Sean C. Morgan
A Sweet Home High School class on civics and government takes a hands-on approach that may end with the creation of a “youth advisory council” for the City of Sweet Home.
City Manager Craig Martin was invited by Nancy Ellis’ Civics and Government II class to answer questions they had about Sweet Home. He met with the class just before Christmas break.
“I thought this was really great,” Ellis said. “Each person that spoke had a really different insight. From a teaching viewpoint, that was a real highlight for me.”
In his opening remarks, Martin told the juniors and seniors that City Council had made a priority of hearing from youth in the community and creating a youth advisory council.
Students asked questions and offered comments on a variety of areas about Sweet Home, topics ranging from the advisory council and a proposed skate park to sex offenders living in the community.
They asked how the community can keep smokers and illegal behavior out of the park.
“It’s kind of like a park,” Martin said. One of the reasons the city and Kiwanis want to build the skate park next to the School District’s Central Office is because it will be visible to the public reducing the likely amount of illegal behavior unlike parks that are isolated and hidden from public view.
It will likely be self-policed, Martin said. If it starts getting “tagged” or problems with alcohol or drugs become prevalent, it would most likely be closed. “In my mind, it has to be the people that use it talking to the people that use it.”
“I can tell you right now, it’s not going to work,” one student said. “There’s so many dropouts that don’t even care.”
“Yeah, it’s going to be vandalized,” Martin said. “The park (Sankey) gets vandalized. There’s going to be fights. There’s fights at school.”
The question is whether it can be managed and controlled, he said.
Students asked about the details of the project as Martin explained what would happen. The project has approximately $50,000 available and appears before the Planning Commission in a request for a conditional use permit on Feb. 3.
Students asked about the proposed golf course resort, called the Resort at Salmon Run, and a lakeside development that will eventually include a marina. In neither case, do they see construction activity.
Projects as large as those two take time, Martin said. Both are involved in processes leading up to construction. Both projects have already met city requirements and are dealing with other public agencies or are in design phases.
Another student asked why Sweet Home has so many sex offenders living here.
“Those are only the ones that we know of,” Martin said. Others have not been caught and prosecuted. He is not sure whether Sweet Home has more than any other community either based on population. He pointed out that Sweet Home does have the lowest serious crime rate for any city in the county.
Discussion also turned briefly on zoning and private property rights.
Youth are often discounted as inexperienced, John Corbin said. He asked Martin whether the council would listen to students on the youth advisory council and think through what they have to say on different subjects.
“I believe it would,” Martin said. A lot of times youth and adults may ask the council to do something, and it must say no, such as if students wanted to skip school on Fridays.
“I approached Mrs. Ellis about the concept of a youth advisory council,” Martin said. “It is an opportunity for you in the community ? to be involved in the governance of the community ? an opportunity for youth to have input in decision making.”
The council would provide input, ask questions and take on projects that it deems important to youth, Martin said. It would have a small budget to pursue those interests.
When needed, the youth council could set aside time on the City Council’s agenda to talk about underage smoking, the skate park or whatever the council might choose.
The City Council may ask the youth council to provide input on long-term decisions for the community.
“If some of the kids in this group were to be on that youth advisory council, I think the City Council would be impressed,” Ellis said of her class. “I was really impressed that the city could make the youth advisory council a priority.”
The students complain that they are not a priority in the community, Ellis said, although this community has obviously cared about kids in many projects.
“I think that’s sometimes what a class like this is about,” Ellis said. It helps students to look at things more objectively.
In its second year, students participated in a variety of projects. Among them, they were asked to go out and observe what they see in the community. Their observations ranged widely, from the negative to the positive.
One came back after expecting to find litter in one area and reported there was none. In other observations, based on drawings of what they observed, students saw the community as churches, bars and Buck’s latrines. Another group keyed in on drugs and methamphetamines.
“They’ll make statements, and I ask, ‘Is that true?'” Ellis said. The class encourages students to check it out.
“It was my brainchild to try to take some of the things they learned as sophomores and make it real,” Ellis said. “You can’t talk about it in third person.”
Among their other projects, they will take a survey of a cross section of the community and they’ll take The New Era apart to get yet another perspective on the community.
In the end, they will choose and research a problem, Ellis said. Last year’s class, the first one, chose hunger, which it saw as one of the major problems in Sweet Home.
“We chose to do some sort of public awareness campaign to let people know about (Sweet Home Emergency Ministries),” Ellis said. The class organized a food drive for May Week and wrote letters to churches and from a political angle the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which did not respond.
There are still campaign fliers hanging around town.
The next step after the class is to get the youth council off the ground, Ellis said. She planned to meet with Martin to discuss the next steps in that project. Ellis wants to see it meet for the first time before the skate park hearing at the Planning Commission.
“I think it would really empower the kids,” Ellis said. “This is a place to have a voice. I could see this as an asset to our community.”
“I enjoyed it,” Martin said of his time with the class. “I’d like to go back, and we’re going to be pursuing the youth advisory council.”
The students “asked insightful questions, and to me it was interesting what was on their minds,” Martin said.