[00:00:15] Amy H-L: Hi, I’m Amy Halpern-Laff
[00:00:22] Jon M: And I’m Jon Moscow. Welcome to Ethical Schools. Our guests today are Steven Evangelista and Anthony Celestine. Steve is a longtime educator and co-founder and former principal of Harlem Link Charter School in New York City. Anthony Celestine is the director of the Office of Juvenile Justice Services at Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. For those unfamiliar with Louisiana, a parish is the equivalent of a county elsewhere. Welcome, Steve and Anthony.
[00:00:49] Steve E: Thank you.
[00:00:50] Anthony C: Thank you.
[00:00:50] Amy H-L: How did you two find each other?
[00:00:52] Steve E: I can take that one if that’s all right. I reached out and found Anthony. Actually, it has to do with the reason why we’re here to talk about, which is assessment centers. I’m an educator who has not been involved in the criminal justice system at all in my career. But I found my way to this work as an advocate and as a learner because of relationships with past students who got involved in the justice system. So I learned about assessment centers, which we’ll talk about today, and I sought out Anthony because he’s one of the senior people in the movement whom I could learn a lot from, and I wanted to connect with him.
[00:01:26] Anthony C: That’s about as accurate as it could be.
[00:01:28] Jon M: Anthony, the Louisiana Models for Change of the MacArthur Foundation called Calcasieu Parish’s Assessment Center, the Multi-Agency Resource Center, or MARC, an innovative model and truly exceptional. What is MARC and what makes it innovative?
[00:01:45] Anthony C: The MARC was developed as a way to fill in some gaps in a system that was very strong in reform efforts. We were doing great work early on in our reform efforts from about 2003 to about 2010. Then we hit a brick wall where we had seen the successes, as it relates to the system, where fewer kids were coming into detention, fewer kids would be in petition to court. And we just plateaued out and we realized there were still gaps in the processes of kids getting services early on without juvenile justice intervention.
So it was developed. We got seed money from the MacArthur Foundation to do a feasibility study with community stakeholders. One thing we do really well in Calcasieu is collaborate with system partners, non-governmental partners, education, law enforcement, anybody that wants to be at the table to push for good work to support kids, and we came together with this model. We had an opportunity to look at a number of assessment centers across the country, some that were run by law enforcement, some that were run by systems, and some that were run by community agencies, and basically grab the best of all. And it really helped us develop as a single point of entry to support families and kids that are are in need of anything, whether it’s community needs, whether it’s supports in law enforcement or system involved work. We will work with any community partner that makes that referral. And one of our biggest partners right now is the school system.
[00:03:19] Amy H-L: Anthony, don’t families tend to find it a little problematic or scary to to be involved in the system that is affiliated with the justice system?
[00:03:31] Anthony C: So that’s a great question. I would have to put the disclaimer out is that families don’t really need to see our agency for supports because there’s various community supports. However, we’ve modeled ourselves in such a way that we basically inform families that you don’t need to be arrested or have a law enforcement or court referral to receive front-end services immediately. And there’s a community referral sent to us because a family, a child, is they’re struggling with something, whether it’s just suspected substance abuse issues or drug issues. We will let them come in voluntarily just to assess their needs and talk with them and link them with community supports. Our job is to be community connectors and conveners. We’re basically there just to support them in developing a plan to operate off of their natural strengths. So you don’t necessarily have to be involved in a system to get services. And that’s still the model. Although our agency is housed in the juvenile justice agency, it’s set apart from our actual juvenile justice facility. It’s a separate home-like environment office. We don’t call our staff over there probation staff or anything. They’re just basically MARC support officers and community providers. So it is really not connected to the system although it’s housed in the system, if that makes sense.
[00:04:51] Steve E: Would it be helpful if I gave an educator’s perspective on demystifying what an assessment center is?
[00:04:55] Jon M: Sure.
