JOHN COBBINS loaded his four young children into the back of the Dodge minivan and nervously slipped into the passenger seat next to a woman he barely knew. Homeless and a single father, Cobbins feared the woman in the driver’s seat was secretly working with the government to take his children away.
As the van pulled away from the Uptown homeless shelter, Cobbins turned sideways in his seat and kept his eyes focused on his children-Diante, Ramania, Rosetta and John. He looked away only briefly to make sure they were heading to Stockton Elementary School on Chicago’s North Side, not to a foster home or orphanage.
“No way you touching my kids,” Cobbins recalls thinking.
The van’s driver, Ada Ortiz, recognized the fear in Cobbins’ darting eyes and fidgety demeanor. A school case worker, Ortiz had made a special trip to the homeless shelter that fall day in 2003, hoping to enroll Cobbins in a little-known, school-based parenting program. They were heading to Stockton to talk more about it.
As Ortiz guided the minivan onto Montrose Avenue, Ortiz tried to remain upbeat. But she worried that the chaos and emotional trauma in the Cobbins family was so entrenched, even the wide-ranging resources of the intensive program might not be enough to rescue them.”This is a long shot,” Ortiz recalls thinking.
Neither one knew it at the time, but the trip that morning was the beginning of a tumultuous 2-year ride that would transform the lives of everyone in the van. With Ortiz at the wheel and Cobbins beside her, the two began their uncertain journey toward a better future for the children.
Traditionally, public schools have ignored-or lacked the resources to deal with-dysfunctional households that handicap children’s ability to learn. But some educators argue that they cannot teach these students how to read, write and do arithmetic if they cannot first stabilize their home lives.
With an experimental program called System of Care Chicago, the school district was gambling that helping Cobbins be a better parent would help his children be better students. Over the next 30 months a team of experts-teachers, administrators, social workers, counselors and mental-health officials-would invade Cobbins’ life and try to teach him basic parenting skills, from keeping an orderly house to setting rules for his children’s behavior.
Ortiz knew from the beginning that the Cobbins family would be one of the toughest cases she ever faced. At 39, John Cobbins was homeless, unemployed and struggling with addictions to drugs and alcohol. A compact man with a demeanor that swings wildly from cranky to jovial, Cobbins sports a 4-inch “Ice-T” tattoo on his arm, and three scars and a gaping hole where his front teeth used to be-a result of gang fights. He has short-term memory loss from a gang-related beating as a teenager, and he is on probation for misdemeanor domestic battery against the children’s mother.
But System of Care workers saw hope in Cobbins because he was dedicated to his children. Where their mother was neglectful and in and out of their lives, he stayed put. Whenever he had spare cash, which wasn’t often, he used it to buy shoes and clothes for the kids. Though he was barely able to read and write, he tried to help the children with their homework each night. He insisted on walking each of them to the classroom and arrived 15 minutes before the end-of-school bell to make sure they were never left alone.
“We knew he loved the kids,” Ortiz says. “And we knew he would do anything to help make their lives better.”
As they sat in the minivan, both Ortiz and Cobbins realized they had a lot at stake.
Ortiz wanted to demonstrate that System of Care could transform the lives of children headed down the path of academic ruin. The program, which enrolls about 100 students in eight Chicago public schools, is funded by a six-year, $9.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The money, which averages about $16,000 per child, runs out next year, and the program will continue only if another agency, likely the school district, picks up the cost. That can happen only if administrators see good results.
For Cobbins, the stakes were more personal. He recognized that System of Care might be his last chance to save his children from the cycle of poverty and abysmal education that had plagued his family for generations.
“I don’t want my kids to be like me,” he says.
COBBINS WAS RAISED by a single mother who supported her family by cleaning houses and working low-paying factory jobs in Chicago. Rosie Cobbins, 70, spent her early life as a sharecropper in Mississippi and never had a formal education.
John Cobbins admits he was a poor student. He struggled to read and write, and his mother could not help him. By the time he enrolled in high school on the city’s West Side, he was looking for an identity. He found it, he says, with the Gangster Disciples. Soon, he was cutting class, getting into fights and bringing home failing grades.
“I was bad to the bone,” he admits.
When he was in 11th grade, Cobbins was jumped by a group of boys who beat him with baseballs bats and crowbars, knocked out two front teeth and left him with broken eardrums and a face full of cuts and bruises. Rosie Cobbins said the beating left her son “senseless.” He spent two weeks in the hospital and never returned to school.
Instead, he worked as a janitor, painted houses, laid tile and hustled odd jobs from his mother’s friends. He fell into a life of petty crimes, including stealing beer from a grocery store and getting into fights with rival gang members. Eventually he was diagnosed with short-term memory loss and started collecting disability checks from Social Security. He fathered two children with two women and says he wasn’t part of his children’s lives as they grew up.
