The Best Hope | Oregon Social Learning Center

by The Register-Guard Staff

Her husband was long gone. He was imprisoned by the time her first son was born, and he was dead when her second son most needed raising.

She moved the boys from California to Oregon, as far away from that past as she dared go. She got off welfare, got steady work and climbed into the managerial ranks at a Springfield department store. She did the best she could for her boys. When her oldest boy was 16, the past caught up. He got in a scuffle with a neighborhood boy, pulled out a butterfly knife and stuck the kid 11 times, injuring him badly. The judge sent him to the state pen in Salem, and then she had one boy left.

Coming home from work each night, she would find J.R. whirling around the cul-de-sac on his silver Mongoose stunt bike. He was 13, a student at Roosevelt Middle School, and in that in-between stage of growing up. He would get down on his knees and play with Lincoln Logs one minute and then get up and dance to Coolio the next. He seemed to be doing OK.

Then one day the phone rang.

The principal was on the line telling J.R.’s mom that the boy was under arrest. On his way home from school, he had threatened a kid for bike parts. He had pulled a knife.

That afternoon, her fears hemmed her in as she waited for his release. She would lose the boy, just like her husband. He would slip away, just like his brother.

“No,” she said. She wouldn’t allow it to happen. She would set a new course for him. “I was going to do whatever it took,” she said.

The luckiest thing may have been that J.R.’s mother landed in Eugene because the city leads the country in knowledge about steering a kid away from violence.

The Eugene-based Oregon Social Learning Center spent 15 years creating a program that is moving kids off the violent trajectory – not all kids, or even a majority, but more than just about anybody in the country has been able to do.

The U.S. Justice Department was impressed enough to pay the “Monitor” program staff to help start similar programs across the country, beginning with Baltimore.

Another hopeful local effort: Parole and probation officers at the Lane County Department of Youth Services took a promising national model and adapted it to kids here. The Violent Offender

Rehabilitation and Treatment, or VORT, program is also getting significant results.

“If a child can’t be helped in Eugene, Oregon, he probably cannot be helped,” said Terrie Moffitt, an international authority on violent youths.

The two local programs, Monitor and VORT, share some staff, but they also share central principles: Changing kids requires an unheard of level of commitment from professionals; therapy should be tailored to each youngster; and for a kid to change course, the family must change to support the new direction.

The commitment is intense. VORT therapists meet families more than halfway, conducting all of the therapy sessions in their homes. Monitor case managers give parents their home phone numbers and encourage them to call day or night. If the parent has no phone, the Monitor program will install one and pay the monthly fee. “We say, ‘Here’s the deal,'” said Patti Chamberlain, the Monitor director, “You’re ours now, and by God…”

The VORT and Monitor professionals have considerable experience; VORT has worked with 62 families and Monitor 250, so far. In each of the programs, the professionals meet each week to figure out how to move each family further along.

They are eclectic in their choice of therapies. The Monitor program, for instance, had a parent count the minutes that a boy threw a tantrum. Later, the boy was required to go outside and dig for the same amount of time, so he could learn the concept of “digging yourself in deeper.”

The programs are committed to families but for an intensely practical reason: Families remain when the programs are done, and if the families don’t support a kid’s change, the kid will revert to violence.

“The truth is, the system is not going to raise these kids forever,” said Peter Sprengelmeyer, a Monitor case manager. “It has to be made to work within the family.”

By the time families get to VORT or Monitor, they are on the verge of disaster. J.R.’s mom was still reeling from her oldest boy’s trial, five months before. She devoted weekends to driving to Salem for visiting hours. She was trying to give her oldest son hope for a future on the outside.

At the same time, she was keeping up the home for J.R. She is a small and tidy woman, who wears her hair pinned up and her blouses buttoned and tucked. She keeps her townhouse spotless.

Then J.R. pulled the knife, and she wanted to deny it. She hated going down to the Skipworth juvenile jail complex to meet with a probation officer, but she had to go. Her appointment was in May, six days after the Thurston High School shooting.

The probation officer told her that her son qualified – based on a coin flip, because it’s an experiment – for the Violent Offender Treatment and Rehabilitation program.

