Vice Documentary on At Risk Youth in Chicago

[SheHateMe]

Hey guys,

http://www.vice.com/vice-news/last-chance-high---episode-1
(there's 3 episodes)

I came across this series on VICE a few hours ago and I thought I would share. This had me tearing up at some parts because these kids have issues SERIOUS with aggression, anger, and learning that they cannot manage and are not able to get adequate treatment or support (outside of the school) for. These kids need help and the school they are attending in this documentary struggles to keep these kids from slipping through the cracks. The staff at the school are constantly battling the home situation and neighborhood environments these kids live in.

This school is explicitly for kids who have extreme issues with behavior. I believe that several of the kids who are featured here need to see a specialist or need to be hospitalized for violent behavior (Crystal, in particular)

I wanted you guys to see this and to discuss what you are seeing and how it makes you feel. The third episode with the young boy with the speech problem brought me to tears. His story really broke my heart because he isn't telling everything about his home life...but, when he describes the event that leads to his speech pattern, I just couldn't deal with it. These kids are going through a lot of shit at home that they cannot escape. So, naturally, some of you can understand ( I hope) why I am so vehemently opposed to posters speaking so negatively about minority youths on this forum without offering solutions...its because of things like this. It's because this is a lot more complicated than blaming it on culture...because these kids clearly don't have a choice and they are not mentally powerful enough (notice the kid at the board in the first episode who doesn't know what 4x4 is and also the kid who nearly cried over a coat) to overcome the situations forced upon them by the environment. One of these kids in the documentary lives with a father who just got out of jail for murder and is abusive to his family. He is the only other male in the house and he is afraid to fight back because he doesn't want to get murdered too.

We live in the land of opportunity, yes. Everyone has access to education, yes....but when you watch something like this and you see what these kids have endured and how it has affected their behavior, you simply cannot oversimplify their life choices and say that everyone has the ability to overcome their environment and be successful. These kids got sucked into a black hole at birth.....I think the harsh reality is that this school won't be able to help more than half of these kids. Actually, one of them is missing (Crystal) right now.

 

[mrjminer]

Everyone has the ability to overcome their environment and be successful.

In most other countries, these kids wouldn't even have a school to go to either because there are no schools or because they would have been kicked out of all of them. If they fail to take advantage of the time they are allotted away from their home environments to be successful, there is little else that can be done. All they can be given is opportunity; whether or not they take it is ultimately their decision.

Sad, but true.

 

[QueBert]

Typically schools in poor areas are much worse than ones in middle to upper class areas. I went to high school in the ghetto and in my senior year I was taking a math class that 6th graders take. This was the only math class we had, there wasn't any college prep classes, not even shit you'd expect a normal senior to be learning. I was 18 and taking pre algebra. To say the curriculum wasn't up to par would be like saying Bill Gates has a decent amount of money. The few who actually made it to graduation were still far behind. For my freshman year I went to a "nice" school, the difference was night and day. The bad one wasn't conducive to learning shit. The mentality of a lot of the people in those areas about education is piss poor. But the quality of the school's are beyond depressing and definitely doesn't help make anyone want to learn.

 

[HendrixFan]

Everyone has the ability to overcome their environment and be successful.

In most other countries, these kids wouldn't even have a school to go to either because there are no schools or because they would have been kicked out of all of them. If they fail to take advantage of the time they are allotted away from their home environments to be successful, there is little else that can be done. All they can be given is opportunity; whether or not they take it is ultimately their decision.

Sad, but true.

There is nothing true in your statement, only empty conjecture and some perverse anti-egalitarianism. Just because some exceptional and bell curve breaking people are able to escape poverty and deviate from the norm we have of little class mobility does not mean "everyone" can do it. Different people have different limitations of all sorts.

