Nancy Johnstone, wearing a tailored blue suit, black pumps, gold necklace and gold earrings, is sitting on the edge of a group of about 15 male gang members who have pulled their chairs into a circle in a second-floor room of the Roberto Clemente Community Academy on Chicago’s Near West Side.
It’s a particularly tense day at the school.
A fight had broken out shortly before noon. It was a spillover from a gang war that had erupted in the neighborhood the previous weekend and escalated last week into gang violence that resulted in the arrest of more than 30 Clemente students. This meeting of gang members takes place weekly.
“This probably won’t be a typical day,” group leader Edwin Caraballo, a social worker who graduated from Clemente in 1983, says to Johnstone as the students continue to settle into their chairs. “But then, what’s typical?”
He introduces Johnstone. “She’s my boss,” he says. “Any questions, any problems with her being here?” No response.
“All right, you want to talk about this?” he asks, referring to the fight. A few heads shake. No. “You sure?” he asks. No.
“All right then, let’s talk about how you solve problems,” says Caraballo. “Let’s say you’ve got a problem, like with your girlfriend-you’ve all got, or you’ve had girlfriends, right?-how do you go about solving it?”
It starts slowly. Caraballo points at one or another, asking questions, pulling out responses. “I hit a wall, maybe break a knuckle,” says one. “Sometimes the only way is to hit someone; if you knock him out, he won’t mess with you no more,” says another. “Yeah, but what if they come back with their gang?” says another.
The discussion escalates. “What do you do, Edwin, what happens when you have a probem?” one of the students asks suddenly. “Me? I work out. I try to talk to someone. I pray.”
Instant quiet. No one laughs.
“You pray, Edwin?”
The bell rings. Chairs push back. Time to move on.
“Thank you for letting me be here with you today,” Johnstone says before they leave. She makes eye contact with several as she speaks. Some shrug, some half smile. One asks, “You coming back?”
“I’d like to,” she responds.
Nancy Johnstone, 61, is head of a unique non-profit Chicago organization called Youth Guidance. For 34 Chicago public schools-most of them in such inner-city areas as Cabrini-Green, Humboldt Park and West Englewood-Youth Guidance provides social services that range from regular counseling sessions with gang members and families-and intensive help when a student is killed-to poetry writing and drama workshops.
Youth Guidance has been around for a long time-the agency will celebrate its 70th anniversary next year-but it was Johnstone who drastically changed its focus when she took the helm in 1973.
With a master’s degree in social work from Carleton University in Ottawa, Johnstone, a Detroit native, moved to Chicago in 1961 with her Canadian husband, John. They had met and married in Chicago several years earlier, while both were attending graduate school at the University of Chicago.
“I started working for Youth Guidance part time-one day a week to begin with,” she said. “I had two babies, and this was in the 1960s before women started working. But I wanted to keep my hand in a career.”
“At that time, we were working out of an office in the Loop. The kids had to come to us. My feeling increasingly became, this just wasn’t the way to do it. The adolescents we were seeing were middle-class kids who had the money for transportation. And it was all one-on-one counseling. We weren’t trying to do anything about family situations, nothing with groups.
“The inner-city kids who needed help couldn’t come to us. I felt we needed to go to them. We needed to move the program into the schools.”
Under Johnstone’s pushing, five or six social workers started working out of three schools, and in 1973 Johnstone became executive director.
The agency she took over was in flux, had a limited number of clients and programs and a budget of only $100,000, primarily from private sources such as the United Way. This year, the budget is $3 million and 7,000 to 8,000 students are receiving some sort of Youth Guidance help.
On a Wednesday in early November, Johnstone was checking up on several of the Youth Guidance programs that go on each day throughout the city. It’s work-as-usual; nothing has been prearranged.
Geraghty is bushed
Social worker Mary Geraghty, 29, is doing paper work in the Youth Guidance office at Roosevelt High School in the Albany Park area. She looks totally exhausted. Her makeup is worn off, and she pushes back her long red hair as she explains that she’s not tired because of that day’s activities, but because her yesterday didn’t end until late at night.
A student had come to her the previous morning with one side of her face and body covered with welts and cuts. The student said that a member of her family had been beating her while her parents were at work. She didn’t think she could take anymore, she said; if she had to go back home, she thought she would kill herself.
The case was complicated, with conflicting family statements. Other agencies were contacted, and several recommendations made, including psychiatric hospitalization for the girl. The ultimate decision, reached in the police station about 9 p.m. with family members and agency members present, was to go along with Geraghty’s recommendation to place the girl in a temporary shelter and arrange for outpatient counseling for the entire family.
“One of the positive things was that she could continue at school while she was living at the shelter and while the whole family started getting counseling,” Geraghty said. Besides such crisis intervention, Geraghty runs groups at Roosevelt for pregnant girls and students who are parents. She also oversees freewheeling discussions for girls on issues relating to sexuality and a range of social issues.
Geraghty is one of 65 Youth Guidance employees, of whom 55 work directly with students in the 34 schools. In addition, there are 25 interns working part time in the schools. Most are social workers with master’s degrees; a few have degrees in fine arts and use drama, art and writing to help students deal with problems. The entry level salary is $24,000.