J.R. was a violent offender, the officer was saying, just like Kip Kinkel, who was then in a jail cell a flight of stairs and a twist of the hallway from where they were sitting. At that moment, her tears fell. “It killed me that he was in that category,” she said.

Another woman, who sat in the same chair months before, was a step closer to losing her son. He was aggressive as a little kid, too rough on the playground, but when he got into middle school his anger exploded. Like J.R.’s mother, she agreed to tell her story on the condition that her son’s full name not be used.

D.A. was born squarely in the middle of her seven children. He lived in one southwest Eugene house his whole life. His dad was a truck driver, his mom a gym manager and soccer coach. Between them they knew everybody for miles around. She kept an open, friendly – if a little messy – household.

Then, when D.A. was 11, his mother and father separated and later divorced. His father’s departure sent his mother into a tailspin. She mourned the relationship in front of the children. She leaned heavily on her middle son. “He was the glue, the priest, everybody’s confidant,” she said.

When D.A. was 14, he slid into a series of increasingly violent events. On more than one occasion, he told his family not to go to sleep at night, lest he kill them, police reports said. He told his 8-year-old brother he would drill a hole in his skull and “watch the brains ooze out.”

The boy abandoned his friends at Jefferson Middle School and began to hang out with a tougher crowd at the downtown mall – “nasty, scuzzy, dirty, rotten, lying, thieving degenerates,” his mother said. “They were everything he was raised not to be.”

His very appearance changed, his face grew hard as if it had been chiseled, she said. “He no longer looked like my son.”

Last fall, D.A. took his mother’s gym keys. She broke down the door to his bedroom to get them back. When she turned around, he whacked her with a pool cue, raising a 10-inch welt across her back. He told the police officer who arrived to arrest him: “One day I’m going to end up killing that fat bitch.” The incident landed him in the VORT program.

But before his mom and his probation officer could make any progress, D.A. got into a fight in his bedroom with an older brother, breaking a beer bottle and stabbing him in the arm and back – making deep and bloody gashes.

The juvenile judge decided the VORT program wasn’t enough and put D.A. in detention for 97 days.

Even then, the judge decided against a return home. “It’s hard to solve some of these problems in the chaos of the family,” said J.P. Davis, a case manager for the Monitor program, where the judge sent the boy.

Both the VORT and the Monitor programs work to change the family. With VORT, the youngster remains in the home throughout the therapy.

Within Monitor, boys live for about seven months with a specially trained foster family – an idea so painful to D.A.’s mom that she still can’t bring herself to say the word “foster”.

Since July, D.A. has lived with Monitor foster parents Shannon and Jerry Stone in a woodsy neighborhood in Springfield, near Douglas Gardens Elementary School.

He’s the couple’s 18th foster son since they joined the program seven years ago. The Stones, in their late 40s, got started at the urging of their pastor, who saw Shannon’s sadness when the last of the couple’s three children was preparing to leave home. Shannon is a homemaker, Jerry a welder.

In the beginning, the Stones didn’t know what to expect from the boys. The programs doesn’t hold anything back from foster parents. These teenagers are troubled: They’ve been arrested an average of 14 times, with an average of four felonies.

The Stones remember thinking: Maybe we’ll have to sleep with our bedroom doors locked.

At the beginning, they took a course at the Oregon Social Learning Center. Now, they attend weekly problem-solving meetings with other foster parents. They report to program staff by telephone each day, and they enjoy 24-hour backup from therapists and case managers. At times, they have taken two foster kids at once.

They learned to treat a new kid like a fond 2-year-old. They get him up in the morning, show him how to make his bed, help him brush his teeth and get ready for the day. They stay with him every waking moment.

All of the Monitor kids are on a point card behavior modification system. For each of these tiny actions, the child gets points. If they don’t go along, they lose points. Foster parents are effusive with praise for any positive movement. The kids cash the points in for privileges, such as free time or phone calls.

The foster parents extend the point system to school. Monitor kids switch to their foster parent’s neighborhood school. That gets them away from bad peers and affords them a fresh start with teachers. The teachers, who know the Stones well from previous kids, make a daily rating of the kids’ behavior. The foster parents then work with the boy to improve behavior and school work.