[00:04:56] Steve E: For the audience. I think a couple of key things that Anthony has said are collaborate and that the title of this organization includes multi-agency. And these are elements that are missing from school reform and education system efforts around the country in a lot of places. Assessment centers are a general term for many, and there are dozens of them around the country, locally designed and locally implemented, agencies that work with the school system with the express purpose of reducing the number of youth justice encounters. And that, in my experience as a New York City educator for 25 years, is unique. And in my experience, you’ve got schools that are frustrated with children who are going through many struggles. Schools feel disconnected from the different systems that other families might engage in or with to get support, and these children end up sometimes being thrown away. They’re housed in these detention centers that are like warehouses or charter schools are famous for pushing kids out who have all these struggles. Schools sometimes are at the end of their ability to support families and don’t know what to do next. And what places like the MARC Center do is provide that last stop to connect the family to another resource that may not have already been uncovered or may not be connected for them, and prevent children from going down a path that would lead to a justice encounter.
And again, in my experience, schools are afraid to touch the justice system, for the same reason you said, Jon, that there’s a stigma attached to it, or maybe it’s you, Amy, with the question. But if we’re going to interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline, these systems have to work together and collaborate. From the child’s experience, who goes through a school system and then a justice encounter, they’re completely different worlds, but they need to be connected if we’re going to prevent children from falling into these traumatizing environments.
[00:06:50] Anthony C: And if it works well, it’s a beautiful relationship because, really and truly, we want to develop those off-ramps from the justice system. And we found over the years that working with families on a voluntary basis early on really reduces the need for them to be in a formal setting eventually, with the justice system.
I think the key word to develop in a beautiful relationship with the justice system and the school system is trust, trust that you’re going to be able to address the basic needs that that child may come to you with and that you will definitely continue to place them in the appropriate services, but also convene back with them to share information back and forth. So it’s a 2 way street, supporting that child and along with these two major partners, community providers, that will also work in a wraparound fashion to support the needs of that child and family is very key to early on success for that family. So our goal is to be that major disruptor to the school-to-prison pipeline and really work with our educators on the front-end as best as possible.
[00:07:59] Jon M: Anthony, a Vera [Vera Institute of Justice] study in 2014, I guess 10 years ago, found that although MARC had very positive benefits for young people who came to it, there wasn’t always a match between the services that a young person seemed to need and the services to which they were referred. Was that accurate at the time? And if so, have you been able to improve these matches since then, and how? Because we know that interagency communication and so forth can always be a difficult task in practice.
[00:08:31] Anthony C: Right. I think that outcome study was done early on, I think somewhere around 2012, 2011. And we were fairly new. We were operating from the mindset of that we want to be a single point of entry. And we wanted to support the actual time from law enforcement contact to justice referral process. We want to reduce that time and basically be a single point of entry as well as support law enforcement. Now, the key to that was in order to understand that dynamic is to understand this: Systems that have a strong collaborative effort that fail are failing because of one central component, that you don’t have the most dominant or prominent agency involved, which is law enforcement. So you have to get law enforcement involvement in early on. You get that buy-in, and then you’re able to triage and change things. So, early on, we were there to reduce referral and court processing time and creating a single point of entry to support law enforcement and the district attorney’s office.
