May 3, 2007

YSHS seniors Carly Bailey and Niquelle Orr are focusing their senior project on a community forum Monday, May 7, 7 p.m., at the high school to bridge the divide they see between youth and adults.

By Lauren Heaton

The youth of Yellow Springs are an active bunch. Villagers can see them on the baseball diamond at Gaunt Park, performing on stage at Mills Lawn, skateboarding at the skatepark, gardening at Friends Care Community or simply hanging out downtown talking with their friends. Opportunities for adults to interact and connect with local youth abound, and yet some villagers sense that a gap between the generations is creating an atmosphere that is uncharacteristic of the town they used to know. Yellow Springs High School seniors Niquelle Orr and Carly Bailey have noticed this generation gap and are trying to get Yellow Springs to look itself in the eye and talk about it.

As their senior project, Orr and Bailey are inviting Yellow Springs youth and village residents to a community forum entitled “Building the Bridge” on Monday, May 7, at 7 p.m. in the high school gym. They hope to bring at least 100 people together to discuss how youth relate to adults and particularly to authority figures in the community. The group will begin the discussion together and then break out into four groups, each focusing on one of four topics regarding either youth and the police, youth and adults, youth and community support or youth and downtown. At least two Yellow Springs police officers and Police Chief John Grote have agreed to participate in the discussions. Yellow Springs Human Relations Commission members Don Wallis, Joan Chappelle, John Booth and Cesarina Trone will act as scribes for the small groups and if needed will help facilitate discussions.

Their goal, according to organizers, is that by the end of the evening, each generation will be more aware of the other’s perspective and each will really feel how important it is to build understanding.

“We want to get people to acknowledge there’s a real gap there, and to let people know that we see it,” Bailey said. “Because if it’s not acknowledged, it could get bigger and we could lose that feeling of love a small town has, that trust, that ‘Yellow Springs feel,’ that we’re all comfortable with who we live around.”

Last fall Bailey and Orr participated in a dialogue with two male high school students and Chief Grote, who talked about the relationship between youth and the police in Yellow Springs. It was the twelfth in a series of listening sessions (available at the Yellow Springs Library) that local resident Don Wallis has conducted with village youth over the past several years. The foursome talked about how adults seem fearful of kids who hang out downtown and in front of Tom’s Market, and how cops seem to stop kids for no reason simply to harass them, Orr and Bailey recalled.

During the session they were able to voice their perspective, which is that kids want first to be respected and supported by people who come to their events and performances and can talk to them and get to know who they are. The four students were also able to hear another perspective from Grote, who told them that as a police officer, he doesn’t like having to stop people or cite them for infractions, but that he does it because he wants to make sure they are safe.

Through the discussion Orr and Bailey said they realized that adults and kids in the village don’t understand each other very well. And they decided they wanted to draw more people into the discussion to extend the opportunity for understanding to other youth and other adults.

They began by surveying their high school peers in the freshman, sophomore and junior classes about their relationship to authority figures and got a lot of responses that were similar to their own. Kids say they would like to be able to hang out without feeling “watched” or harassed, but there aren’t a lot of opportunities or places in the village to do that.

On Monday, Orr and Bailey met with their project advisor, YSHS principal John Gudgel, and Human Relations Commission members Wallis and Chappelle to finalize plans for the community forum. Chappelle thinks the forum is important because she believes the gap exists.

“Everything these two ladies have brought up I agree with — youth feel alienated from adults, and adults keep their distance. It’s partly developmental and partly a lack of effort,” she said. “But if we can’t support the differences and understand each other and the youth we raised, what is the rest of the world going to do?”

Gudgel and Grote both have opportunities to interact with a broad range of people every day, and they believe that connecting with youth and paying attention to what they’re saying and who they are becoming is necessary to create a functioning community. But they also see the divide between youth and the rest of the village increasing, which raises their concern that the community they both grew up in may be losing some of the closeness and trust that used to bind its residents together.

Chappelle believes that raising the questions and realizing we can do better should be enough to motivate community members to work toward greater comfort and alignment between the generations. Talking is the main thing Orr hopes to accomplish too.

“For me it’s getting the thought into people’s minds so that everyone will feel something when they leave,” Orr said. “I want to think that we’re the kind of community that can have that open mindedness and not lose our ability to see others’ perspectives.”

Orr and Bailey are both leaders in their school communities. Orr is vice-president of the senior class, captain of the high school cheerleading squad, vice-chairman of the student review board, and she received first place in the Ohio Future Educators Association impromptu speech competition this year. Bailey is salutatorian of the class of 2007, captain of the basketball team, a member of the National Honor Society and a scholar athlete. Though they will be leaving for college soon, they both wanted to do something for the community they care about and hope that someone else will carry it on after them.

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com