I'll never dunk a basketball no matter how much I try. There were kids in middle school that could dunk, kids who were just barely teens. Years of effort and training only got me to be able to grab the rim but nothing more. There is a ceiling for the entire range of capabilities with each person, and everyone is different. Aside from physical feats like dunking (or swimming, running, etc, etc) people have different ceilings in the intellectual realm. Forrest Gump was never going to be Einstein, to use the extreme example, but people fall all along a bell curve range within that idea.

There are all sorts of learning disabilities, legitimate ones that restrict intellectual growth. Someone with aspergers may have savant like abilities in some limited realms but in social intellect they are inept. Someone with a photographic memory can learn easier than the norm, and that can exponentially improve their intellect and subsequently their standing in life.

I grew up poor. Really poor. I went to schools as a white kid but I was the minority there. I saw the low income struggle firsthand. I saw kids with great potential lose out because they had to decide to continue with school or to dropout to help support too many brothers and sisters in single income households. These kids could achieve if they were born into a different family/life.

I ended up at a tier one university and felt out of place, surrounded by so many kids who were lazy, ethically inept (cheating on homework, exams, etc), and generally average intellectually but because they were born into a better situation they were in position to succeed in life. Their family connections could get them into the university or even different colleges with strict entrance requirements. One guy I knew was the son of one of the Motorola VPs here in Austin. He wanted to get into engineering school but the minimum GPA to even apply was something like a 3.5, far more than he had after his first year. After his father had lunch with the Dean he got into the college of engineering. His internship at Motorola proved successful, and on and on.

It is an odd situation for me. I was born with a intellectual ceiling on the upper end of the bell curve. With little effort I breezed ahead of classmates and even skipped a few grades at different points. I had an idealized version of the real world in my head where as I moved up in social class I would be surrounded by more people of similar intellect. It didn't happen. I was surrounded by people who were largely a symbol of the aristocratic nature of our current society. Sprinkled in were a few exceptional individuals who broke the social mobility norm, but they are an exception. The numbers on class mobility in our country bear this out.

We as a society can do better. People claim to be open to the idea of competition and allowing the best to rise, but that doesn't happen. How we look after those who need help is indicative of the strength of our society. The easy thing to do is turn our back to inequity, or turn our back on people who struggle. Kids who grow up in terrible environments develop all kinds of issues. The psychological wear and tear of a disgustingly poor childhood has long lasting effects. We can do better.

Blaming the victims is absolutely disgusting.

 

[Howard]

There is nothing true in your statement, only empty conjecture and some perverse anti-egalitarianism. Just because some exceptional and bell curve breaking people are able to escape poverty and deviate from the norm we have of little class mobility does not mean "everyone" can do it. Different people have different limitations of all sorts.

I'll never dunk a basketball no matter how much I try. There were kids in middle school that could dunk, kids who were just barely teens. Years of effort and training only got me to be able to grab the rim but nothing more. There is a ceiling for the entire range of capabilities with each person, and everyone is different. Aside from physical feats like dunking (or swimming, running, etc, etc) people have different ceilings in the intellectual realm. Forrest Gump was never going to be Einstein, to use the extreme example, but people fall all along a bell curve range within that idea.

There are all sorts of learning disabilities, legitimate ones that restrict intellectual growth. Someone with aspergers may have savant like abilities in some limited realms but in social intellect they are inept. Someone with a photographic memory can learn easier than the norm, and that can exponentially improve their intellect and subsequently their standing in life.

I grew up poor. Really poor. I went to schools as a white kid but I was the minority there. I saw the low income struggle firsthand. I saw kids with great potential lose out because they had to decide to continue with school or to dropout to help support too many brothers and sisters in single income households. These kids could achieve if they were born into a different family/life.

I ended up at a tier one university and felt out of place, surrounded by so many kids who were lazy, ethically inept (cheating on homework, exams, etc), and generally average intellectually but because they were born into a better situation they were in position to succeed in life. Their family connections could get them into the university or even different colleges with strict entrance requirements. One guy I knew was the son of one of the Motorola VPs here in Austin. He wanted to get into engineering school but the minimum GPA to even apply was something like a 3.5, far more than he had after his first year. After his father had lunch with the Dean he got into the college of engineering. His internship at Motorola proved successful, and on and on.

