Teen School And Life Skills

One troubled teenager learns how to budget for materials. Another teen orders supplies. Another teen sets up service for the day. It’s an ice stand. Small and insignificant in the scale of things but through such simple enterprises valuable lessons can be learned. Programs for troubled teens that in any way equip them for future employment is the aim of many community efforts to keep teens off the street. “If the water ice entrepreneurs weren’t scooping three flavors, organizing dollar bills in plastic containers and saying things like, “Have a blessed day, come back again,” then what would they be doing? If Normary Toro, 17, wasn’t feeding a bottle to an infant at a day-care center, rocking him back and forth in a sea of sleeping babies, then what would she be doing? These are the questions that sustain Stella Horton, executive director of the Camden Center for Youth Development, through the hot summer months.

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Horton sees a direct correlation between idle kids and troubled kids, unemployment and violence, so the nonprofit group runs two summer programs to provide real-world job training for the most at-risk youth in Camden County. One program trains teens to run water ice stands; the other places them at job sites like child-care centers. The programs are particularly significant this summer because the city school board, housing authority and government provided 420 fewer jobs to young people than they did last summer, according to the latest data.” (Unknown Source) Troubled Teen Resources offers countless examples of programs for troubled teens that were started as a result of communities working together to provide teen crisis interventions.