that someone would come in at a young age and when they would do their vitals, the vitals seemed to be totally out of whack for their age. And they were wondering why would it be physically that you would have these symptoms at that age. So they went and they backed down the study and this is what they found. Incarcerated household member, if they were sexually abused, a drug use problem, if you witnessed domestic violence, if you were physically abused, mental illness, separated or divorced family, drinking problems, and verbal abuse, 28%, the prevalence of individual ACEs. And so what they do is they give you to exam and you take the ACE test and see how many of these things happen to you or you experienced. If you have six or more ACEs, your life period is reduced by 20 years. Because you may not think you're dealing with it, but you're dealing with it. Who has seen the film, the films done by California Downey called Unnatural Causes? Okay, that was like two people. Unnatural Causes talks about, well who has heard this axiom? If you tell me your zip code, I will tell you your life outcomes. I'll tell you how much you earn, how far you'll go in school, that kind of stuff. So one of the films in Unnatural Causes, Mrs. Relevant, took a black woman living in Kentucky, I think it was, who was a pediatrician who got pregnant, living in the suburbs, moved out of the hood with her husband, thinking they're getting away from it. There's a high prevalence of low birth weight babies with black women. She knows about this. She's read the research. She's a pediatrician. She's upper middle class and gives birth to a low weight baby. And can't believe it happened to her. And she wants to know, how did this happen to me? And so these are the kinds of questions that people are looking at in that regard. Now how does trauma show up? In school, indifference, defiance, aggression, you can read that results in suspensions and expulsions. In the community, those same kinds of things in terms of trauma or toxic stress, indifference, defiance, aggression. So I'm not going to go through the whole cortisol thing, but the more people are dealing with trauma and they aren't addressing it, it's showing itself and it ends up in our systems. And as you can see, when you go to the justice system, 90% have had at least one traumatic incident. So not clear what a six by nine room is going to do for that. Or we know we need to be aware of what we're doing. And here, here are the scholastic expectations. Confidence, focus, ability to regulate your emotions, and skills to understand and negotiate social relationships. That's what makes a great student. However, the coping mechanisms for trauma are withdrawal. I don't engage, I don't talk. I just sit there with the pencil in my hand staring or hypervigilance, which is often diagnosed as ADHD. Your head, your hypervigilance, you're on a swivel all the time, all the time. Your hypervigilance because something's going on at home, something's going on in the hood, something's going on. So obviously one of the first ways to engage all of this is for us to be trained on the latest science and literature. Such an approach maximizes our chances to move beyond trauma responsive. We'll get to this. Recent data reveals that almost 650,000 children are adjudicated by the courts in this country. Of those, 22% will be sent to some form of placement. And of those, almost 80% of the placements will be locked facilities. So while the use of incarceration has deep historical roots, its current overuse is made easier because its utility is imposed mostly on young people of color from neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. The overrepresentation of youth of color in the juvenile justice system has drawn national and local attention since the 80s. And hundreds and thousands, if not millions of federal, state, and private dollars have been dedicated to addressing this issue. Despite this attention, the overrepresentation of young people of color at every stage continues. Although the juvenile crime rate is at one of its lowest points in history, and progress has been made in reducing overall detention rates, as Fernando so eloquently stated, youth of color continue to be disproportionately arrested, referred to juvenile court, prosecuted, detained, and sentenced to secure confinement compared to their white peers. Now, one of the nation's architects, John Adams, a very interesting fellow, whom I read about a lot, remarked, this is one of my favorite quotes from John Adams. Power always thinks it has a great soul. Power always thinks it has a great soul. In many communities of color, folks can think of justice systems as coercive since they reflect what is perceived to be the punitive and retributive power of the state. However, I beg to differ with that analysis. I believe that justice, in order to be sustained, requires not coercion, but consensus. In fact, the entire justice apparatus requires a grand bargain between those that govern and those that us that are governed. And essentially, the bargain states this, we believe justice will be applied reasonably, fairly, and thereby working in our interests, and in turn, what we get for that is we will respect you and your apparatus. However, this bargain is breached if a significant segment of the community and the population believes that the justice system is unfair, biased, and doesn't serve their interest. In essence, they opt out of the bargain. And our most recent example of that, Ferguson, Missouri. You can see the breach on the streets. And more recently, in another context, the demonstrations in Hong Kong. There's a breach. We are not signing up for this contract. Coercion alone for justice professionals will never get the job done. There has to be consensus with the community. Has to be. So you are the key foot soldiers that make local objective decision making possible. While it is clear that every child that is in conflict with the law may present a unique situation, there is also no doubt that sanctions should be similar for similar behaviors. We know from data that young people of color pay a higher penalty for similar behaviors than their white counterparts do. This study I'm going to commend to you. I don't know if you can see it. It was in the American Journal of Personality and Social Psychology studied by UCLA, stunning to me. Google it. It's called the essence of innocence. What this study found, and this is a group that works with police to train them and work with law enforcement. This is who law enforcement hires to work with them to be more community engaged. What this study found is when you had black Latino and white kids of the same age and they showed them to police officers, a seven-year-old black kid was seen as 11 or 12. A seven-year-old white kid was seen as five. And a 17-year-old Latino kid was seen as 10. Now, how is it that we could both, all of us be seven? And some of us seem to be older because at seven, you may not be able to go to juvenile hall, but 11 you can. And not only that, they were seen as more culpable. This notion that, you know what? You may be okay sitting in this room, you may be okay when you walk out of here, but if I follow you long enough, you're going to commit a crime because that's what y'all do. This notion, this is structural. This is structural. These police officers aren't individually racist. They looked at a kid, they said, what is it you think it is? This is what they thought. This is a deeper problem than individuals. This is how structural racism lives in America. And in order for us to engage this, we must have an extra muscle to go deeper to look at it. Who has heard of or read this study? Breaking schools rules. Okay? We got the same five people in the back that have read everything. Breaking schools rules is the most comprehensive study, six million school and youth records from the council of state governments. Write down the middle bipartisan requested by both Republicans and Democrats. In Texas, because in Texas, because in Texas, kids get a universal identifier so you can follow them all the way through longitudinally in ways that we never can in California. We'll never be able to do this in California at this level. And when they control for everything, they were shocked. This thing has moved policy. This thing, I know educators hate the word school to prison because if you talk to classroom teachers, they go, I ain't at the beginning of no pipeline. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm just getting the disruptive kids out of my classroom. It's the principle that suspends them, not me. When they control for everything, most discipline was one, outside the disciplinary code into those discretionary areas. And two, when they control for everything, the only disparity that they could find in why kids of color got more severely disciplined was race and ethnicity. They tried to look for everything else. Very comprehensive study. I gave you the front of what it looks like. Google it. If you're in justice or in education, you need to read this study. And if you don't want to read the whole study, they got an executive summary because that's what we all read. Some of us get paid to read, so we read the whole damn thing. If you're getting paid to read, just read the two-page executive summary. Said, yes, I read that study. It was very interesting. Told me what I already know. So anyway, breaking school rules, I can't recommend it enough. And the council state government is following up this study and in November next month or December, you will hear on your local news about their follow-up study is coming out because they then went to investigate why race and ethnicity was such a potent thing in these schools. For a while, it may seem overwhelming. It need not be. As you know better than most, there is so much we now know. The technologies and innovations are there. In justice, they are objective decision-making, day and evening reporting centers, two-tiered warrant systems, court notification systems, probation violation grids, on and on and on things you can do in the justice sector. In the education sector, I want to introduce to you some slides that you may know, you may not know, that people are trying to do for classroom teachers, race suspensions, and expulsions. First, please see discipline as an integral part of the pedagogy. That discipline should not be something that's meted out separately from the rest of the person or the rest of the unit that's your classroom. Discipline is an integral part of your family. You don't have a discipline pedagogy in your house. You deal with it as it comes up. You respond based upon the behaviors. So that's the first thing. And what we want to do if you do that is we resolve and educate. We don't deport and discipline. We resolve matters and educate them. Now, some people said, this sounds like pie in the sky. And I'm going to say to you, it's not pie in the sky, it's happening every day in this country. It's happening right now in this county. And you know where it's happening? At Santa Cruz Country Day School, where the tuition is 45 grand a year, they resolve and educate. They don't deport and discipline. Because when I pay you my 45,000, I'm paying for tolerance. So you call me. Don't call the police. That's what my check's going to give you. At the public institutions, we get zero tolerance. So we know what resolve and educate looks like, because it's happening every day. And it doesn't have to be the country day schools. It could be the parochial school with sister Ann Margaret that grabs you by the pigtail and say, what the hell? Preventing discipline disparities, make relationships, make it a part of academic rigor, problem solve, engage, have activities with the young people that are get to know you activities. So let me just give some examples. I'm not a classroom teacher, not going to try to tell you how to do your business. But this is Walla Walla Washington, currently called Lincoln High School. Now when the principal went to Lincoln High School, it had another name. And he said, this school is so bad. It's so funky. We're going to start a new and we're going to have a new name. And I don't care what the name is, but it's going to be new. So that we don't associate what used to happen at this school with what's going to happen now. So they named it Lincoln High. That was a new name. And his philosophy, the old philosophy was discipline with dignity. And what they found is, is that punishing misbehaviors, especially those with kids that had three or four more trauma incidents. And if you have free and reduced lunch programs, you really need to know what those kids are going through. He says, it doesn't work with a traumatized kid. What we were doing isn't working. They'll just withdraw further or they'll just get more hyper. It's like, how can Johnny get more hyper? You want to know, ask Fernando, lock