When I was a kid, we used to make jokes about being “sent to Juvey. “ Juvey was Juvenile Hall, where you go if you’re in “real” trouble as opposed to just the garden variety trouble you get in when you’re a regular kid. Juvey involves the police. It’s just one step from jail. When I was a kid we lived in the suburbs, and they didn’t have courts in our town. You did anything serious you went to the county seat, Woodland. You were no longer in the charge of the school district, you were “in the system.”

Today I’ve had a chance to see the inside a school set up for when you’re expelled from regular school because you committed a felony. This school is locked. Each classroom has a second person sitting in with the teacher whose job is to keep discipline. Sort of like a bouncer. The kids wear uniforms. If their behavior is good, they wear a yellow belt. They sit down, they listen.

Today, on the first day back at school after Christmas break, the students can hardly keep their eyes open.  They’re almost all guys; I see only four girls all day. They live at home and they stayed up late last night, I am told. “Actually I never did go to bed,” one tenth grader tells me.  I ask if anyone went to bed before 4 a.m. No one says yes.

One has to admire their fortitude in showing up at school on zero hours of sleep. They apparently want to be here not because they like it but because  if they don’t come, it doesn’t count off on their “sentence.” Before they can go back to their home high school, they’ve got to count off a certain number of days, generally ordered by a judge. 

Classes are small, averaging 4 or 5 students. Some topics of conversation are gangs, movies, and when you are getting out. Making trouble means you’ll stay here longer; even refusal to do the work can get you lost points and delay your return “home” to your own high school.  

What are the issues for teachers here? The classrooms are under control, but the students are not, let us say, parituclarly engaged in their schoolwork. I am told academics are not make or break here. I try to teach the students but wind up feeling foolish for doing so, even though they show some interest. After all, is academic learning relevant in an environment like this? I see signs of intelligence in the work turned in. The students are  rather clever.  I ask them what they want out of life.

They want to be rich, and not be bored. They don’t see why they should go to school, what good will it do? I want to reach out to them, tell them I understand, but I have to be honest and admit to myself that I really don’t.

So muc h of what you learn in this life takes time to sink in. Perhaps the only thing they really have to learn here is willingness to control the impulse to disrupt, to refuse, and to rage. After this hyper-controlled environment, perhaps, there has to be some growth. We must wait and see. I’m reminded of a Bob Dylan song my dad sent to me once, “Walls of Red Wing” about the boys reform school in Minnesota,  and it seems to me that it must have been so much the same:

… some of us will wind up in Saint Cloud Prison,
And some of us will wind up being lawyers and things,
And some of us will wind up, and meet you at a crossroads,
From inside the walls, the walls of Red Wing.