North County Issue / Youth Violence...

Alfonso Urias, Santa Paula city councilman

I don’t know what can be done. It’s a social phenomenon that’s developed in the past four or five years, not just in Santa Paula. If we had a solution, we could bottle it up and make a fortune. We’ve had meetings in the past year with parents and educators to address the problem of gangsterism and violence. We have a report coming to us from the Police Department soon. We’re trying to develop--for want of a better name--a youth commission. I feel that gang violence and some of the shootings that have occurred are not only a problem for the police but a problem for the whole community. This means all the parents and the merchants. I think the root cause in Santa Paula is poverty, the lack of jobs and the economy. While it’s true that Santa Paula does not have amenities other communities have, we have a very successful Little League, Boys and Girls Club and a soccer program. What happens in a kid’s development in that mysterious age from junior high to senior high is something we have to find out.

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Lonnie Miramontes, Director of community services, El Concilio del Condado de Ventura

In my opinion there’s no one thing that’s causing this. It’s economics, parents, community, resources. It’s everything. I don’t think young people enjoy killing each other. But there’s so much frustration out there, there’s such a feeling of powerlessness. We deny it, we push it off to someone else, and then we act in extremes. There are two reasons why people don’t come together. One is people asking, “It’s not my kid, so why should I bother?� The other one is people asking, “It’s the Mexican kids, so why should we worry?� Maybe it’s going to hurt people, telling them certain things they don’t want to hear. We try too hard to be so polite and diplomatic. Fillmore, Ventura, Moorpark and even Simi Valley have instituted youth task forces. We of El Concilio tried until September to get people interested in doing this in Santa Paula. Some people showed up, but there wasn’t a lot of response. What we need to do as a community is come together. The situation is not going to go away. These are all our children, good or bad.

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Robert Fisher, Principal, Santa Paula Union High School

We need to improve communications between the adult community and the young people. Adults need to be aware of the young people’s needs, but the young people need to understand where the adult community is coming from. But how do you do that? The common denominator is schools. We have access to everyone. We have them all together. We need more community and parent involvement in the schools. We are doing that at the high school with back-to-school nights, but somehow we need to get the leadership of the community and the young people together. What I’m seeing so often is that kids who go to your community meetings are not necessarily the average kids on the street. Maybe one way is to select middle-of-the-road students on each campus. We need to use the schools and get representatives of average students and sit down and talk to them. If you just advertise in the paper, you won’t get the silent majority of the young persons out there.

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Julian Escobedo, Senior, Santa Paula Union High School

People get into gangs to challenge the other side or the law. It’s part of living--you always have to challenge something or someone. Instead of trying to help other people in gangs,people should help themselves and start getting involved in activities. Young people need more attention. They need more activities and jobs so that they can see into the future and see what they could be doing with themselves. By living day by day, you don’t get a taste of the future. If some seniors of the high school could be invited to businesses to see what could be done, or if more people came and talked to the school, people with professional degrees, that might make a difference. If you never get a taste of the outside, you never want to go out there. Instead of being treated like a minority, Latinos should be treated like the majority, which they are in California. I wouldn’t feel challenged if I knew I was the majority. When you feel you are a minority, you always feel you have to be opposed to someone. We should be treated like who we are, instead of a minority.

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Dolores Corral, Santa Paula resident and parent of a teen-ager

For anyone who’s made a mistake in their life, you need to reach out to them when they are able to make a change. I believe that the future of our kids needs to be assessed and reviewed and worked on a lot more than it is now. We need to reach out to the youth and ask them what can be done. In order to do that, the community needs to get together and reach these kids with youth counseling. There’s no youth center providing a lending ear. There aren’t any real activities provided for the youth in this town. There isn’t a skating rink. The job-training council in Oxnard has worked with youth throughout Ventura County both during the school year and during the summer, helping them with their work maturity and placing them into job-training programs. These sorts of programs are needed in Santa Paula to develop self-esteem. We also need to work with kids who don’t talk to each other and help them get to know each other. I think a large spectrum of the youth don’t talk to each other because they don’t have much in common.