But in 2014, we almost hit a wall. We were being successful. But there was a need for change. And that’s when we used through adaptive leadership and challenges, we realized we’re doing well, but does a kid need to be placed handcuffed and placed in the back of a law enforcement vehicle to receive timely services? And that was the defining moment for us to switch our whole philosophy and really collaborate with our partners and provide direct services to the school system through child welfare and attendance to the Department of Children and Family Services, and really expanding our hours of operation to support through advertisement, letting families know, hey, if there’s a need and you don’t know what to do. There’s a crisis. You don’t know what to do. Come and see us. Let us work with you and your child. So we’ve changed that whole mindset of, let’s just focus on what we see in front of us and place what we think we need to put in place right now. We’re operating with the family as the drivers. The families are the navigators, they’re determining the needs that their child has. And we will work with them through assessments and screening instruments to get them where they need to be. So, yes, I would say at the time that was accurate, but right now we are really flourishing in an environment where families are the driver of the services that their children are connected with, and it’s very successful. Our numbers that we’re seeing even from light touches to the system and even referrals, those numbers are astronomical. And I would like to pull some of those numbers up if I can, and it’s to the tune of this since we’ve opened in 2011, we provided 39 percent of the kids that have come into our system, the MARC Center, with immediate supports within hours. Since the inception, we’ve diverted over 86 percent of all children presented to our agency with a formal referral. And 32 percent we’ve kept from a light touch. That’s just like somebody walking in saying, hey, we’re, we’re, we’re struggling with this particular issue. Can you assist us with that? And we provided immediate help to that family. And we track things through data. We’re very data-driven. We track everything. We report through the National Assessment Center through the system called ACORN. It’s an acronym for assessments in the data. And we also provide satisfaction surveys to every family that comes into our agency to see if we met the mark that they, they they were requesting, if we met their needs and we’re getting overwhelming positive feedback from those families, and that’s a voluntary survey. So, when you’re connecting with people in the appropriate way, you get the appropriate feedback that you need to know that you’re doing things the right way.
[00:12:11] Steve E: I think about a former student of mine who, when he graduated in the first graduating class of the school that I founded, he was the one who was most affected by the impending end of school, you know, and going off to middle school. He was crying and his family was teasing him about it. He was a very successful student, very well liked. After that graduation, he fell off the map and was not involved in any of our alumni events. And I didn’t hear much about him until years later when I found out from another alum of the school that he was incarcerated for conspiracy to drug trafficking and gang involvement. And in talking with his mom, she said, I just couldn’t compete with the streets, you know, and I didn’t have a way of keeping him away from the temptations of that life. And I imagine what it was like for her feeling isolated as she did. And if there was a resource like the MARC where she could go and find credible messengers, find people who could connect with this child at a different level than she could as the parent, and then we could, as the elementary school and not involved formally with him anymore, but still cared about him. And if you and your agency would connect with his school personnel and find the one person at that school who could connect with this child, maybe there could have been a way to keep him away from the streets. And tragically, after being released and being in a diversion program, he was picked up again. He was back involved in selling drugs, and he actually passed away in the jail system this year. So I think about this, the stakes of not having something like this. And we have all these resources in big cities, but we don’t have that connectivity and that seamless relationship between systems to care for children as they go through the different stages of their growth. I think about how this child, maybe it wouldn’t have, but it could have made a difference.
Anthony C
And Jon, I want to go back to your point, the question that you asked earlier with that outcome assessment study. I wanted to double back to that. Although there was concern about the connectivity to the appropriate service match, we did realize that there were factors that determined that kids were better off. We were able to reduce the case processing time from 17 days to 13 days, meaning that we were able to get a better result, a formal connector, a formal approval from the district attorney’s office to work with a child in diversion. The chances of reoffending went down by from 26 percent to 12%. And then, if I’m thinking correctly, status referrals, these are kids that are like, more of a threat to themselves, run away, ungovernable and have and have truancy issues, that decreased fivefold. So we we’ve seen early on success. And just because we did not hit the full mark that we wanted, it really pushed us to reinvent ourselves in 2014, as I mentioned earlier, to be that early disrupter to work with our community partners in a successful way. So, I just want to double back to that.
[00:15:16] Amy H-L: Wow. Anthony, Louisiana is known as a law and order state. That may be more from the outside than what you’re seeing on the inside. But given that, how are you able to elicit so much support from a lot of different stakeholders in that environment.?
[00:15:37] Anthony C: So, what happens is Louisiana has Calcasieu Parish. We’re seated at the Southwest end of Louisiana. If you look at Louisiana on a map, it it’s like a shoe. If the heel were Calcasieu Parish, Lake Charles, Louisiana, then the toe would be New Orleans, the arch would be Baton Rouge, and the strap where you pull your boot up would be Shreveport. Well, so all of these locations were involved in juvenile justice reform with the Casey Foundation through JDAI, the Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative.