his ass up. You'll see how much more hyper they can get. It's like, Jesus, kid. So his philosophy was simple. Now I know a lot of people are going to laugh and go, that's what his philosophy was. It's the same philosophy employed at the country day school for 45 grand. Instead of saying, this is you, you just ask, what's going on? What's happening to you? What's going on in your life? Why are you acting this way? When I went to public school, we didn't have SROs. We had 2000 teenagers. Can you imagine a place with 2000 teenagers? Oh my God! After algebra and geometry class, bring the bell rings and it's chaos. Now you can ask them, walk in line, walk quietly, walk in line. It's developmentally not there. They're going to burst out and explode. So if you don't let them explode in school, as soon as the school bell rings, what happens to teenagers? The boyoyoyoying. It's a term. It's a boyoyoyoying. I know it doesn't mean anything, but it's the boyoyoyoying. And what is the boyoyoyoying? It's what can we do stupid together in the next half hour? Because we sat through school. They wouldn't let us talk. They wouldn't let us eat good. They may as eat apples. Don't give us no grease. We have to walk in silence. We can't touch nobody. So school is school is out. The boyoyoyoying takes over. Hey, why don't we run out in the street and avoid buses? That sounds like fun. Dare you to do it. Hey, why don't you get a tattoo with your eyes closed and be surprised? I mean, if we pull the 15 year olds, y'all can come up with stupid stuff. Because that's what 15 is. So when we got into fighting in our club, when it was a fight in the halls, it was a fight. You got 2015 year olds. And ooh, don't let it be a girl fight. Girl fight. It's like, where? Where? Get some hair pulling. You know, it was considered normal. The school didn't flip out. The school didn't trip out. The football coach and the basketball coach and the female tennis coach would pull the kids apart and say, what are you fighting for? And it would be the 15 year old reason. He's Kobe, I'm LeBron. Yeah, two people who really are going to give you any of their money. Right. He said, my girlfriend was ugly. I said his mama had warts. I mean, we could just go on and on. Because when you're 15, you ain't invented enough sophisticated reasons to fight. You don't know enough. He lives north. I live south. Anything. So he just said, how do we deal with this? And you can see the suspensions dramatically increased in the course of a year. So you might look for this Walla Walla experience. Robert Redford's son has been filming there for a year and a half. They're editing the movie now, have seen clips from it, and they're going to try to sell it to HBO or some documentary. I'm sure you can look for it. It's going to be called Lincoln High or something like that. And he's documenting what happened at Lincoln High. Garfield High. I want to talk about this. Who's heard about the Garfield High experience? Okay, same two people in the back. Good. So here's what they did at Garfield. Garfield is like 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 factory. It's been a long time since Jaime Escalante was doing his teaching there and they were going to national things. Garfield's dropout factory. So the new principal comes in and he says looking at suspensions and expulsions and what we know in California the number one reason for suspension and expulsions is willful defiance and 70% of kids of color are suspended and expelled for willful defiance. Now fast forward, legislator in LA representing Latinos puts in legislation to get rid of willful defiance. It passes the legislature last year. The teachers union says if you get rid of willful defiance we will not be able to control our classrooms. Governor Brown said okay veto the legislation. After the veto of the legislation the LA Unified School District due to a lot of organizing and a lot of work in communities with parents and other people said well we'll get rid of willful defiance as a school district on our own the second largest school district in the country. So last so we don't know what the data is yet but LA got rid of willful defiance. This year again the legislature brought the thing up to the state of California. The legislation passed again and this year Governor Brown signed it so there's no more willful defiance statewide in California. Query to see if the schools turn into violent facts. So the data is not out but we do know that that's not happening. But while all this was going on and before it was going on Garfield said I don't care what they're doing our school we care about so what did they do? One they told people two years in advance in two years people you will not be able to use suspensions and expulsions as a tool so we're getting you ready. So what did they do? They organized parents and parent councils. They began to give the teachers tools. Okay y'all come D-day September 1 20 whatever you're not going to be able to use this so you better go to this training and we get the parents and the communities together. Parents begin to walk the halls. There's a parents council. We do two years of prep. We don't just throw it out there as a memo and say go fish we prepare the entire institution that we're about to change and they came up with a computer based system called cost. Now I don't have cost to hand out to you but you can find it online and basically this is what they wanted the teachers to do as alternatives to suspension. So before you referred to the dean and you suspended after the teachers have interventions that they use the counselors have interventions they brought the counselors back. They said we can't live without them. The dean looks at the attendance grades and whatever helps determine a reason and the response is education because it is not suspension. And what is the data showing us at Garfield as a result? Suspensions fell by 100% of course because they didn't allow them. The API scores increased 20% in five years as you can see in 2008 when they were dropout factory to 2013 and the graduation rates are eight points better three points better there better than the average and eight points better than the rest of la usd. That's the Garfield experiment. So I just want to say some other things. If you're a classroom teacher and you don't have your principal support or you don't have the administration support there are things you can do free of charge. David Lynch anybody heard of David Lynch now that we're in an old movie house? Right. David Lynch makes them weird movies where people having sex breathing oxygen and stuff is just weird movies. Well, old David has a foundation and his foundation the David Lynch foundation you should look it up if you want has taken mindfulness to institutions. Some of you have heard about yoga in jail and detention. His thing is that we're going to do transcendental meditation. So David Lynch's particular thing is TM. Well, everybody ain't down with transcendental meditation. Some people like I don't even know how to say the words. I don't know what to think internally. I can't do all that. But what they have adopted is what we're calling mindfulness and they piloted this mindfulness two minutes at the beginning of the class. Two minutes at the end of the class of just silence. Just sit, think your own thoughts. Let's try to come to some peacefulness in the DC public schools. That's where they piloted it. Because they didn't think it would they said if it works there, it'll work anywhere. And stunningly, the principles who were like, I don't know what this weird stuff is, but I told them, Hey, for these people, try anything to keep these kids quiet. They go, Oh my God, it worked. So maybe you want to think about creating some mindfulness in your classroom, enhance predictability so that when I walk in your class, I know exactly what's going to happen. Exactly what's going to happen. How many of you are just like totally afraid of going to the dentist? My sister's one of them. Okay, a lot of y'all strong. You're like, I go to Dennis ain't nothing to me. Right? My sister is just phobic. She's phobic about the dentist and flying. She walks in the office. She's I can't do it. Pull all my teeth. I'll just take dentures. Now, for those people that are afraid, or how many people have ever gone downhill skiing, and you're like, Holy, Smoly, I don't know how to do this. What helps you is somebody going, You can do this. It's not no big deal. You see this hill? If you fall down, it ain't like but like this, you can't hurt yourself. You're only going a half a mile every 80 years. So I'm gonna walk you through it. It's predictability. So the dentist will say, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do that. Raise your hand if it hurts so that you can be then begin to not be in fear. If the dentist says, sit down and I'll go to work. You could come up with anything in your head. So what we want to do is enhance predictability. And I EPs for Children and get to know you activities. Think about it. Have morning circles or check ins real quick. Have students write their autobiographies. Talk about themselves that you want relationships with these students because when you have that things go well. So what we need to gain traction and move ahead is political will, leadership and courage. The structures are in place and we only need to turn motion into movement. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes commented that every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief. And if believed it is acted on unless failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. I know that we will not be subject to a failure of energy with stifles. The ideas in this room from our ability to address equitable and fair administration. We all go to work every day and do what we can to have an orientation of the spirit. To use our gifts to seek justice for proven risk youth and to educate young minds. We must always use our abilities and authority to articulate the humanity and young people that are being dispossessed simply because of who they are. Many of you sitting in this room know exactly what I'm talking about. When you positively impact youth and families, you can see the appreciation in their eyes. There is power that is unleashed and I hope you never stop trying to find it. This requires a civil society to see itself as a champion of human potential, whose mission is to shape minds, touch souls and motivate bodies. Vaqlav Havel told us hope is not optimism over pessimism, but hope is rather an orientation of the spirit. We must use humanity and equity as an orientation of the spirit to change the conversation regarding true public safety. No act is too small, no gesture too humble as to be unrecognized by the least of these and all of these. Most beautifully stated in Micah, do justly, judge mercifully and walk humbly. Justice demands that we be creative in order to change the balance of power regarding decisions about who will be the keeper and who will be the kept, who will be the servers and who will be served and who will suffer abuse and who will be protected from harm. Thank you so much for your time and attention. Thank you. Thank you very much. What time is it? Okay, we got we got a five minutes for some questions. If people have it, you can come up and we're going to give you your break in about five minutes. You can come up to the mics in the front. If you have a question, if you're sick of me already, it's like I ain't got to ask him nothing. That's fine too. Any questions? Thank you for that warm reception. Some of y'all actually like that. Yes, morning. So you go around the country and deal with juvenile justice reform. I guess my question is you talk about using data. Big data is huge. And people talk about predictive policing. Can you tell me a little bit about how you've seen? I mean, is that a do you know much about predictive policing and how it's used around the country and then it's tied to? No, I don't know it as a term of art. I do know use of Comstat data to determine how to deploy police and where police are going to be deployed. And the way that we use data with law enforcement is we do it in the context of the juvenile hall to look at the data to see where most of the kids come from by zip code. And then we engage what are the top offenses that we have kids of color in for? And then we involve law enforcement to say, What would we do differently if at all about these about your procedures to bring young people to us? So we would go to the precinct that serves that zip code and not deal with the whole department, but deal with the captain of that precinct to say, Let's talk about who's here. So that's our approach. Hi, hi, thank you. I just want to thank you for all the information. And I think every time I come to something like this, I guess I always feel very lucky and very fortunate and privileged that I'm