It is an odd situation for me. I was born with a intellectual ceiling on the upper end of the bell curve. With little effort I breezed ahead of classmates and even skipped a few grades at different points. I had an idealized version of the real world in my head where as I moved up in social class I would be surrounded by more people of similar intellect. It didn't happen. I was surrounded by people who were largely a symbol of the aristocratic nature of our current society. Sprinkled in were a few exceptional individuals who broke the social mobility norm, but they are an exception. The numbers on class mobility in our country bear this out.

We as a society can do better. People claim to be open to the idea of competition and allowing the best to rise, but that doesn't happen. How we look after those who need help is indicative of the strength of our society. The easy thing to do is turn our back to inequity, or turn our back on people who struggle. Kids who grow up in terrible environments develop all kinds of issues. The psychological wear and tear of a disgustingly poor childhood has long lasting effects. We can do better.

Blaming the victims is absolutely disgusting.

A+ would read again (srs)

 

[mrjminer]

There is nothing true in your statement, only empty conjecture and some perverse anti-egalitarianism. Just because some exceptional and bell curve breaking people are able to escape poverty and deviate from the norm we have of little class mobility does not mean "everyone" can do it. Different people have different limitations of all sorts.

I'll never dunk a basketball no matter how much I try. There were kids in middle school that could dunk, kids who were just barely teens. Years of effort and training only got me to be able to grab the rim but nothing more. There is a ceiling for the entire range of capabilities with each person, and everyone is different. Aside from physical feats like dunking (or swimming, running, etc, etc) people have different ceilings in the intellectual realm. Forrest Gump was never going to be Einstein, to use the extreme example, but people fall all along a bell curve range within that idea.

There are all sorts of learning disabilities, legitimate ones that restrict intellectual growth. Someone with aspergers may have savant like abilities in some limited realms but in social intellect they are inept. Someone with a photographic memory can learn easier than the norm, and that can exponentially improve their intellect and subsequently their standing in life.

I grew up poor. Really poor. I went to schools as a white kid but I was the minority there. I saw the low income struggle firsthand. I saw kids with great potential lose out because they had to decide to continue with school or to dropout to help support too many brothers and sisters in single income households. These kids could achieve if they were born into a different family/life.

I ended up at a tier one university and felt out of place, surrounded by so many kids who were lazy, ethically inept (cheating on homework, exams, etc), and generally average intellectually but because they were born into a better situation they were in position to succeed in life. Their family connections could get them into the university or even different colleges with strict entrance requirements. One guy I knew was the son of one of the Motorola VPs here in Austin. He wanted to get into engineering school but the minimum GPA to even apply was something like a 3.5, far more than he had after his first year. After his father had lunch with the Dean he got into the college of engineering. His internship at Motorola proved successful, and on and on.

It is an odd situation for me. I was born with a intellectual ceiling on the upper end of the bell curve. With little effort I breezed ahead of classmates and even skipped a few grades at different points. I had an idealized version of the real world in my head where as I moved up in social class I would be surrounded by more people of similar intellect. It didn't happen. I was surrounded by people who were largely a symbol of the aristocratic nature of our current society. Sprinkled in were a few exceptional individuals who broke the social mobility norm, but they are an exception. The numbers on class mobility in our country bear this out.

We as a society can do better. People claim to be open to the idea of competition and allowing the best to rise, but that doesn't happen. How we look after those who need help is indicative of the strength of our society. The easy thing to do is turn our back to inequity, or turn our back on people who struggle. Kids who grow up in terrible environments develop all kinds of issues. The psychological wear and tear of a disgustingly poor childhood has long lasting effects. We can do better.