The agency is separate from the public school system. Individual schools and local school councils contract with Youth Guidance, and provide office space, sometimes not much more than a large closet. Youth Guidance works directly with the principals, teachers and parents.
“Sometimes we go into a school because a funding source wants to be in a certain area,” Johnstone says. “United Way wanted to fund in the Near West, so we went to Crane High School. Another way is for a school to come to us and say they need the program. That’s how we started at Roosevelt and Clemente.
“But our priority always is serving the inner-city community,” she says.
Chicago’s public school system, with 500 elementary and secondary schools, employs its own social workers and psychologists, but they’re spread thin. According to Lourdes Afable, coordinator for internships in the crisis intervention services, Chicago schools have on staff 325 social workers and 250 psychologists to serve 411,000 students.
“So with over 500 schools, we just don’t have enough people,” Afable said. The primary obligation of social workers and psychologists is to evaluate students to make sure special education needs are being met, according to Afable. The other primary function is crisis intervention.
“We cannot do all the crisis work, she said. “We need other resources, like Youth Guidance.”
A tragic first day
A student was killed right outside Roosevelt High School on the first day of school this year.
“He had been trying to enroll,” says Roosevelt’s acting principal, Rafael Sanchez. “He left and was across the street. It was about noon. He was shot two or three times, by someone driving by in a car.”
Youth Guidance workers started group and individual counseling with students the next morning. “They swung into action right away,” Sanchez said.
“What gets to me often, when I visit some of these programs, is seeing how these kids can still be kids. That’s still in them,” Johnstone is saying. “There’s all this violence and drugs, but then you see what could be there. And it can be heartbreaking.”
Improvising for fun
The Youth Guidance programs are divided basically between clinical and creative arts. Right now, Johnstone is observing one of the latter-an after-school drama program called Straight Talk.
She’s sitting on the auditorium stage of Roosevelt. About 30 kids, freshmen through seniors, are taking turns doing improvisation under the direction of Youth Guidance’s Vergil Smith, who has a master’s degree in fine arts.
Two students start out, improvising a scene. Any other student can interrupt by saying “Freeze!” and replacing one of the players and changing the plot. A woman getting a haircut becomes a woman in labor, then her husband becomes a dog owner, and then the girl is at a high-school reunion. It’s fast and funny and orderly. Spirits are high; the woman in labor brings down the house.
“This the sort of thing they should be doing. You watch them having such a good time, and you hate to think about what might happen when they leave here,” Johnstone says.
Rehearsing the word `no’
“If we did not have Bob and Debbie, we would not be getting this program. We do teach drug abuse in PE (physical education) for 10 periods a year, but we don’t have the resources or the expertise to do this.”
The speaker is Terrence Murray, principal of Haugan Elementary School, near Roosevelt High School on the Northwest side. Haugan’s nearly 1,400 students speak 40 different languages. Murray is talking about social worker Deborah Gordon and Bob Schout, team administrator for Youth Guidance programs in the four Albany Park schools (Roosevelt, Haugan, Von Steuben Metropolitan Science Academy and Albany Park Multi-Cultural Academy). The two had just finished a 45-minute long session with a 5th-grade class; the subject was “How to Say No.”
They made a game of it, tossing a Smurf ball to different students to determine who would act out little scenarios-an older kid trying to get them to smoke a cigarette, or a group pressuring younger kids to drink beer. Although the children are laughing and having fun (especially with the Smurf ball), they are also tough critics: They rank each acting student in terms of body language, tone of voice, and words said.
“And us girls talk softer than Bob here, don’t we?” Debbie says to the students near the end of the session. The girls nod seriously. “We have to learn to talk loudly when we really mean something. When we say `no’ we want to make sure we’re heard.”
No choice but optimism
Forty-eight percent of Youth Guidance’s funding comes from government grants, 28 percent from corporations and foundations, 13 percent from United Way, 4 percent from individuals, the rest from other sources.
“When I became director, there hadn’t been any aggressive fundraising,” Johnstone said. “Almarie Wagner (who started at Youth Guidance in 1969 and now heads the American Heart Association of Metropolitan Chicago) and I hit the streets. We started going to companies, foundations, public agencies, any door we could get into. I said yes to anyone who asked me to be on a committee. I went to so many lunches, dinners, receptions where I didn’t know a soul.”
Fundraising is the downside of her job, she says. “It’s always hard, especially when you believe so strongly that you’re doing the right thing. My love is developing programs and staff.
“I always say that if I got paid by the number of pages of proposals I wrote, I would be rich. But we have been able to build a network that is incredible.”
Still, the problems faced daily by Youth Guidance often seems insurmountable.
“I think they are doing as good a job as possible, but look what they’re up against,” says Kirsten Gronbjerg, sociology professor at Loyola University and a member of the boards of both Youth Guidance and United Way. “Look at the (student) dropout rates, the high turnover in principals and teachers, the devastation in some of these communities.”
Says Johnstone: “I have to stay optimistic or I couldn’t stay in this job. I have to keep thinking that kids want to change and they’ll be able to. I believe there are solutions to problems that don’t cost billions of dollars. Sometimes I do feel despair-I get outraged at the killings, the waste and loss. But that doesn’t make me want to run. It makes me just that much more determined to stay in there.”