get being exposed to this information. Yeah, I think it's our communities that are not getting this information. And actually, some of the workers in the systems aren't getting it either. But I think, especially when when we have places like Watsonville, where we have a majority Spanish speaking population, I know I work with the parents there. I know if they had even a piece of this information, it would truly help them better manage what they're doing, what they're doing. I just feel like there needs to be some next steps in getting this information out into the communities that need to hear it with a very adequate I mean, professional interpreter who can interpret the information. I just can't. I just know the parents there would benefit tremendously. Absolutely, you're correct. And let me just say we are available to do that and work with you. Tracy Benson is here. That's why we have the Community Justice Network for Youth as part of the Burns Institute to deal with families and communities. We have 200 programs around the country. And so we work with parents, young people. And so if you are interested in having us come to Watsonville, and we are not going to organize it from the Bay Area. But if you can help get it together, just like these folks help get it together. I drove down here for free. I got a parking ticket. You know, we'll do that. We'll come we'll come to Watson and eat at one of your many pizza parlors that you have down there. And we would love to do it. So we don't talk to everybody. So that's not just talk. Tracy, raise your hand, Tracy. Tracy's right there. Talk to her. Go on our website, and you can find out more what we do. So we will take you up on that challenge. We love talking to people, especially if you feed us. Yes. How are you? Good, good. It's been a while. So my thing is that we're essentially talking about policy and systems change and changing culture. But why don't we ever talk about culture? My question is specifically is, you know, to this county who's very progressive is how does it address that structural implicit bias? Correct. Right? Yes. You know, I work in Monterey County. We're super conservative. That's a battle. But being in Santa Cruz County, which considers so progressive, how do you get over that kind of? Correct. Nostalgia. Correct. It takes, well, first you have to start with data to understand what is the culture that you're trying to engage. And then it's going to take, I think what's happening with this planning process is going to take being at the table, fighting, cajoling, talking about it, and continuing to try to change these cultures. But it's not, but you're right. It is not easy. But you must be at the, you can't walk away from the table. You have to be there. And we have to really come up with ideas to process this. Yes. Thank you. Okay. You know what, y'all? Oh, okay. One more question, and then we're going to break, because I'm sick of me. So I know y'all sick of me. I'm wondering, is there data, or is anybody looking at the connection between adults that get youth involved in crime? So like the adults that are involved in criminal lifestyles that are getting the youth to deal with drugs, to be part of the gangs, to steal for the gangs, or whatever. Correct. Yes. There are studies on that, but those studies aren't going to tell you what to do to break that chain. Who is very powerful? There's a group that you may know about in Los Angeles called the anti-recidivism coalition, strictly a formula. Formerly incarcerated young people who come out and are, they were identified while they were in. They come out and they tell other young people how to break that chain. You will have formerly incarcerated young people saying, my daddy was crazy when I went in. My daddy is still crazy. If I'm looking for love from my father in order to start acting right, I'll never act right, because he's just not right. So I have to find other people to love me. So when you hear that coming from somebody that's coming out, that resonates with people who are having the same issues with their dad, or that their brother is banging. And you know, how do you break that up? You're talking about families. Family is important. So I believe you need the voices of people who come from that background. They don't want to listen to me. Right? I didn't do time in the pen. I did time to do no harm. I don't say anything about that, but I didn't do that kind of time. Right? And so we need people who can speak that language, and there are groups that are powerful. And I invite you to look at the anti-recidivism coalition in Los Angeles. Check out their website. Okay, good people. I'm sure there are great questions, but more importantly, you want the break. So please come back and join us at 11.30. We'll be starting the panel discussion and talking about how these issues show up locally and what we can do about it. Thanks. Thank you, James. Thank you. So please come back on in. We'll start in just a few seconds. I know the bathroom line is long. So it's my pleasure and honor to introduce our panel today. And like I was saying earlier in the day, it takes a village and these are some of the members of the village that are doing a lot of things differently. And with the saying we like to say United Way of Santa Cruz County and a lot of our change workers, it's not about necessarily doing different things. We're already doing lots of things, but sometimes it's just about doing things differently. And that's what impresses me about our panel today. They're also very committed to the work that we're doing here and the work that we talked about today. And each of them recognizes the fact that there's also a ways to go and that there's things that we could do to improve. So we thank you for being here, each one of you. So today the discussion will be facilitated by Valerie Thompson, also honored to introduce her, the probation juvenile division director. She's back here. She'll say hello in a second. And then our panel starts with Kenya Edison, director of student services for the Pajaro Valley Unified School District. We also have Eileen Brown, director of student services for the Santa Cruz City Schools. Beverly Brook is down there, the commissioner for Santa Cruz County Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Commission, and also retired U.S. probation officer and chaplain at Juvenile Hall. We have George Zamora joining us, a lieutenant with the Watsonville Police Department, Joe Hernandez, an officer with the Santa Cruz Police Department, Aaron Nelson Serrano, program director at Alcante and Community Action Board, and Reina Ruiz, program director at Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos. Quite a panel. Thank you again and I'll let Valerie get started. One reminder, you've got index cards. We would love for you to be writing as you hear questions that come up for you, things that you want to know more about, to write on those index cards and we'll be collecting them through the aisles throughout. So just look for somebody with a green bucket, stick it in there, and we'll ask those near the end. Alright, thanks. I was so happy when James got up here and said, y'all, I thought, oh somebody from the south. I turned to Yolanda and I said, where is he from? And she said, I don't know. I said, he has to be from the south. He said, y'all, since I've been here, I always start whenever I talk with folks with, hey y'all. So I'm really happy to be here, really happy to facilitate the conversation. Just to let you know a little bit of what we're going to do is we're going to sort of go down the line and give each of our panelists about five minutes to speak on a specific topic and Megan is going to be somewhere out here sort of holding up her hand to cut us off and be our time keeper. We hope that this will allow you to use your index cards to ask more questions, to give us more in-depth conversation. So we're going to start with Kenya and she's going to talk about school discipline reform efforts. Hello everyone. I am a proud colleague and member of Pajaro Valley Unified School District in Watsonville where we have 20,000 students, 33 schools, and awesome things going on. Over this past year, I've been in this position as Director of Student Services. I was coordinated prior to this for now going on four years so I'm excited about it. In the last three years we've really looked at our data and I'm proud to say that we're down in expulsion 60% in three years. Thank you. And down in our suspensions, our suspension rate we're down 39%. So I'll push that up to 40 in roundup so that's pretty good. I attribute that really to and what James was talking about is looking at the data. We can disagree what I feel because you feel differently than I do. We can't disagree with what the data says. The data says that students are being suspended and expelled differently based on if they're affluent, background, the color of their skin, or if their parents are present and making noise on campus. When we take all of those things out we should be disciplined based on behavior. So if a student is smoking marijuana at a South County school and smoking marijuana at a North County school the discipline should be the same. And really not looking at discipline as an intervention. Suspension is a discipline. It does not intervene. It removes the student from campus and sometime necessary if there's fights. If there's a huge bruja the girl's pulling hair he's talked about. Sometimes a day off campus and apart gives time to cool down do an investigation bring everyone back and try and do a conflict resolution. So I'm not anti-suspension but I am glad that we're looking at the data and my colleagues are being brave enough to break the status quo. Countering systems, questioning, looking at students, looking at with behavior in classes where students are always referred and my mother used to always say this at my parent teacher conference says all your teachers can be lying. So if students are being referred from the same classroom all the time it's time to start looking at that environment in that classroom. And so I totally attribute all of the change I know in the in the newspaper they kept quoting my name and I'm a behind the scenes type person. But in the article all of the the accolades should have been to my colleagues at the sites because I just bring the data and start the discussion and then pose the questions. Would this student be disciplined this way if there's if their family lawyer was sitting right next to them in the discipline conference. If they wouldn't they need to be in school. We should treat every student as if they have an advocate sitting right next to them. Phyllis Katz is in the audience and she is she advocates so we were adversaries most times but I respect her her mission because it is bringing a voice to families who usually don't have a voice. So our our practices really are now being influenced by our data. We could say oh we don't suspend as much over here we don't we don't suspend for that. K came up and just just to clarify and correct K we still have in California unfortunately it was rewritten we can't suspend students K through third grade for K. We can't suspend for 4th through 12th but we can no longer expel for K. K is willful defiance or disrupted school activities. So that's awesome. Showing our sites that it's our secondary level last year the year before last we had 690 suspensions that involved K. In 1314 we had 262. That's awesome. Two years before that we had 982 round up a thousand. The data told the story not Kenya. I didn't go and say I think you guys are doing suspending K too much. I say the data says that you have 900 suspensions for K. 800 of them are Latino students. 