At the same time, we were also working with the MacArthur Foundation’s model for change. In reforming our system, Calcasieu was very different. I always go back to the word collaborate. We had a strong collaborative effort early on, and that continues to date. Although some of the faces have changed, the mission and the goal is still there, to work to provide better outcomes for our children so that they can all be happy, healthy, and successful as they approach adulthood.
Also, in Louisiana, most of juvenile justice reform takes place at a local level, so we have a split system like everybody else. We have a state system, which is the Office of Juvenile Justice. Then you have your local systems that drive local detention, probation, and front-end services. We just chose not to bend back and take steps backwards instead of folding when things get tough and say, okay, well, this is just the way it is and this is how kids are, we’re going to go back to doing things this way. No, it just pushed us to forge on, to be more creative. You know, we’ve learned early on that through adaptive measures, you can figure out how to overcome a lot of things. We had an opportunity to exercise that early on. In 2014, when we had judicial partners who wanted to suspend our screening instrument, we had an objective screening instrument to determine whether kids should be placed in detention, to assure that we’re placing the appropriate kids into detention. Well, a couple of judges didn’t want to use that instrument. So what did we do? We became innovative. We’ve sought our law enforcement partners and told them to utilize your discretion. If you don’t think that child needs to be placed in detention or brought to our system, but instead brought to the MARC and we can service them immediately, do so. We learned early on that law enforcement doesn’t want to arrest every child that they come into contact with. This gave us the [inaudible] that not every child needs to be placed in handcuffs, put in the back of a police patrol unit, and brought to the detention center for services. So that’s how we were able to do that.
But we’re continuing to push innovation, continuing to link with best practices across the country, working with the Casey Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Assessment Center, but also being that driver behind state legislation and statewide detention standards, statewide juvenile detention alternatives collectives. We’ve been pushing reform efforts, and that’s why Calcasieu Parish is different from other areas in the state. And juvenile detention reform will continue to push forward, although the overall messaging, juvenile justice in the state has gone from reform to crime prevention. We’re not going to take that crime prevention motto. We’re going to continue to push reform efforts to support our families and meet them where they are.
[00:18:57] Jon M: Following up on, on Amy’s question, I think you’ve been involved in alternatives to detention, I think, your entire career of decades. I’m curious, have you seen significant changes in general attitudes in Calcasieu Parish over that time? And are there particular things that you think make it distinctive? So that what you were just describing of this openness to innovation and willingness to focus on what’s really good for young people. it’s just so exciting. And also needless to say, if people can be doing it there, what lessons can people be learning elsewhere?
[00:19:37] Anthony C: I go back to those two words that you will hear me say over and over, collaboration and trust. And when I say that it’s our system partners, child welfare, community, families, law enforcement, prosecutors, and our own internal team create that happy health and successful mindset. So we’re seeing through data and outcomes, the more you share successes, the more people will buy into what what you’re selling. And I think having that constant message at our children and youth planning board. It was the board that was developed through legislation in Louisiana to oversee projects as it relates to kids in your community.
And each one of those systems stakeholders that I mentioned earlier are involved with that, as well as parents and judicial partners. And I guess you can say local government elected officials. We all come together to look at these outcomes every other month just to make sure that we’re meeting our mark. And so, through data, we’re showing that early informal intervention that’s voluntary will increase that front-end work, but it decreases things that matter. Like, there’s no net-widening. Our status of diversion numbers have decreased and these are the kids once again that are either truant, running away from home, are ungovernable or kids under the age of 10 that, had they been 13 years old and committed that offense, they would be considered delinquent. So we work to help reduce that and support that.