Both the Monitor and VORT programs send young college graduates to hang out with kids and coach them through social problems, such as meeting nondelinquent friends. These skill trainers and behavior support specialists teach “what to do on a Saturday night when you aren’t drinking, drugging or vandalizing,” said Sprengelmeyer, the Monitor case manager.

The specialists come to the kids with pockets full of gum, beef jerky, Altoids, Skittles and certificates for Whoppers for instant rewards. They try to get kids hooked into teams or groups or hobbies that will sustain them after the program is over. They try to give kids a lawful way to get the adrenaline rush that a lot of them seem to need, Davis said. Some examples: bicycling and rock climbing.

But the most powerful lesson comes from the foster parents themselves. The kids find out what it’s like to live in a relatively peaceful, relaxed family. By example, the foster families teach the norms of familial interaction.

Shannon, as it happens, is the soft touch, always sympathetic and willing to encourage. Jerry has developed his own style, sometimes to Shannon’s chagrin.

When a new boy comes, Jerry will lay down the law: No hitting, no scuffling, no wrestling, no horsing around, he tells them. “I don’t touch you. You don’t touch me.” When a boy stinks, Jerry rather indelicately gives them a stick of deodorant and tells them to use it. When they jabber, he says, “I’m thinking right now; I don’t care to talk.”

Jerry learned that maneuver from foster boy No. 1, a hyperactive 12-year-old who refused to go to bed at night and yelled Christmas carols out of his bedroom window to the annoyance of the neighbors.

“I was at the point,” he said, “that I just wanted to survive him being here.” After that experience, the only way Jerry agreed to boy No. 2 was on Shannon’s promise he’d be older and quieter. Of course, he had a problem too – stealing.

Still, about half of the boys gravitate to Jerry rather than Shannon. Boy No. 5, for instance, wouldn’t

talk to anybody in the Stone household when he first arrived. During free time, he say in his room and sulked. Then, one day, Jerry invited him along on a fishing trip to Fall Creek, where he thrilled to the experience of reeling in a crappie. “From then on, he was a good kid,” Jerry said. “It just opened up a door. He started talking.”

Boy No. 8 had a lot of trouble at school, especially with one teacher. “He just knew this teacher didn’t like him,” Shannon said, “and that he couldn’t do anything right.” She coached the boy through his impatience and dislike of the teacher. They talked about it day after day. Then, one afternoon, she picked him up after school.

He hopped into the car and flopped his daily report card on the dash so she could see it. The troublesome teacher had scratched the “good/poor” labels off the top of the card and penciled in “excellent.” When Shannon looked at the boy, he was grinning like she’d never seen.

Almost without exception, the Stones end up liking their foster boys. The behavior modification system works fairly well. The kids straighten up and become contributing members of the family.

“You could take almost any delinquent kid, get them away from their negative peer group, spend a little time with them, and you will like them,” Davis said. “We have a lot of fun, cute delinquent adolescents in our program.”

But the Stones are never sure their foster kids will stay on the positive course the couple tries to set for them. Jerry sometimes gets the feeling a kid is on a dead-end street. Sometimes he’s right.

Jim Burkett, the Stone’s foster son No. 7, later stabbed a man to death on a downtown Eugene Street. Burkett admitted sticking his victim 19 times during the 1995 killing.

The latest study of the Monitor program found that 59 percent of the subjects – boys ages 12 to 17 – had been arrested at least once in the year after treatment began. But that compared with the control group, which had a 93 percent arrest rate.

“With these kids it’s a crap shoot,” said Bob Van Iderstine, probation officer for the Monitor program. With D.A., the Stones’ point card system worked. He was so well-behaved Shannon couldn’t believe what he’d done to his mother: “I kept thinking, this isn’t the one I have.” The boy has made a major change, Van Iderstine agreed. “I’m impressed.”

Parents cannot see their children for the first three weeks they’re in the Monitor program. The “blackout” period helps kids focus and get on track. After that, the case manager arranges limited home visits. D.A.’s mom longed to see her son, and when she finally did, she said her “heart sighed.” His face had relaxed and softened. “My baby’s back,” she remembers thinking.

Not quite. The lesson that the VORT and Monitor program learned is this: If a kid is to change course for good, his environment must change to support his new direction. That sounds far easier than it is. The therapists and case managers must change deeply ingrained behavior patterns dating back almost as far as the day the youth was born. They also must treat the parents’ own problems, such as drug use and depression.

