Extension Update:
Community Resource Specialist, David Hill.

Pretending To Not Know!

I have a question for you today. Have you ever been alarmed, surprised or even bothered a little by discovering something that, upon reflection was fairly obvious? Well, I have, three times in the past two weeks, in fact. I'm alarmed from hearing practically the same observations about communities from three different experts, speaking to three distinctly different audiences, using three different approaches to analyze local information, yet all three, one an expert about youth gangs, the second, a member of the area drug enforcement task group and the third, a University of Missouri rural sociologist who studies social and economic data about people in Missouri, America, and other parts of the world. All three get out to meet local people. Each was concerned with identifying barriers to maintaining community vitality and identifying causes to prevent recurrence of the barriers instead of just treating the symptoms. They offered clues to addressing causes of barriers to community vitality, most internal and some external.

So what alarmed me? The common denominators of affordable housing shortages, the growing gap between skills needed in the workforce for companies to be competitive and the skills of those available to work, declining household incomes when the percentage of persons employed increases, a rise in the percentage of persons receiving some form of public assistance in order that have ample food and adequate nutrition, high school completion rates, family violence incidents and juvenile arrest rates.

Knowledge about these factors at the community level were cited by the youth gang expert this way: "Gangs, he said, are strongest where the community is weakest. Gangs come in and find vulnerable kids. They are very good at youth development, he stated. They start 5-H Clubs by attracting the homeless, helpless, hungry, hugless and hopeless. Crossroads towns, he noted, are particularly vulnerable.

Drug trafficking can best be prevented by caring communities made up of caring parents and neighbors who support them, the law enforcement experts testified. They noted the main purpose of gangs is to make money using drugs and violence. Gangs target communities with the social and economic characteristics already identified. Not to find drug buyers but to recruit drug dealers, money runners and kids to watch out for the law enforcement personnel. Again, similar characteristics resulting in barriers to community vitality.

Demographics, the sociologist admonished, tell quite a story about family and community resource barriers affecting school completion rates, labor force skills household income, etc. and hence, community vitality.

For example, he discussed school completion rates or dropout rates as some refer to the situation. Solutions for having more and better equipped high school graduates lie within the school's communities, as are the reasons kids do not finish school to begin with, he observed. In the last twenty years, the public school has become responsible for more and more social services. Part of the problem stems from the time the U.S. was not only the world's industrial leader, but Americans had good-paying jobs for life, and all the other perks that went with the time. The world affecting all of this has changed, along with the rules of the game. Mistrust of these changes created in a community's adults is often reflected in its youth.

Parental involvement is regularly cited as key to helping youth address the world they face. The two key reasons given for lack of parental involvement are work constraints and lack of time. It is the experience of these three experts that today such comments are not excuses they are reasons parents cannot be more involved. Nevertheless, it's still important, so important they agree, that making time for it is necessary. However, it has to be a community effort, which means more commitment in a number of ways. To mount a successful effort people must know more about their own local communities. What we don't know locally about real causes of barriers to community vitality was alarming to all three speakers and that alarms me. Most parents are doing the best job they can with whatever resources they have available to them, some say. Others, claim people just don't realize what resources are available. Perhaps, the real message, is that we all need to reassess our responsibilities to our own children, our own families and our own community. Do our kids know what it means to be a part of a community and contribute to its vitality. The focus, each speaker said, was that as people we can no long do what we want, we need to do what we should and we must. Every community needs happy productive children who grow into the same as adults.

As the Dean of the School of Education at the University of Missouri- Columbia puts it: "We can no longer pretend not to know what we know."

To learn how to know more about what you may already know about your locality contact the nearest University Extension Center. - 30 -