But also even in Louisiana, in 2019, it raised the age and took 17 year olds into our system. We saw our diversion numbers continue to decrease because of the front-end work that we were doing. We also saw the number of kids being petitioned to court. Those numbers have dropped from 2017 at 275 to 2023 to 160, which is amazing. And this is including 17 year olds in that system. But most importantly, from 2017 to 2023, our detention admission numbers have dropped from 348 to 173. This shows that the system is operating up right. We are working with the school system and other partners informally, with those families, putting them in a driver’s seat to seek this work early on or the supports early on and reducing that need to be in that formal system where we know, and as Steve has been stating, once you get linked into this part of the system, it really opens that pipeline up to go into residential facilities or group home facilities and our state juvenile correctional facilities. So, that early on work and decriminalizing a lot of behaviors that, the four of us, that we’ve probably engaged in at some point in time, and we’ve never been brought to the system, but we just did things that were natural for children. And children should not be punished for natural behaviors. We need to support them and assess or screen their needs early on to figure out what traumatic experiences they are bringing to the school system, or how they’re showing up every day. You never know how a child’s showing up. And I get that from my wife, who’s a school counselor, middle school counselor who sees how a child shows up, and it’s her job to figure out why. And so if it works in a school system, in a clinical setting, it could work in a juvenile justice system in a clinical setting.
[00:23:03] Steve E: I’d like to, if that’s okay, restate a couple of things that I heard Anthony say just now with the intention of explaining some vocabulary that was new for me as I became a learner here. I found in an informal survey of my colleagues, more than half of secondary school principals don’t know what diversion is. And almost all elementary school principals don’t know what diversion is. So your audience may not know what diversion is. And Anthony’s talking a lot about diversion. Diversion, as I understand it, is alternatives to sentencing for people who have been convicted or picked up for crimes, not necessarily convicted. But it’s keeping people out of jail through community programs. It’s a version of restorative justice to repair harms and learn rather than serve your time in punishment. He’s saying that the instances of diversion are going down not because they’re putting more kids behind bars, but because they’re doing more preventive work to keep them from even getting to that stage.
And diversion is almost entirely reactive. It’s after a child’s been picked up after what he called a status offense, which is something else that was new to me, status offense being something that isn’t necessarily a crime that’s going to harm the community, but it’s something that’s going to be on your record and means you did something bad. Like you said, Anthony, harming yourself rather than your community. And he also mentioned net-widening. He said, there’s no net-widening. That’s a very important concept in law enforcement where you may have a good idea that’s preventive in purpose, e.g., let’s check every child’s backpack for guns. Great. We’re going to keep guns out of the schools. At the same time, you’re going to catch things now that would ordinarily not be caught, that don’t need to be caught brought into the system. Ordinary behaviors that are risky behaviors teenagers engage in that don’t need to be brought to a formal justice resolution. Net-widening means you’re increasing the number of people who are now involved in the system with your otherwise well-intentioned efforts. And there are ways to determine whether an effort is engaging in net-widening or not. But you’re hearing from Anthony that these efforts and prevention are actually reducing the number of kids who are housed in their detention centers and the number of kids who are brought into the system in general. So I think it’s incredible what you’re doing there. And the relationship with schools, at whatever level it is, it’s unique in my experience.
[00:25:23] Jon M: Yeah, I was, I was really struck, Anthony, by your comment about the net-widening as well because I think that also speaks to the question Amy was asking before about parents’ perhaps hesitance in getting involved and the fact that they’re seeing that this does not mean in that their kids are more likely to get involved with the juvenile justice system is really powerful.
I had a question for Steve, because I think you’ve been looking at assessment centers around the country. And I was curious if you found patterns of what makes assessment centers successful and and where they have difficulty.
[00:26:02] Steve E: I think you heard Anthony say it like beating a drum, trust and collaboration. That’s what I hear as I listen in and talk to people who are involved in these successful programs. One thing I’ve heard repeatedly is let’s connect youth and families to communities rather than systems. I’ve heard about being intentional about using data to develop off-ramps to keep kids from getting into the system in the first place.