900 are male students. So the data tells that story. I don't have to go in with what I believe and how I feel now my core belief if you know me if you've ever received an email for me is that success is the only option for every kid. That's the signature on my email. Any email that I send out will reflect that I expect success for every student. The expectation is that students would not only show up to school but they'll be successful while they're there. So anything that we do on our campuses should reflect that belief. We can't teach a kid who isn't in school. Teaching is not just reading, writing and arithmetic. It's also teaching appropriate behaviors. It's using teachable moments. Most of the K violations are teachable moments. Students sit up, you scream, ran across the class, dump someone in the head. Disrupted the class. But if you use it as a teachable moment kids come back different. You're sending the behavior home with a suspension and expecting that it's just going to disappear when they return back to school. No, we have to teach appropriate behaviors to replace inappropriate behaviors and that happens in the school setting. I totally tipped my hat so all of our colleagues, we have some of our parent educators here and I'm so thankful to them with Teresa and Ruby because that is the other part of the puzzle that was missing. We're telling parents we're handling school, you handle home and in the middle kids will figure it out. Now we're saying no, we're a team handling your child and we're going to agree on your child's success. So come on in, let's work together. And we have a parent series that we're doing and we have done for years actually but really trying to centralize it in uniform for parents that of our frequent fliers or our BAs, I call them I love them to death, our bad ass kids. And really trying to say success is really the only option and it's the only option for every kid. And success looks different for everybody and that's okay. But we're going to make sure that success is the only option. Thank you Kenya. Eileen is going to continue this theme and talk to us a little bit about student success. Thank you. And I'm here representing Santa Cruz City Schools and the work that we do is we're working on every level. So we're working in our leadership teams, our administration, our superintendent, our teachers, our students and our parents and our other staff members. We have looked at our data over several years, very similar to what Kenya described, really going back to that data, looking at how are we doing in our discipline? How are we doing in our referrals for special education services? How are we doing in our students completing college prep classes as opposed to a non-college prep track? And once we started really disaggregating that data we found that we had lots of challenges in our school district. And as Kenya said, it just became so apparent when you put the data up there. And I'm just going to read you just one of our statistics and the changes that we've made and talk about what we've been working on. And I loved what Megan said, it's an ongoing process. We still have plenty of challenges and I feel like we're just getting started and we're ready to move. So just in looking at our college prep students, because one thing we looked at was really looking at a discipline data as really a progress monitoring of how we're doing school-wide. How's our culture? How's our climate at our schools? Do students want to be there? Are they being included? Are we really an inclusive group? And I loved what the questioner used that word nostalgic. I hadn't thought of that before, but many people are nostalgic for how things used to be. And we're getting really clear that this is how it is now and our whole system has to adjust to the population of students and the community that we live in now, not the community we might have worked in when we started our career 25 years ago. So we looked at our students completing our college prep requirements, which is really the highest standard that you can have in our K-12 system. You can complete diploma requirements, but completing college prep is a whole other level. So in 2010, when we first looked, we had 17% of our Latino students completing the college prep requirements. Last year, we had 33% completing those requirements. Our African American students, we had 35% completing those requirements and last year, we were at 58%. And our students with disabilities, which is often a group of students who aren't always disaggregated out, we had 24% completing college prep requirements and last year we had 35%. Our English learner students, we had 0% in 2010 and last year we had 8% completing the full college prep requirements. So how did we do that? First of all, I think it starts with leadership. We said this is going to be the norm. So all ninth and 10th grade students are going to be registered into the college prep curriculum. They can no longer come into ninth grade and take non-college prep classes. So that was a big adjustment for our staff. Started with our counseling team and for them to really start those conversations with students of you can do it. We're putting you in this class. No, you can't take non-college prep science. You can't take that easier class. You're going to be in the college prep science. Then it took working with our staff, our teaching staff. You have the ability to reach every student. These are the tools. Here's how to differentiate your instruction. Here's how to really support students. We read the research. We looked at what other schools were doing. We brought in trauma informed practices. So our staff is being trained in that. We really looked at what does it take to really move this whole system forward? How do we really change the culture? And as you know, having people shift their mindset is really difficult. And we just keep at it. We just keep at it. It's really, it's a moral, ethical, imperative in our district that we have to keep doing this work. And we're really not going to any longer have the conversation about, well, you know, the homes I come from and, you know, they're poor and, you know, they just moved here and, you know, they live in a bad neighborhood. It's hard for them to get to school. There are many things that we don't have a lot of control over in our school system, but we do have control over six hours a day on our campus. And we have to put everything we can into that. And there are no excuses anymore. There's no reason why every student can't achieve in those classes. And I think as a result of that culture and climate work we're doing, we really have seen a tremendous drop in our discipline. So, for example, in our elementary school, when we started this work in 2009, we had 1,000 referrals for discipline to the principal's office. Last year, we had 39. So it's this huge school overhaul. We don't need to send kids to the office because they're misbehaving. They need to be in school learning. Every time they leave the classroom, they're missing instructional time. They need to be in here and they need to be learning. We can handle the stuff. We can handle kids acting out. We can handle kids who might behave differently than we behaved when we were kids. We can broaden what the range of acceptable behavior is and keep those kids in school. So we want to keep looking at that. We just keep disaggregating that data. We keep looking at how we're doing and we just keep pushing forward. And as teachers start seeing the success, more get on board. So I think once you start seeing a little success like that kind of data, it's like, oh, we can do it. Let's just keep working hard at it. So it just, it keeps on growing that way. Joe Hernandez with the Santa Cruz Police Department is going to talk to us about community law enforcement trust and positive relations. I can say we know a lot about that because they partner with us in juvenile probation and it's an extremely important relationship that bears fruit. When kids can trust law enforcement, you really are one step ahead of the curve in anything that you're trying to do in the community. So if you'll talk to us a little bit about that. I got to start off by saying I appreciate them putting the microphone up like this. So I physically have to put it down in front of you guys. They thought someone taller was coming in my place, I suppose. But community involvement, I think it's important with the police department and what it is that we do. I think the collaborations that we're involved with, not just with the probation department, but also looking at the various agencies and organizations throughout the Santa Cruz area, also our partnerships with the schools. We're part of BASTA, which is a broad-based apprehension, suppression treatment and alternatives in North County. We work very closely with Santa Cruz City School District. We work very closely with the County Office of Education. Probation has always been a close partner of ours as well. And I think that what we're doing there is making a huge difference in the lives of some of these kids. It's looking at how we can assist them, looking at some of the wraparound models that probation already had and how we can bring that over to BASTA and how we can further assist the kids. Especially those kids that haven't gotten to the probation system where they're getting that service, how do we then start to give them those services there? Above that, not just looking at what we're doing in collaboration with other organizations or agencies, but how we're reaching out to our communities. And as a police department in Santa Cruz, what we do is we provide a Citizens Police Academy. And that's a 10-week program where we give the community members an opportunity to see how the Santa Cruz Police Department works. It's to give them an understanding of what we do on a day-to-day basis and also how we investigate crimes and things of that sort and why things take so long. We also end that with an assistant attorney and judge to come in and speak about what their components are. Excuse me. What their components are. And I think it helps give an understanding of why things take so long in the system. We do that in both English and Spanish. I think it's important, especially with our Latin population in Santa Cruz, for them to have an understanding of what it is that we're doing. And what's nice about our Citizens Police Academies is that we have a different officer come in and teach each different subject. And when we do it in Spanish, it's completely done in Spanish. There is no translation. It's Spanish-speaking officers. So they get to meet the officers. They get to know who they are. And it's actually benefited us when we do investigations because people feel like they have that report. They have that relationship. They know the officers. They can talk to them. It's not just some random person come in my door saying, hey, what did you see? It's, hey, I remember you how things been since the class and this is what I saw. So it's created an opportunity for us to have more of a dialogue with our community members. Sorry, I'm not used to being under spotlights here. I feel like I'm a sports star or something. But in addition to that, we also do work with our youth. We have our Teen Public Safety Academy, which is a week-long program that's 40 hours. And it's for those that have an interest in law enforcement or the fire service. And it's to get some interest in our youth for them to understand to go through the background that's really difficult. And what happens a lot of times is our youth make mistakes. They make bad decisions. So because they make those decisions, it knocks them out of the background process. And what we're trying to do is give them that understanding of what it is that they need to do and what kind of decisions they need to make if they want to come into this field. We also have our Pride Program, which stands for Personal Response to Individual Development and Ethics. And that's to help our at-risk youth, kids that are making bad decisions to help them make better decisions. Mr. Bell said there's not one program that's going to fix every kid and that's true. I don't stand here today and pretend that the Pride Program is going to fix the kids. But I will tell you that we have had some success that some of the kids that have come through our program are doing well and that I just got the one-minute morning. Thanks for being subtle, Sarah. And what I really like about the program though is we partner them up with a mentor and I think having someone who was positive in their life that has given them positive guidance really makes a difference in the kids' lives. And I believe Mr. Bell said this earlier where he said you just need someone there who's telling him hey, my dad was crazy going into jail, my dad is still crazy now but finds someone who's going to love you out there and I think that's what's important. Everyone wants to feel like they're a part of something so it's important that we all get engaged and that we hop on our youth. Thank you. I just want to say before Lieutenant Zamora shares some words with us that we were talking about a case this week in juvenile probation and we thought the one key that we needed in order for this youth to be successful was to reconnect him with his partner from law enforcement who was working with him as a mentor because that's when this youth did the best. I think that sort of highlights relationships and collaboration. Probation cannot do it all, the schools can't do it all or at least not alone. So when we work together and we work to benefit kids we bear fruit. Lieutenant Zamora? Hi. Hey. Everybody can just call me Jorge. You don't got to do the whole Lieutenant thing. That's cool. I'm going to time myself here. So as far as Watsonville PD and what we're doing at our agency I think we're really starting to push our officers to their edge state. You know pushing them to their age to their edge so that they're doing things that they may have not been comfortable doing maybe 20 years ago. That includes things