After living for years with kids who are going so wrong, the parents are often “distressed, demoralized, defeated and cynical,” Chamberlain, the Monitor director, said in a study.

Their despair is amplified when they realize how well their children are doing in foster care. D.A.’s mom overheard her son laugh and joke with the Stones when she called them on the phone one day. She was floored by the realization that the boy had changed for them, and not for her.

“I was a no-good mom,” she said. “I couldn’t recognize my son was in pain.”

But therapists try to whisk parents past this sad juncture. “We have the time. We have the resources, we have the history, and this is your only kid. We’ve worked with hundreds of these kids,” Sprengelmeyer said.

D.A.’s mom also learned to grieve her lost marriage without involving her kids.

In other cases when a parent has a drug problem, the therapists will suggest treatment and follow-up by asking for regular urinalysis tests. The courts don’t require this of parents, but they will often do it for the sake of their kids, Sprengelmeyer said.

Then the therapists, case managers and probation officers associated with the VORT and Monitor programs converge to teach parents how to change the picture for their kids.

Probation officers assure the kids that their parents now have the full authority of the court behind them. The probation officer is liable to stop by to check up on them at any time. If the kid messes up, he must call the probation officer and confess, and not let the officer learn from somebody else.

In the case of J.R., the boy who pulled a knife on a kid, the VORT therapist taught his mom how to keep tabs on her son. The therapist asked about the boys J.R. was with the day he pulled the knife. Did you know those kids? the therapist asked. No, the mom replied.

Did you know their parents? No, she said. Did you know where they lived? No, she said. “I was embarrassed when I was answering those questions,” she said.

Six months later, she would answer ‘yes’ to every one of those questions. When she’s at work, J.R. is required to page her every two hours and then be at home by the phone when she calls back. “If I don’t stay right on top of him and structure his day,” she said, “he won’t do what he needs to do.”

The therapist helped J.R. appreciate how demanding he was the minute his mom got home from work. She taught him to wait 15 minutes before asking for dinner, or anything else. He learned to kiss his mom on the cheek and ask about her day.

“I can’t tell you what that means to me,” J.R.’s mom said.

Parents learn a new and different way of talking with their children during weekly therapy sessions.

D.A.’s mom, who used to get into battles with her son, changed her style. “I’m not a dictator; I’m more of a president. I can work with situations without being mean and aggressive.”

She learned to use the same point card that her son was on in the foster home. She rehearsed how to anticipate the situations that previously led to violence. For instance, D.A.’s family has a huge stereo system with speakers to rattle the neighborhood, and D.A. used to crank up the volume.

“Turn it down,” his mom used to say. And he would say, “No.”

“Turn it down,” she would scream. And he would yell, “NO.”

She would yank the plug or switch off the power at the fuse box. He would pick up one of her hurricane lamps and smash it against the wall. He once threatened to ignite a pool of kerosene and burn her up, a police report said.

Now, on home visits, she asks him to please turn down the stereo. If he refuses, she deducts points on his point card, which means he may lose some TV or other free time later in the day. These days, he almost always complies. “He hates to lose points,” she said.

For parents, this kind of change is a great relief. At this point, their depression often lifts and they, too, begin to look a little better. Their dress may be cleaner and crisper, Sprengelmeyer said. They may laugh and talk a little more, including to neighbors they hadn’t spoken with for years.

In the Monitor program, families are reunited when everybody agrees that the parents and kids are ready.

The process begins with afternoon visits, daylong visits, weekend visits and then the homecoming. Therapists are available 24 hours a day to ensure the transition goes smoothly.

In the VORT program, therapists give the families assignments to ensure the changes are solid enough to endure when the program is done.

D.A.’s mom is hoping for a reunion in February. She said she’s prepared to do “whatever I have to” to keep D.A. on the happy course that the Stones set him on.

If it takes a daily consultation with a Monitor therapist, she said she will keep the phone at hand. If it means keeping her son on a point card system for life, she said she will keep a pencil in her pocket.Her husband was long gone. He was imprisoned by the time her first son was born, and he was dead when her second son most needed raising.