And I’ve heard about the trust in the community. I’ve heard people and assessment centers pretty universally say the answers are already there in the communities. So our job is just to help connect the dots and to be a trusting partner to support families in going through this process.
And you hear Anthony say, put the family in the driver’s seat. In education, we have this tension where there are standards and there are top-down reforms, and there are expert educators who are imposing things on families and children. And an assessment center flips that around and says. No, the families are the experts on what their children need, and we’re here to support them and give them tools and let them drive the boat.
[00:27:11] Amy H-L: You’ve also looked at assessment centers through the country in terms of the environments that make them most likely to be successful. I was thinking about demographics or urban versus rural vs suburban. What are you seeing?
[00:27:30] Steve E: Well, that’s part of the reason why I’m passionate about this subject. I don’t see these centers taking off in big cities. Calcasieu, and I’ve learned to say it properly, Calcasieu Parish, part of the shoe, is more of a rural community. I’ve seen them successful in Clark County in Nevada; in Savannah, Georgia, I believe it is, or Augusta; Memphis; Boise, Idaho; Grand Rapids, Michigan. These are places that are mid-sized cities at best. But Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, you know, there really isn’t a stronghold for this concept. And, and my understanding in talking with people who could make a difference in New York for developing an assessment center is that big cities are just seen as too complicated, too bureaucratic too filled with turf wars, too big. Have a place, I believe it’s Grand Rapids, that has about 30,000 kids in the entire district. That’s just one district in New York City and we’ve got 32 of them. So how do you network all of these services and build trust in a kind of a small town way in a place that is so packed with people and services that are piled on top of each other. There are agencies that try to do parts of assessment center work all over New York City and other cities. How do you not duplicate efforts when you’re just trying to collaborate and connect the dots? So, I think there are many reasons why this system hasn’t developed in big cities. I don’t think it’s hopeless. I think it can happen, but it’s going to take people smarter than I am to figure that out.
[00:29:00] Anthony C: I’d like to piggyback on Steve’s statement. Other than New York, every site that you name Calcasieu Parish has worked with, either through technical assistance, in our agency in and of itself, and/or through the National Assessment Center. But one of the biggest takeaways I want the audience to receive is this: I’m very proud of some of the work that we’ve been doing with our local school system to decriminalize a lot of behaviors that would show up to the front door of some juvenile justice agencies, like the vaping issue. The school zero tolerance fights, the truancy issues; we’ve been able to decriminalize all of those types of offenses. And that was a partnership between myself, our three juvenile and family court judges, our district attorney, and our school superintendent. When you have your school superintendent and all of his or her top brass on board for this juvenile justice reform work, that’s important. That’s huge buy-in. And when you share the stage with your school superintendent at the local news media or the local news station outlets talking about ways to fight human trafficking and support front-end work, that’s huge. That’s another selling card where your community sells the service that you provide without you opening your mouth. We’ve worked with over 1500 school-age kids in Calcasieu Parish in 2023 on school fights and vapes. They came to us and said, hey, if you develop a program that can support this, we don’t want these kids to be brought to court. We don’t want these kids arrested on our campus and the judges don’t want their dockets inundated with something that’s more of a behavioral concern than a criminal offense.
So, we’ve developed the process and we’ve worked with all these kids on a voluntary basis. We worked with over 1500 kids for a first time school referral. Those who came in for a subsequent, second, referral, that number reduced to 143. And those who came in for a third referral, that number’s reduced to 10. So you went from the overall total number of kids that the school board sent to us to support them, 1,527 kids, to those coming in for a second referral to 143. And those for a third referral, 10. That’s a huge success. So whatever we’re doing, and my staff is supporting them, and the community is supporting them, it’s working.