like working with groups community groups that in the past we may have just kind of turned away from. And I think that's really really positive. One of the things that that we do is we select certain officers that grew up in the community that have maybe worked in the fields speak the language very well and then we have partnered with the school district. I saw Ruby or heard Ruby earlier around here someplace. Ruby Vasquez and Joanne Borboia who's really have helped us connect with the families that probably fear us the most. And if when you look at an officer I don't care who you are but if you're driving and you see yeah yep all right. You see the cops behind you you're not thinking oh my god there's a cop thank god. You're thinking damn right. Now you're thinking that imagine what the undocumented farm worker is thinking. So for our officers we really try to push them to and we're again we're very deliberate in selecting these officers to go out and really engage in a conversation not only a training but engage in a conversation with people to get to know their values because if you haven't read Brian Hall's book on value shift values really determine a person's behavior and I think it's very important to note that because once we as officers know what some of these unheard voices value in the community then we are better able to serve them. You know these workshops take the officer from the uniform and the patrol car and the motorcycle into a classroom when they're actually facilitating and working with the parents to actually teach them something and at the end of these workshops were we're taking pictures with people we're hugging people you know people are telling me that they're my aunt my uncles and it's just a really positive experience and we bring different agencies to to help us out with that in the past the peace and unity March in Watsonville is coming soon in November I encourage everybody to show up oh crap someone's getting a ticket today okay I think it's November 1st the flyers are out front someone's gonna pray for me so so we've gone from you know years past to to to really just paying officers over time to to monitor the March this year we're having officers participate in the March and they're volunteering their time which I think is huge I think it's I think it's huge and you know and I got to give a shout out to to the peace and unity March coalition who actually reached out to us and said we want you to be a part of this and I thought this is what I was waiting for because the police culture is changing and I lean talked about where we are now and I think we are not the police culture is not where it was before when I started and I am not the same officer that I was 20 years ago I'm not and I'm slowly learning that doing police work now is doesn't necessarily have to involve the idea handcuffs and I think that's that's really powerful to model because although it is necessary at times to to to do enforcement and make arrests we have to do it with a certain level of understanding and compassion and human dignity and really see the person for who they are not for who they appear to be and I think that really connects us or lets us or allows us to see our common humanity if you will so I think that's really gonna be it for me unless anybody's got some donuts because I do love donuts by the way so I just throw that out there so if you got a ticket you got a donut come see me all right I'll hook you up man thank you and Beverly Brook our commissioner and Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Commission she is always in our Juvenile Hall being a supporter being an advocate she's gonna talk to us about direct files so my awareness and concern regarding racial disparity and the correctional system began during my field education studies while attending seminary following my graduation I returned home and soon began serving as the chaplain at the Juvenile Detention Center in Santa Cruz County during this time I was appointed as a commissioner on the Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Commission which focuses on the broader issues of juvenile justice and delinquency prevention in our county and I'm reading off my notes because I'm a preacher and I go way over five minutes if you let me so I'm just gonna stick to script through my work as chaplain I became aware of what appeared to be a racial disparity of the youth who were direct filed to be candid I was not exactly clear on what constituted a direct file case nor why and how this legal process was used I began to inform myself on what constitutes the direct file case what is the ethnic makeup of the county and the youth charged as direct file currently the commission has a subcommittee preparing a report for the Board of Supervisors on direct file cases but in the interest of time I will briefly summarize what constitutes a direct file case in 2000 California voters passed Proposition 21 which basically overturned the legal process that required juvenile court judges to approve transferring a youth offender's case into the adult system prior to trial before the passing of Proposition 21 the use of a fitness hearing would be utilized in these hearings the juvenile court could take into consideration the age of the youth the sophistication of the offense the potential for rehabilitation and mitigating circumstances in the hearing the court ruled whether the youth was amenable or not unfit for juvenile court Proposition 21 allowed the district attorney to bypass the fitness hearing process and send the matter directly to adult court for trial hence the term direct file in the past 10 years in Santa Cruz County there's only been one fitness hearing and that was this year for a white young man it also expanded the number of offenses that required direct transfer to adult court under the welfare and institutions code 602B called mandatory transfers direct files include murder, attempted murder, robbery assault with a deadly weapon shooting at an occupied dwelling or vehicle an unlawful carrying or possession of a weapon all which carry potential enhancements for being gang related once in adult court youth offenders face sentences to full adult criminal terms including life imprisonment the W. Hayward-Berns Institute reported in 2012 that between 2006 and 2011 43 youth in Santa Cruz County were direct file of these 38 or 88 percent were Latino 35 out of the 43 offenses were classified gang related as to what classifies or constitutes gang related everyone has a differing opinion as to that classification the factors affecting racial disparity and direct file cases if it does exist are multifaceted and are not easily defined or evaluated however in the interest of true juvenile justice okay this is the good part though Sarah however in the interest of true juvenile justice the commute as a community we owe it to the youth to seek the answers we cannot allow our youth to be warehoused under the guise of safety or expediency so next Erin Nelson-Cerrano is going to talk to us about youth employment and she has a really unique view being that she was formally with probation and now as the program director for Alcance and the community action board she really has a unique view of what our kids needs are having served them in probation and now on the community side so thank you unlike Jorge I would like you to call me lieutenant nice I was very pleased at the opportunity to have my staff at Alcance come and hear and and other co-workers from the community action board come and hear James Bell today because I think that he is an inspiration and he is able to articulate something that we often sense and can't really find our own voice about that the community action board is Santa Cruz's designated anti-poverty organization and within that Alcance does employment and leadership development for youth and adults our population our client base is disparately represented because these are folks who live in poverty and also because of the referral system that we've set up with the justice system and schools and other community-based organizations that when kids are in trouble they refer them to us for mentorship and employment services we know that in Santa Cruz County Latino youth under the age of 18 are three times more likely to live under the 100% of federal poverty than their white counterparts Latino youth are three times more likely to live in poverty so other people could you know many many of you could come up here and talk about how to work with youth I'm not an expert compared to the rest of you in that respect but I will talk to you about what our values are in Alcanze about doing employment work we have to value youth that is part of our mission at Alcanze and by the way we're formerly CRP if people know CRP but part of our mission says that we will honor and serve those who are under resourced at risk and involved in the justice system so that it is it is part of our mission our drive to serve people and to honor them those who are living in poverty and those who are disparately represented as racial and ethnic minorities or majority minorities as James says we make sure that the people who we work with who have multiple barriers to employment that we display an appreciation for youth culture and part of the value of youth culture is also to value racial and ethnic diversity and to understand youth development and also to be strength based and that is how we are able to build rapport with our clients with youth and we make sure that we meet them where they're at so that means that we'll go to new school where the Serrano or Southside affiliated students who attend school and who can't get to our office safely that they also have access to our services we make a point to network with county office of education and alternative schools to go on site to increase access for resources for those who don't have resources within their home or within a more traditional school environment and I do want to say that there are so many partners through alternative ed and through ROP and through the conventional school system who are building really healthy employment programs and those benefit all kids but most especially those the lowest hanging fruit so those kids who are able to take advantage of those services the kids who we work with may have difficulty accessing those services they may have difficulty understanding how you meet the expectations of working in a job so we continue to hold the standard of what the standard is but when that kid can't meet the standard we never close the door so I worked with a young man who is now 27 and I'm happy to say that at age 27 he has been out of custody for the longest period of his life since he was 11 and he just reflected the value of doing the employment work he was ordered to do community service hours and joined our work crews and hated it and was a but and but what he got eventually when he was able to mature enough is an appreciation for the respectful relationships and the value that he developed when he was part of that programming and that's what you all do is create a safe space for kids and we need to hold the standard and the expectation but we can never close the door so this 27 year old he he went through foster care he was involved in the dependency system the delinquency system and then on to prison and he finally gets that what the standard is and he knows that the door is not going to close I think what I want to say is I just want to identify a gap in the services that exist that the services don't meet the need and what we really need are employment services that are not necessarily outcome based because what we have right now are employment services who where people qualify for entry into these services based on the fact that they're low income and part of an ethnic minority however they have to demonstrate the ability to benefit and that doesn't mean are the kids going to be better off because they participated in these services what it means is are they going to be successful in this program to meet outcomes so that we continue to receive funding so you're basically again selecting in the low hanging fruit so we we need to have a community value around youth employment I would pause it that what we should do as a contractor with the county we're required to pay a living wage I would suggest that county contractors are also required to employ a percentage of youth now I didn't make that up I stole it from another jurisdiction but it it embeds the value of youth and I'll tell you the person that I would hire is somebody who's got a bunch of facial tattoos and somebody who's got a hairline you know a trigger for the temper and who isn't going to do well in competitive employment and that's the kind of person that you continue to hold the standard but you never close the door so thank you so much so Reina Ruiz who's the program director for Santa Cruz Barrios