Juvenile Hall School Has a Say

Elk Creek School is the Juvenile Hall School for the county, housing students between 6th and 12th grades. These students are most at-risk in social and environmental behaviors, which have landed them in the facility. They are a very disengaged population educationally, economically and socially.

Exploring Environmental Issues in the Places We Live is a curriculum that was developed by Project Learning Tree. It gets students involved in learning about their communities through studying its strengths and weaknesses, and then enables students to go about making positive changes through public action. Our project involved researching the county center, brainstorming kid-friendly facilities, and then placing them in areas on a map throughout town that were bereft of child-centered areas. We invited a county supervisor in to the facility to present these ideas to him, and he took our ideas to a Board of Supervisors meeting for their input. What came of this meeting was then brought back to the facility by the supervisor, who explained that several committees had been formed to develop this plan into action, including a Youth Council that the students were invited to join once they left the facility.