Blaming the victims is absolutely disgusting.

I don't blame the victims. What's disgusting is implying that I blame the kids for their situations because you don't know how to read. What I do, however, is hold them accountable for their actions.

They are given the opportunity to make the right decisions. I don't sympathize with giving people the freedom of choice who then repeatedly make poor decisions. You would rather blame society than the individual responsible for the decisions, though. In your mind, somehow a society that has multitudes of charities, foundations, organizations, and programs that give them opportunities, offers them safe places away from home for the majority of the day, repeatedly attempts to instill morals and respect for societal rules in them, and repeatedly attempts to educate them equates to turning their backs on them.

Pitying them into complacency or acting as if society has abandoned them and is somehow responsible for their personal decisions will do nothing other than further reinforce their current paths are acceptable.

Also, no shit Forrest Gump wasn't Einstein, and no shit people have limitations of all sorts. I just don't act as if their limitations excuses their otherwise limiting of themselves.

 

[BladeVenom]

Chicago gets more money per student than the national average.

 

[SheHateMe]

Everyone has the ability to overcome their environment and be successful.

In most other countries, these kids wouldn't even have a school to go to either because there are no schools or because they would have been kicked out of all of them. If they fail to take advantage of the time they are allotted away from their home environments to be successful, there is little else that can be done. All they can be given is opportunity; whether or not they take it is ultimately their decision.

Sad, but true.

These kids have unaddressed mental issues. This school does not have the adequate resources to give the them help they need. One of the kids has a history of physically harming teachers and stabbing students. They sent her to this school. She needs to see a specialist.

So does the boy that burned down his house with his sisters and grandmother inside. These kids don't have the ability to overcome anything.

They are in this school specifically because they are unstable. You guys seem to have tunnel vision on this issue. OK, so some kid in some other country...blah blah blah. How does that apply here? These kids live in a city where someone is murdered everyday. They live in a warzone, they live in abusive households...and they have behavioral issues. One of them is on medication, one of them has developed some weird speech pattern that he did not have previously... This same kid sat in front of the camera and told us how his father was abusing his sisters and his mother, went to jail for murder, got out and came back. He is afraid to challenge him because his father has a pistol and he thinks he will get murdered too.

Stop oversimplifying things. This isn't simply about taking opportunities vs. not taking them.

I don't blame the victims. What's disgusting is implying that I blame the kids for their situations because you don't know how to read. What I do, however, is hold them accountable for their actions.

They are given the opportunity to make the right decisions.

And what if they don't know how to make the right decision? Did you watch the video? Did you see the kid who got angry and emotional because the teacher made him put his coat in the closet? The kid was literally about to have a mental breakdown and looked like he was about to burst into tears.

Again, these kids are in this school because the district doesn't want to deal with them. This is a "therapeutic" school. From what I've seen in the documentary, it just means that people are more patient with them...but they aren't getting the adequate mental health evaluations that they need.

 

[Mai72]

I was doing crossword puzzles in 12th grade.

That's how bad my school was.

 

[HendrixFan]

They are given the opportunity to make the right decisions. I don't sympathize with giving people the freedom of choice who then repeatedly make poor decisions. You would rather blame society than the individual responsible for the decisions, though. In your mind, somehow a society that has multitudes of charities, foundations, organizations, and programs that give them opportunities, offers them safe places away from home for the majority of the day, repeatedly attempts to instill morals and respect for societal rules in them, and repeatedly attempts to educate them equates to turning their backs on them.

Pitying them into complacency or acting as if society has abandoned them and is somehow responsible for their personal decisions will do nothing other than further reinforce their current paths are acceptable.

I see you didn't really read what I wrote.

The easiest thing to do is give a cursory glance and determine that everything is fair for all participants of our society. While there are indeed a great many people who invest great time and energy on helping others it is extraordinarily foolish to think that those efforts have solved problems. Whatever band-aid it is shouldn't be construed as a fix.