Anidos is going to talk to us about culturally-based and relevant prevention and intervention programs and of course they are also a partner with us and in the community at large so please share with us thank you that is a mouth ball I feel that James did a great job I can take a break now let's see I think I should note that Santa Cruz Barrios Anidos has been or was a founding member of CJNY or the Community Justice Network for Youth and has been a part of that for over a decade and our work really in terms of youth and community we bear the brunt I think the communities that we work you know the families that we work with are the most impacted and so the stakes are really high I would say and so as an organization our work is really around the belief that our work around violence prevention is that there is power in healing and there's power in reconciliation you know we go where most people don't go we were at a conference in LA and Nana took me to the Maravia Projects and you wonder what that has to do with the work here locally and it really is you want to know what the issues the challenges are of those that are involved or most heavily involved in gangs to know what not to do or to bring those words of wisdom back to community and you have to engage them so you know in the work that we're doing I think I just started about a year ago I've known about Barrios Unidos for a really really long time they've been actually in the community since 1977 and Nana started out of the back was it a 64 or a 67 right Chevy doing the work the peace work but I didn't realize until I came to be you the extent of our network the extent of the dedication and the work that we do you know we're at Santa Cruz High School working hard to keep the students in the classroom in the school tying them back to community we're at Pajaro Valley High School we bring the prison trailer so whatever it takes is we build a prison cell you know so that people can so that youth can relate so that they can see in a different way perhaps and engage them teachers talk about scaffolding learning we use art culture and spirituality in a way that that reaches young people in a way that matters let's see I don't know I have to say that today my brother is in court dealing with 225 to lives and that when we talk about being in the peace movement and when we talk about this work these young people that we see are not just statistics they are families they are our kids they we really must believe in healing and reconciliation the work of culture and spirituality is important I don't know if I'm the most articulate to talk about it I have been working in the grassroots community for a long time and I'm glad you talked about direct files because I think these are young people and we need to bring them back to community the impacts are far the impacts that happen are not just to that young person but to the entire community and for example we were at a supper club at PCS we have a program a beach putts kids club and we're working with Pacific collegiate school and study skills and college awareness because we want kids to have what everybody else has right to be to excel in college and I had a parent that said you know years ago she was a student she was born here in Santa Cruz she was born here in Santa Cruz and yet her Spanish isn't really good and I said why is that said why I spent most of my years here in Santa Cruz in a special education classroom and didn't speak Spanish until I was in high school and now I'm working with her children and her children are in special education and her children are is in her child one of her children is in fourth grade and doesn't know how to read and so she's dealing with some of those same issues and so the more the community gets together and talks about those issues the more that you see how this plays out and as advocates in community I think it's a you know the role that BU has played it's it's sort of like the Latina in the boardroom sometimes the one voice in the classroom that is the advocate for those families and for those kids and we need more of those voices those teachers those allies the youth shot out to Youth City Council Coastanoa and Watsonville Youth City Council for being here today because we need those voices and you even need to hear those voices of active gang members in here so that you can hear or so that we can all work together because that healthy tension that we're talking about is important there is an imbalance and you know I believe that we just all need to work together thank you so we're going to invite everyone who has the index cards to please write down any questions that you have and they're going to be passed up here to me and I'm going to ask them in order and anyone on the panel who wants to chime in please do will at least try to have one response per question so that we can move the conversation along okay so one of the first questions to the panel is how are you addressing racial and ethnic disparities in your organization or field what is it that you're doing that's maintaining a focus on that and you're using either data or issues that have come up to drive your actions to get outcomes Kenya am I going to get a one minute mark on this one okay before I answer that question though if I may pause I do want I don't want anyone to leave here today thinking that new school is a Sereno school it's a school for all kids I know that has been historically the belief within our community and and kind of played out that way and me and Erin we're closely together so I'm not I'm an advocate for my kids and I'm an advocate for Power of Alley so I don't want anyone to leave here thinking that new school is solely for Sereno kids because it's not it's for all kids on that question doing just what I spoke of earlier is just using the data to have those critical conversations change work is not for wimps if you want to be liked you probably shouldn't try and change the status quo change is difficult it is people resist it you have to believe in your core that the work that you're doing is worth the effort that you're gonna put out you also have to believe that you're gonna come up against people who don't agree with you which is fine so changing the the system my colleague Eileen she shared awesome data that's great like you said it's not easy it's holding an expectation for everyone that the data shows that we have expectations for kids because they get suspended they get sent out of class they get sent home but having an expectation of the people who receive paychecks right with that check is an expectation and the expectation is that we are going to help every child succeed and if the data shows that our practices are not enforcing success for kids then it's time to have those critical conversations with the data are our expulsions and suspicion suspension data over three years it wasn't because everyone said oh yeah that's right you're good let's do this they said this is how we've always done it what are you talking about and who are you I'm originally from San Diego I've been up here for four years I wasn't outsider moving in but we all could agree as colleagues that kids not being in school meant they weren't learning it also was that if they weren't in school they also weren't learning appropriate behaviors they also weren't probably plugged into positive people situations and environments so first thing with with impacting change when you're looking at the disparities is don't be afraid don't expect to be liked just share the data and don't water the data down gotcha Sarah don't water the data data down because it would make for a lighter conversation tell it exactly how it is I've always I'm a mother of daughters and I always told them yeah it's not always what you say but how you say it so yeah if you're if you're delivering vinegar serve it with a muffin but serve it you know you can't water that down you can't go into it and say I'm gonna advocate more for adults to have an easy day than I am for kids to succeed okay and that's kind of what it is success is the only option go in there with that belief and then use your data to shift practices and policies if you're in a position to influence change have your weedies before you go to work if you want something nice to be said about you if you're having that critical conversation said to yourself before you get there because change is hard it's difficult all of us have to we have to do things differently at some port in our life but do we believe that our kids are worth it hell yes is it worth people not liking you for the moment hell yes but we have to do it we've had our chances through all of our education and schools where we either got knocked down or picked up or whatever the case is but for our kids today it's critical the only positive thing they may hear come from you and if the expectation is we just want you to show up then the efforts that we put forth as adults would just be show up efforts but if the expectation is we want you to show up and succeed and we're going to make sure that our policies and practices support that and we're not going to suspend more Latino males than we do any other ethnicity if our population is 70% Hispanic we're not going to have 90% of our suspensions being Hispanics that's a disparity and being I'm going to be empowered to have that conversation with the people who are making those decisions I'm done you ain't even going to get up thank you Kenya so I'm going to move on to ask another question although I know the whole panel sort of reflects working collectively with others we have a question just to talk to us about what it looks like when you work collectively across fields or jurisdictions to address disparities what does it look like or sound like to connect with each other to come together and do the work anybody who wants to chime in I will but I'll give them an opportunity okay I'd like to address that if I may it's interesting having had the perspective of being a probation officer and working inside the system and then going out and being a community-based partner it is it's challenging to maintain trust I think and so the efforts that we've gone through with the youth violence prevention task force really demonstrate how we've developed relationships and come light years from where we've been let's say in the last decade but it it is these are relationships that need to be nurtured and it we have certainly so much more power together when we're looking at system change but it it is difficult to be a CBO let's say and be mindful of serving your clients but then also maintaining credibility and integrity and transparency let's say with government or other partners thank you certainly I'd like to respond I think that we have a great model of working across jurisdictions right now with our keeping kids in school and out of court task force so it's a group that's been brought together by judge morris and includes schools law enforcement many many community partners children's mental health legal aid the public defender's office the district attorney's office and I think it's a great model because we each bring some expertise to that and none of us can solve these problems alone and so if we can bring these groups together so we have the students but our main role is teaching our main role is not supporting mental health we don't have the expertise to do that our main role is not working with the court system we don't have the expertise to do that we're not legal folks in schools but when we can bring those groups together then we can really lay the foundation for some structural changes some interagency work and then the the actual supporting of individual student work so I think that we are starting to do that it is a data driven group we're looking at attendance data we're looking at it disaggregated by ethnicity so that we can look at what's the structural issues that are going on in our systems and then how do we start addressing those I think the other piece of it when we work across agencies that has been helpful is we are all looking at well in schools we call it research based practice I think in probation they call it evidence based practice but we're all looking at the same thing we're not going to do something if we don't know the data behind it does it work or not and when we do something we're looking at the data before and the data after and if it's not working we're refining and refining and refining so that we're not sort of just throw in darts and hoping something will work but we're bringing all of our expertise together and I think that that group has has been working as a really great model of working across jurisdictions thank you so our next question from the audience is how do we break down the silos and get results I Lee just said all the best things there yeah having a uniform effort county life I think if I could just add to that too is is that it