It’s working so much they met with us about a month ago to introduce a new concept. Kids who are up for expulsion with their third school suspension. These other programs are working. How can you guys support us? We know there is an issue going on with that child. Can we refer them to you guys to see if there is a misdiagnosis? Is there some community services that need to be provided? I mean, does the parent struggle with housing? Are they homeless? Just a number of things that we can look into to determine what the outward action of that child is, and hopefully we can support that and come back with good data like we showed with the vaping situation and the truancy issues and the school fights.
So if we can revisit this conversation at this time next year, hopefully we will have additional data to support our partnership with the school system. That’s something that I’ve never seen before in the country, and I’ve been in this work for over 28 years. But we’re going to ride the wave right now. We don’t know what it’s going to look like in five years, but I would hope in five years, we’re as successful as we are now, but I am really excited about the work we’re doing with our partnership with the school system. That’s great.
[00:32:43] Jon M: It’s really exciting about the schools coming to you and saying, how can you help them with their discipline systems and avoiding expulsions and stuff?
[00:32:52] Anthony C: Yeah, and we’re not taking that, I mean, they’re still doing what they have to do on their campus. Each campus at our schools has a school resource officer as well that works with the sheriff’s office. And again, if you can work with certain things informally, it doesn’t take those, those guys and ladies off of the campus, where if there is a true need or a true emergency or a threat that they can address, that lets us deal with the low hanging fruit informally. It seems to work.
[00:33:21] Amy H-L: Steve, what would you suggest for our listeners who are in schools that could use this sort of interagency concept of an assessment center?
[00:33:32] Steve E: Well, he mentioned the J. D. A. I. community. I see it as a message board. It’s a compendium of resources. Just Google J. D. A. I. and you can join for free and it becomes a member of the community and you can learn what’s going on. You can connect with other people. I would also suggest looking at National Assessment Centers website and signing up for their updates. Your first step is the learning curve of the justice language and the justice systems. So, it’s not not directly answering your question of what do I do if I have a problem in my school, but I think if we’re going to do this, well, we to think big picture about connecting and building community, rather than being in our separate spheres,
You can act as a mini-assessment center yourself. As an educator, whatever your role is, develop relationships, walk the streets of the community where your school is, find out where and what’s happening with your families. If you’re worried about a family, ask us to come over, and sit on the couch and talk As an educator, you probably have resources and connections that you can recommend. Hey, I’ve got this, this nonprofit that I know about. You might want to try them. You’re not going to push them and force them. They are in the driver’s seat, but families want the best for their children, and they will take action when they see a possibility.
[00:34:47] Anthony C: What Steve said was so important. Being married to an educator for over 28 years, I know many teachers are already doing what Steve mentioned. They’re buying things for their kids outside, you know, from their own pocket. If a child doesn’t have a coat. My wife has provided coats and shoes and undergarments and things of that nature, and the school can be very innovative in and of itself. If you wanted to develop your own clothing closet to support coats, school uniforms and things like that, weekend and evening snacks, you could do so.
But I think as large as a city, such as New York is, with over 32 school districts, you can start. Innovation starts very small. Steve is a, is a powerful messenger. He is going to be that credible messenger to get the work done. Steve could actually start a movement with one school in one community, and then the success of that one program will quickly spread. People often say that bad news spreads faster than good news. I think it’s just the opposite. Good news spreads really fast. And once they start to see the success of that one location, because your spokespersons will be your families, the mothers and the fathers or the grandparents that are benefiting from that success, who are going to preach that message and support what you’re doing. I think it could be done. If the state of Idaho is doing it in all of their counties. Most of their cities are rural, but if it could be done statewide, it could be done in certain locales. And if it can actually be replicated in Philadelphia and Chicago, I think it could be done in New York as well. I’m just crazy enough to believe that.
[00:36:26] Jon M: Thank you, Steve Evangelista, educator, and Anthony Celestine of the Calcasieu Parish Office of Juvenile Justice Services. And thank you, listeners. Check out our new video series, What Would YOU Do?, a collaboration with the Harvard Graduate School of Education and EdEthics.
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