I haven't watched the documentary yet (I certainly will) but I did read through SheHateMe's post and identified what she seems to think is the take away. It looks to be more anecdotal data to support what statistical analysis shows, that "disadvantaged youths" are at a disadvantage.

At the end of the day society isn't to blame for their personal decisions, but it is to blame for creating an environment of hopelessness and despair and all sorts of psychological trauma. Which leads to bad personal decisions. I'm interested in the root of the problem. That is miles away from denying there is even a problem.

 

[mrjminer]

I see you didn't really read what I wrote.

The easiest thing to do is give a cursory glance and determine that everything is fair for all participants of our society. While there are indeed a great many people who invest great time and energy on helping others it is extraordinarily foolish to think that those efforts have solved problems. Whatever band-aid it is shouldn't be construed as a fix.

I haven't watched the documentary yet (I certainly will) but I did read through SheHateMe's post and identified what she seems to think is the take away. It looks to be more anecdotal data to support what statistical analysis shows, that "disadvantaged youths" are at a disadvantage.

At the end of the day society isn't to blame for their personal decisions, but it is to blame for creating an environment of hopelessness and despair and all sorts of psychological trauma. Which leads to bad personal decisions. I'm interested in the root of the problem. That is miles away from denying there is even a problem.

I did really read what you write, but it just wasn't an effective argument. All you have really done is act as though everyone should feel guilty for offering kids opportunities that they choose not to take and make ridiculous claims like society is to blame for creating an environment of hopelessness and despair and all sorts of psychological trauma. No, that's the parents. Society is the beacon of light giving them some form of hope from their shitty home lives.

You do realize how kids typically get to a school like this, don't you? They typically get there after years of people constantly trying to put them on the right path and help them. Sorry, but after years of people doing nothing but trying to turn these kids around, having them not turn around is nothing to apologize for; they should be the ones apologizing to everyone else.

If someone was trapped in a well and someone threw a rope down for them to climb up, but they chose not to, would you also blame society? I think you would based on your both humorous and radical response. If you want to be some sort of societal apologist, feel free, but don't expect me to indulge the insanity.

I never said life was fair for all in society or that everyone gets fair opportunities. What I said was that everyone has the ability to take advantage of the multiple opportunities they are provided if so chosen. Don't worry about making constant erroneous implications, though. I'll just write it off as society off as being responsible instead of you. I'm sure you already have.

 

[Rage187]

You take the fathers out of kid's lives and this is what you get.

 

[unokitty]

Hey guys,...I think the harsh reality is that this school won't be able to help more than half of these kids. Actually, one of them is missing (Crystal) right now.

Eighty years of Democratic rule has left Chicago over 80 billion dollars in debt...

Kind of sucks, don't it?

Uno

 

[SheHateMe]

Eighty years of Democratic rule has left Chicago over 80 billion dollars in debt...

Kind of sucks, don't it?

Uno

This isn't posted in P&N for a reason.

 

[blankslate]

Is that site related to the HBO show Vice?

If so I'll definitely be looking at it. Vice does news stories that 60 minutes should be doing. My only complaint is that 1/2 an hour isn't quite enough but it's a good jumping off point with the information they present to do your own research.


.....

 

[KlokWyze]

Those VICE pieces are good.

Thing a lot of people don't get is that in order to get by in those types of environments you have to adapt. It's fine line between protecting yourself and being a criminal. I'm sure it's incredibly difficult to keep away from the bad elements and play by middle class society's rules.

Most of the "treatment" that these kids get his a jail sentence which just throws them all in with even worse elements. The system is not designed to help or improve, but just poorly control a broken system inneffectively. Private prisons, middle class doesn't care about them, etc., etc.

In essence, I find it hard to care as I've had many attempted robberies, random violent acts committed against myself and those around me countless times by the "thugs". Can't say race though, that would be "racist". I'll say words like inner city youth and shit... lol