shouldn't just be at the top you know I work with a great staff in probation and I sort of consider them ambassadors they understand evidence based practices they understand the ills of overrepresentation in our juvenile hall they are on committees in the community I think that if if we're all mindful in our our various agencies or departments that we work for everybody being knowledgeable being educated being well trained and really walking the talk you know if you say you're going to do this how is that evidence by what you're doing and the results that you're getting and I know that our staff is you know they're out in the community with the kids Julia and the rap team are taking them on cultural events they are not just saying oh you did this you did this okay now go and follow the rules of probation they are engaging them in the community in a positive way the probation officers are advocating for kids they're going to school meetings they are doing whatever they need to do to try to work with kids at any level of need so I think that as we all and again in our capacities do that and spread it throughout our staff we'll have better outcomes so our next question can I just add something on the direct file I think one of the things that we need to do is to educate I mean I consider myself a very educated person in the criminal justice system and I didn't know about direct file when I came back to Santa Cruz and we voted for it I mean I don't think Santa Cruz County probably did but the state of California did and I've worked with folks that work in the prisons and they weren't really aware of direct file and that we are taking these 14 15 16 year old kids and giving them 25 to life sentences so for me it's going out there and just talking in public about direct files this is what we're doing as a community to these youth and I just want to add and I get these words from Michael Painter who I'm not sure is still here but he shared with me the other day that we have this tension of accountability and empathy and I think sometimes what happens is when perhaps I talk people will say oh well you know what do you expect you know she just wants this she doesn't want accountability and I'm not saying that I'm saying that these are kids their brains aren't fully developed yet and so we're I want them held accountable but what else can we do besides throwing them away for 25 to life so you just answered the question which was can our county pursue its own path regarding direct files even with prop 21 so I think it starts with what you said is getting out in the community and starting the conversation to try to make change and just with the committee the subcommittee on the commission we have interviewed so many different stakeholders I hesitate to say Bob Lee's name because I know he's all in our prayers but he gave us two and a half hours of his time to explain prop 21 and how the DA looks at cases and I my sense is that the community wants to find a different path and help us find that path and I think we've gotten that from mental health from the DA to the public defenders to the court help us find that path so we don't have to go down that one so we have another question which is wouldn't students who have been through or affected by the system be better informed to work with your community programs and why do mistakes disqualify them? I think from the perspective of the youth violence prevention task force I can speak to the fact that we've invited court involved youth to be a voice on the task force also as part of the focus groups of youth who are court involved will also have their voices heard to contribute to the strategic plan May I add? Sure I think one of the places I think that you know I also part of my work is Watsonville Youth City Council and Santa Cruz Youth City Council and as part of this process really the youth engagement piece is key and you know working with Tracy Benson on bringing it's also getting the youth giving them a context about what their what their suggestions are for is important and what the impacts are for that so the education around that is important too and all of those voices are important youth in alternative ed are youth that are doing the best the ones that are in college the students that are in private school so across the board we need to hear those different voices so just in that piece I think we need more of that especially if a three to five year plan is going to be impacting their their community or their group which in Watsonville is like 34% youth are under 18 thank you so question for our police department I'm sorry okay I just wanted to ask did did that question ask about the youth who've made a mistake their system involved and why would that mistake count against them is that what the question was I just wanted to go back to a comment that I made that there exists an employment program where kids can they are qualified into the program because they're low income potentially they're an offender and they're an ethnic minority however because of the requirement to reach outcomes it's a disincentive to the program and I'm not naming the program because I don't want to dime it out because many many kids do benefit from this program but it is another screening tool that the administrators of the program have to apply to the youth who are they're considering enrolling because they want to make sure that they can continue to get funding based on the kids success so I was saying that there needs to be employment services where there's no expectation of particular outcomes that it's not kids are going to achieve things on a timeline that's established by adults because kids don't think like that all right the next question from the audience for the police is how can the police listen more as a ranking officer I'm going to pass this one on to this guy I clean my ears constantly how can we listen more well I think we've got to stop giving orders and start listening I think for us at least for me I can speak for myself I think education really provided that container for me to be able to listen and to really shut my mouth and then really getting to know people's values getting to know where people come from I think it's very important so I'm not sure if if that answers the question I mean how do we get to listen I mean how do we listen I think the important thing is for people at least in my opinion and I don't know what Joe thinks but I think for me if you want me to listen then come by my office call me email me text me do something like that because I'm ready to listen and I think you have to find those individuals who are willing to listen and those who are not just have this polarized world view of my way is the only way and I'm going to hook and book all day long and take people to jail because I was once there and I think we just need to find those officers who are willing to listen to us that's what I think what do you think just to add a small piece and I don't know what the intent of the question was when they say listen more but I think it's really just listening to the concerns that the community has and what we try to do is we have community meetings and it's whenever our that request is made we try to do them several times a year just throughout the community but also looking at smaller neighborhoods smaller smaller areas where we can go and talk to people within the community and listen to what it is that they have on their mind what challenges they're facing in life with regard to public safety and things of that sort and I think I hope I mentioned the question when you talk about this more but I think that's the effort that we're making and really what it comes down to like Lieutenant Zamora said you really need to reach out you need to say hey we'd like the police to come because we have some things to say and if you invite us we'll be there I think like anything else there might not always be an agreement on the way to get there but what it comes down to is collaboration and really having a discussion how we can work together to achieve the same ultimate goal thank you so the next question James Bell talked about changing hearts and minds in addition to policy and practices what is being done to address how communities think and feel about youth of color and our teachers and school personnel receiving professional development of culturally relevant discipline practices so the first part is how are communities thinking and feeling about youth of color we're thinking that they're just kids first part but I think I have to start from the back which was the cultural competency piece everyone's kind of afraid of that I think the fear comes from we don't want to say we have biases everybody has biases it just is what it is as the kids say right but it's to recognize them and to not have them impact or influence your decision making that's the part that's hard go ahead and pause why not no one ever claps for me but and I think for us it's a difficult conversation we're on that path but I think we have you know a long way to go even the moment we start saying we got it down is the moment we have to start reevaluating our leadership because it's all it's going to be an ongoing practice I mean I have a bias you know if I walk in the room if I don't see any of my sisters and brothers and then I'm like man I should have brought somebody with me you know and that's just and I'm not afraid of that bias I'm okay to say that will that impact my ability to show up no I'm going to show up and as I tell my daughters when you show up you show out but I'm going to do that but with decision making with with teachers or in our community when we say it's not a problem is when it's our biggest problem and having those forms like the enforcement is talking about where we really have in those discussions and then we're taking that discussion and putting it in action when you go to a campus particularly with our district is there someone there to communicate with the parents in their natural language when parents walk into a school or an organization are backs to the door so you can't even greet families because someone doesn't speak the language do you yell and talk louder in your language those type of things and I think that true change is going to come start from that just a discussion about it you know get it out there it's the elephant in a room it's okay but it's not okay if it influence policies and practices that's when we have to take a step back and then really come back to the table and have you know replace all leadership if we say yeah well it's okay for us to do that I had a colleague say that one you know section of our population of 33 we're from Aptos to Watsonville that one population didn't deserve to get truancy letters because it's a more affluent community well no no it's not true truancy laws are for everyone air cold says you gotta be in school our policy on time all day and every day that solves the problem right there so when you start having different practices based on socioeconomics ethnicity and you're not willing to really address that or if you're in a position of power and you do a passive consent by not questioning it and allowing it to go on you're equally as far at fault thank you so in our school district we are offering professional development we're working closely with a consultant who is helping us really uncover really the root cause of our disproportionality in different areas we know it's there we just weren't sure what to do about it and he's really helping us get to that the root cause which is each person and what shifts they need to make and their mindsets about kids one of the things that has helped us the most is to really learn the term implicit bias and what that means no one's a racist but we didn't understand what implicit bias is and what we carry with us all the time so as we start exploring that and start providing that professional development and opening up that conversation it allows people really in a non-defensive non-threatening way to really look at what's real and to really start saying wow I wasn't even aware of that I had no idea I didn't know that's how I perceived or everyone perceives or that's how I'm looking at the world and then people can start re-looking and picking that up so we are providing that professional development we need it we can't expect people to know what to do about a problem that's existed for a long time we are all part of that problem so we need to bring people in to help us train us so that we can keep moving forward thank you so another question for our educators is specifically for Kenya what model do you use to engage parents and what tips would you share for an after-school program currently unsuccessful engage in engaging parents I have to kind of yield and I'm going to just take her thunder and Teresa Rodriguez in our district is the parent educator and we've done several