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| New Haven Register - Employment, safer neighborhoods top city kids’ wishlists at youth forumAngela Carter NEW HAVEN - City youths repeatedly cried out for employment opportunities and safe places to “chill” with their friends after school and on weekends during a two-hour town hallstyle meeting Thursday. In a poem that Mercedes Ingram wrote spontaneously during the forum, the 17-yearold summed up the frustration city kids feel in the face of violence at their schools and in their neighborhoods. “Bullets flying. People dying. Families crying and no one’s trying trying to stop the madness with all this sadness going around. It’s bringing down our town,” she wrote. “How can we as a town turn the frowns upside down? Let’s create more afterschool programs to help rescue our fellow man.” Ingram said kids need “more options” for activities in their free time. The Board of Aldermen’s Youth Services Committee sponsored the event at Hill Regional Career High School along with Yale students involved with the Research Group on Youth at the university’s Roosevelt Institution. The students are investigating the quality and availability of youth services in New Haven and the attitudes that youth and residents harbor toward those services. Committee Chairwoman Frances “Bitsie Clark, D-7, said the panel will review the comments of participants and develop an action plan for responding to the needs expressed by more than 70 children as young as 7 and as old as 18. Jamilka Carrasquillo, 16, a student at Common Ground High School, invoked the name of civil rights icon Rosa Parks in her stand for young females who lack self confidence. “Girls need to respect themselves. They need help with knowing who they are and knowing about wonderful women like Rosa Parks. We need more programs for women who have self-esteem issues,” Carrasquillo said. Then there were the thoughtful comments about safety in city streets from Ashly Santana, 16, and Graviel Martinez, 17, who advocated for traffic-calming measures that adults are revisiting in the wake of 7 motor-vehicle related deaths along Ella T. Grasso Boulevard since February. “We need more speed bumps for cars,” Martinez said. Martinez also used the microphone to lobby for a career day for teenagers who want to work, and for resources for the afterschool Ring One boxing program, in which he participates. “We need more places on the weekend to chill,” Santana said. Ten-year-old Jaquan Simmons suggested bringing children and families together from rival neighborhoods as a way to combat gang activity and shootings. “We need to get neighborhoods and gangs to sit down and speak together instead of using weapons,” he said. “They might change and go to school and their life might come out better than if nobody speaks to them.” While the youngsters diligently brainstormed on their problems and the solutions they desire, parents and youth service providers said the issues are not new and the city needs to do more than have meetings about them. “Kids have been saying this for years. We need more action and less talk,” social worker Barbara Fair said. Deputy Majority Leader Sergio Rogdriguez, D-26, said Mayor John DeStefano Jr. and the aldermen are working on earmarking funds for the Youth@Work program and a youth initiative yet to be launched. “In allocating that money, we need to be clear about how we leverage it and sustain a real, comprehensive youth strategy,” he said.
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