Youth & Community

Mayor Reeves and Commissioner May Say Money Is Not the Problem

The mayor and a county commissioner agree that kids, ages 14 to 17, fall through the cracks. Now they have to decide what to build for them.

Mayor D.C. Reeves is ready to put city money behind a program for at-risk teens. At his Wednesday press conference, he said the funding is not the hard part. Deciding what to fund is.

• Reeves was responding to Commissioner Lumon May, who asked the Children’s Trust last week to set aside $1 million in reserves for kids ages 14 to 17. May joined Rick’s Blog Live the same day and said the figure may reach $2 million. Reeves described a scenario in which May secures $1 million and the city adds “a couple hundred thousand dollars” for a joint effort.

“In this job, 80% of the time the difficulty of getting something done is finding the funding to do it. This one is an outlier.”—Mayor D.C. Reeves

Why teens are the gap. May said Escambia County has spent close to $18 million to $20 million on after-school programs for children up to about age 12. Teenagers get far less, and he said the results show it.

• Probation: May said Escambia County has the highest number of teenagers on juvenile probation.
• Civil citations: He said the county has one of the highest civil citation rates, and that its raw numbers top even Broward and Miami-Dade.
• Downtown: May said young people hang out on Palafox at night because they have nowhere to go.
• Schools: Middle schools here have no athletic programs, and high school leaves out kids who are not gifted athletes.

Why older teens are hard to reach. Reeves said he and May talked again this week about “the difficulty and complexity of really getting in the game with 14-, 15-, 16-year-olds.”

• May made the same point from the other side. You can drive by community centers at four or five o’clock, he said, and find them empty, because programs built for adults’ ideas of what kids need do not draw teenagers. His fix is to design programs with the kids themselves and give them a reason to come, not force them into tutoring.

What the program could look like. Neither leader has settled on a design, but between them they laid out the options.

• Sports and activities: May would start with middle school football and add golf, tennis and performing arts. Reeves floated midnight basketball.
• Support staff: May wants behavior technicians, counselors, social workers, tutors and coaches, in partnership with the school district.
• Parents: Reeves asked what government and nonprofits should tell adults about raising their minor children, and whether parents can do more.
• Neighborhood schools: May said his district has no middle school, and that extracurriculars give kids a reason to stay in their own community.

Pilot now, or study first? May wants to move. “We don’t need to study the problem. We have the data and the statistics,” he said. “Let’s pilot a program and see if it works.”

• Reeves shares the urgency but is wary of the process. “We might spend two years figuring out what we want to do,” he said. He also warned that if the mayor or a commissioner forges ahead on a pilot, “there’s a lot of second guessing about how that gets done.”

The national picture. Reeves said no city has cracked this. “If every city had figured out… do this many midnight basketball leagues, do this many, then we’d all be doing it,” he said. He is bringing the police chief to the U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in San Diego, and called the mayors and police chiefs session on teen violence the one he is “most excited about.”

• Working together. Reeves said May’s request inspired him to call the commissioner and ask, “What can we do?” He said he would entertain a joint city-county effort if there is “some critical mass value” in it.