different things actually the one thing that we're doing is our father's homosexuals or parents as partners and it's really bringing parents in and working on the relationship and starting from assets which is what James Bell said starting from what is already positive in that family our biases allow us to look at a family that is different from our belief system or our value system or the way we're living or our socioeconomic and say poor family something's wrong with it instead we're saying as a family unit you have strengths your values that you convey to your child will help dictate the choices that they make and less empower you to do that it is a parent series that parents attend with their students there's some parts where they separate then they come back together our first session is 40 assets dealing with that work and seeing how what students perceive are their assets in their family or their lives and then what parents perceive that they're providing for their kids in their lives and then having that discussion and sometimes it's a bit different our final series in that a meeting in that series is parents really conveying to their kids what their hopes and dreams are for them and then students conveying it to their parents and then reading love letters to each other and things like that we don't talk about discipline per se we don't talk about the negative things that probably got the kids there we only talk about those strengths and how a family already can support their students and then how we can be a part an extension of that family and come in and support them that way for the after school programs a lot of things that we do in the school is from eight to four or eight to three after school programs go to six o'clock really seeing the program as more than just we're keeping kids during critical hours of three to six and Thadesa does this work with our family literacy project in Pajaro Valley in that there's evening activities for families after six o'clock when families are available with mills and childcare in the language of the family and I think that understanding that perception is a lot of things and not seeing parents as they ask them or oh here they come I can't do my job but if it weren't for students in seats you wouldn't have a job so parents are critical to that and welcoming them in seeing them as an invited partner not an intruder and after school can be a little bit flexible on how they do that whereas the school they have maybe you know restricted funds and things like that so thinking outside the box and not seeing as we're going to teach you how to deal with your kids but we are going to work together to help your child succeed and I think for us with particularly with our Spanish speaking families that opportunity isn't there enough Ruby worked with our migrant family so she knows firsthand about getting them in there and having things done and our English learner families I can't even see that far but I'm sure it said stop so I would say really thinking outside the box and engaging the parents and doing what's true to your community and your culture where parents will show up don't try and do some blanket one size fits all because everything doesn't work for everybody I could just say something on that just in working with the school district and setting up some or trying to get some parent engagement into some of our events personally growing up I know that my parents left home at about 5 a.m. and got home at about 7 p.m. so I think it's really important to recognize the audience that you're trying to get in there and recognize that a lot of these excuse me at least in in Watsonville and my personal experience growing up my parents were extremely tired from working in the fields all day to get them into a meeting at 5 36 o'clock it wasn't going to happen and I think that that still exists so I think it's something to be mindful of we'll keep you on the mic because the last question is for law enforcement and that is are gang enhancements biased against black and brown people and are they necessary to hold people accountable for their crimes? Joe's going to answer that I'm kidding I'm kidding you know the gang enhancement is a really when the gang enhancement law first came in and I was on the gang unit I thought it was a great thing right now we're going to you know we're going to get these violent gang members off the street and we're going to send them to jail because they're doing these violent acts and I know it's going to be a really controversial issue you know that was the question was it thinking is it repeat it is it necessary or what was it again? are gang enhancements necessary to hold people accountable for their crimes? I think so I mean it's it's kind of hard to say I would say that sometimes it is necessary when you have you know gang members committing violent crimes on people say like a home invasion a murder sometimes it is necessary sometimes it's not you know I could tell you that as a young officer on the gang team I arrested a an 18 year old kid for writing on a wall and he was writing the name of his gang well that particular crime fell under the gang enhancement criteria so what did that do to that kid? it raises bail and it potentially gave him more time in jail for graffiti okay now you compare that to a violent murder so is it necessary? I would say sometimes it is and sometimes it's not that's my personal opinion and that's you know being on the job for 19 years 20 years sometimes it is necessary sometimes it's not so I don't know I don't know what you think Joe but I'm sure you're going to tell everybody or not I think you've answered the question okay I've answered the question thank you would you all give a round of applause to our panelists Fernando and James will close the session you all can return to your seats if you like thank you may I just make a quick announcement the community forum on justice and compassion and hope will be in Watsonville on Wednesday October 15th from 6 to 8 30 Eddie A. Hall middle school you're all invited to come six o'clock look like James but I'll try to be as exciting so thank you for coming we truly appreciate our panelists and we appreciate your time this was a lot of time and it's amazing to see how many people stayed throughout so we really appreciate everyone coming and being a part of the village and we hope that you'll follow us into the next steps with our planning and into implementation we need your voice to help us create the plan and we need your voice to help us understand how it's going to best be implemented so I just wanted to say that and this has been filmed by community TV so if there are people that you know that would be interested in this that couldn't be here today please know that we'll be sending that link out I also wanted to acknowledge the awkwardness of our index card process because it's never ideal to not be able to hear directly from you if there were questions that weren't answered today we'll collect those and our intern Julie and coordinator Sarah and I will help get those out to whoever's most appropriate to answer and try to email those answers out they don't know that yet so thank you in advance but we want to make sure that all voices are heard and that we get you your answers thanks thank you oh one more housekeeping thing thank you Sarah for keeping our heads on straight you all received an evaluation of this event please fill that out we know it's rather lengthy but it will really help us understand how to put these events on in the future and also just how to get back to you with more information etc so please do fill those out and we'll collect them on your way out Bernanda well I want to end and wrap things up and really try to pull together some of the messages that we heard that's going to help us then drive the process for a strategic plan but not just the strategic plan for the use violence task force but I think for the well-being of the community as a whole James is not coming up here James I know you probably I'd prefer to listen to James than myself but you're going to hear me and not James but a couple things though I want to really thank the panel members all of you especially law enforcement they're an essential part of the balanced approach that our community takes and I think it says so much about the leadership the law enforcement and our community that we had Watsonville PD here we also had Santa Cruz PD they're an essential part of this conversation and it's often challenging to get everyone at the table but I think that's what makes this unique so I'm really proud of that fact I want to say something about James because his presentations as you all are thinking I heard you already saying we're just amazing but what he always brings to us is new relevant vital in the up-to-date statistics and research I see a lot of presenters and after once or twice I can pretty much say word for word what they're going to say but James brings us something special to Santa Cruz when he came here this isn't something that he used two years ago or even two months ago so I really appreciate that fact that it's special for us but I'm sure he does that for everyone else but I think it's just us it's not recycled information but here are some of the words the impactful words and ideas that I heard today and of course they resonate especially for me because my role as chief probation officer are several roles but one of those is of course public safety recidivism reduction through effective supervision effective practices so I need to keep that in mind that's my lens but we did and James did talk a lot about public safety improving public safety and how we do that and public safety doesn't mean we all know this more suspensions more expulsions more jail time there are other ways to do that to hold folks accountable one thing we heard over and over again is asset-based and be tough on results it's more it's like a little different than saying tough on crime responses asset-based and then tough on the results that we're getting so we need to consider this as we move forward with our plan how do we be asset-based and how do we leave out some of the elements that really are looking to may perhaps increase consequences there are already lots of consequences there are a number of laws on the books a number of procedures and practices I'm not sure we need more consequences because those exist and those are happening it's just that how we use them and do we use them appropriate and proportionately one thing I heard James say and I'm sure all of you agrees that child well-being is the preferred public safety mechanism it's really that simple if our children are feeling good are feeling safe are engaged in schools are civic engaged in their communities they feel supported love just simple things like we do with our own children we will have a much safer community and much more highly educated community as well I've been hearing this for the last two or three years is the idea or the importance of really working from a base of being trauma informed that to me is a no-brainer that we need to consider the trauma that our kids have experienced whether in school in the classroom with probation officers whoever they've been through a lot and I really think that we need to to make advances there's folks here that are trained in that but I think that needs to be more widespread so we all understand it where it's not just the buzzword you know it's trauma informed so I think we really need to to work hard as a community to get that out there I think really Santa Cruz is an important place entering the curve on youth violence it's I've been working in the community for 25 years and I haven't seen this large number of folks with passion expertise and really interest in joining together and coming up with a solution to make to improve our community this is truly an important time for us an important time that we can continue to turn the curve because there's a lot of good happening you saw the in Watsonville Paro Valley Unified School Districts suspension rates cut by 60 percent that is remarkable and we need to continue that so it's all of us that can that can do this and I think one of the last things I'll say and it was important I heard it from someone in the audience commented to James that how do we get this message to the community to the grassroots community where it was we were talking about Watsonville so I think that's an important next piece because really the folks there are folks that that aren't hearing this that are that are working long hours today that could not be here parents of the kids that we're working with so I think that is an important next step so I just I want to thank you all for taking your time to be with us today I appreciate it and so the next steps will be to take action on the information that we've all learned today so thank you very much for joining us