Tomorrow May Be Secure After All
With finals over and school out, Colleen Melody has softball on her mind. You would too if you were a competitive 16-year-old who had summer stretching out before you and a big tournament coming up in Colorado.
Tournament or not, this teenager’s world is larger than a softball diamond and to chat with her is to discover the cure for any cynicism you harbor about today’s youth. She’s personable and self-confident - a good student, a good athlete, a good kid.
Certainly not the sort of youngster you’d expect to bump into in the juvenile justice system, yet that’s where she may be headed - if she gets her wish.
Colleen is not only a second baseman but a trained mediator, and before summer fades into her senior year at Ferris High School, she hopes the courts will call upon her to work with young people who are in trouble and need help managing conflict.
About 15 years ago, some schools around the country started relying on students to steer their classmates through a constructive dispute-resolution process. Peer mediation, they call it, and it’s a big improvement over settling things behind the water tower after school.
Good school counselors and other adults can get peaceful resolution to school squabbles, too, but with the right training the kids themselves can do it quicker and get more lasting results, says Fred Schrumpf who oversees a peer mediation program for Spokane Public Schools.
“We’re using that peer influence in a positive way,” says Schrumpf, who wrote a pioneering handbook on the subject.
Colleen was in a peer mediation class that Schrumpf taught three years ago at Sacajawea Middle School.
“I thought it was really neat to put conflict management skills in the hands of 13-year-olds who want to deal with it,” she says.
Neat enough that when she was looking for a job-shadow experience as part of Youth Leadership Spokane, she approached Inland Mediation Center.
“She was really keen about continuing to work in mediation,” recalls IMC’s Marilyn Colgur.
And IMC was really keen to have youth like Colleen involved in their program, which often deals with youngsters in conflict with other youngsters, their families or the law.
Having a trained teenager as part of a neutral mediation team would be a good way to encourage participation by young people who might be put off by a room full of adults, neutral or not.
The job-shadow idea didn’t pan out because of confidentiality considerations, but Colleen did volunteer work with IMC which in turn put her through a three-day training program.
This summer, without the complication of coordinating school and court schedules, Colleen hopes there will be a chance to put that training into practice.
But helping classmates sort out a spat in school is one thing. Are adolescents really up to the challenges of cases serious enough to land in court?
Colleen doesn’t seem daunted.
“The more conflict you can prevent and give people skill to know how to resolve it themselves, the less we’re all going to have to deal with it,” she says.
As both a student and the daughter of an elementary school principal, Colleen is as aware as anyone of the volatility and unpredictability that have compounded interpersonal clashes in some communities’ schools.
What we can’t pinpoint is the frequency with which school or community violence is averted because of the work done by Colleen and other teens like her.
Littleton, she says, is a textbook example of how peer mediation might have worked.
“A lot of the kids there said they knew there was this problem. That’s when you sign somebody else up for peer mediation. You say, `I see there’s a problem and they won’t deal with it so I’m going to send it in for them.”’
No, it’s not difficult to picture Colleen Melody shifting comfortably from peer mediation in school to court-ordered mediation in the justice system.
“They can talk the accountability language as well as we can,” IMC’s Colgur says of teenagers.
Not only that, there’s a receptiveness for it among the young population whose aggressiveness is the issue. Colgur says youngsters who go through mediation say later that although they entered the process reluctantly, they wanted more instruction by the time it was over.
The aim, says Spokane Schools’ Schrumpf, is to de-escalate conflict to peace rather than let it escalate to violence.
“We’re trying to create an ethic of peace and non-violence.”
And who is going to deliver that message to kids more credibly than other kids?
“Oh, yes, we’re going to expand our involvement of youth,” Colgur says.
So besides ripping line drives and scooping up grounders and narrowing her decisions about where to attend college, Colleen Melody may spend part of her summer making the community safer for all of us.
If that sounds like an overstatement, consider Fred Schrumpf’s experience. Six years ago when he was new to Spokane and asked groups of students if they’d report a classmate who brought a knife to school, the reply was predictable. Nobody wants to narc.
“But now, kids are saying, `I would tell. I want my school to be safe.”’
Many people will find comfort in that change. If Colleen Melody is typical of our future citizens, they will think with a smile, tomorrow may be secure after.
That’s just it, though. Melody and the many others like her are not future citizens. They are citizens now and they are shouldering citizenship’s duties admirably.