By the early 1990s, Cobbins had hooked up with a woman who lived near his home, and together they had Diante, Ramania, Rosetta and John, whom everyone calls Little John. By 1998, the family of six was crammed into a one-bedroom, government-subsidized apartment on the city’s Near West Side.
Home life was tumultuous. Cobbins and his girlfriend fought often, he says, their arguments fueled by alcohol. In 2002, he was convicted of misdemeanor domestic battery against her and spent 90 days behind bars. He was ordered to complete a drug-treatment program and an anger-management course.
On at least two occasions, the Department of Children and Family Services was called to investigate allegations of neglect against the children’s mother, department officials said. She moved out, and in the spring of 2003, Cobbins was given temporary guardianship of the children.
But his girlfriend continued to visit and, Cobbins acknowledges, the two kept up their volatile relationship. After neighbors repeatedly complained about the noise, Cobbins and his children were evicted that summer, he says.
With no place to go, they sought refuge at a nearby homeless shelter. Eventually, they moved to the Uptown shelter and enrolled at Stockton, where they met Ortiz.
From the moment the Cobbins children arrived at Stockton, school officials knew they needed special attention. They were so far behind that teachers wanted birth certificates to prove their ages. Diante entered 4th grade unable to spell “cat” and “not.” Ramania, a 3rd grader, could not count past 29. Rosetta wrote her letters upside down and backward in 2nd grade. And Little John, in kindergarten, was unsure how to grip a pencil.
Life in the homeless shelter made the children depressed and anxious. They couldn’t sleep at night and were exhausted during the day, unable to concentrate in class. They also had difficulty finding friends.
Diante says kids at school made fun of him because he was homeless. Already quiet and guarded, he withdrew deeper inside himself. He rarely participated in the day’s lessons and preferred to stand by himself on the playground.
Rosetta, the most gregarious of the Cobbins children, told fanciful tales about living with her mom and dad in a house near the school. She clung to her teacher and followed her around the classroom asking for help with assignments.
Little John reverted to a younger age. He hated to be left alone, and during after-school Boys and Girls Club, he stuck to his siblings and rarely let them out of his sight.
Ramania, who already was prematurely jaded, had shut down emotionally. One day she was standing on the playground near a group of 3rd graders who were debating the good looks-or lack thereof-of their male classmates. When Ramania tried to join the conversation, they closed their circle and shut her out. “She smells bad,” one girl said to the group.
“They came home crying a lot,” Cobbins recalls. “It hurt me bad.”
System of Care workers immediately blanketed the family with free services, including family therapy sessions at the social-service agency where Ortiz works. The school moved Ramania and Diante into special-education classes and sent Rosetta back to 1st grade. Little John was put into a kindergarten classroom with a special-education aide.
Meanwhile, Ortiz began sorting through the disarray of Cobbins’ life. He was receiving $500 a month in disability payments and $140 a month in food stamps for himself. The children were eligible for food stamps, health insurance and public aid, but Cobbins was unable to navigate the bureaucracy to get it.
When Ortiz tried to help him collect food stamps for the kids, she was told the stamps were in the name of the children’s mother. When she pointed out the children were in the care of their father, she was told that, according to federal government records, Cobbins was dead. He had no identification to prove otherwise.
Ortiz tried to track down Cobbins’ birth certificate in Mississippi, but he didn’t know the name of the county where he was born. Complicating matters, John Cobbins’ real name is Theartris Cobbins, a fact he had forgotten to mention. He could not recall the exact birth dates for his children, or which hospital they were born in, making it difficult for Ortiz to find their birth certificates.
Cobbins is often forgetful. To compensate, he writes down important phone numbers and names in a small black notebook he keeps in his back pocket. He also carries a thick day planner to jot down vital information in his kids’ lives. His system is not fail-safe, however. He often finds himself at a loss for important information.
“Sometimes my brain just stops working,” he says.
But Ortiz is as tenacious as Cobbins is forgetful. A Puerto Rican native, she is soft-spoken but direct, and has a way of dealing with people that could be described-charitably-as assertive. She built her negotiating skills through countless skirmishes with the school system over the education of her own daughter, who has attention-deficit disorder-a process Ortiz describes as “banging my head against the wall.”
After nearly three months of visiting government offices and playing phone tag with various bureaucrats on Cobbins’ behalf, she prevailed, and by December, his government assistance had risen to about $23,000 a year. Not a windfall, but more than three times the $7,500 that the family of five had been living on before.
There was one catch: Cobbins had to turn over control of most of his money to Community Counseling Center of Chicago, the social-service agency where Ortiz works. The agency would pay most of his bills and give him a monthly allowance to help buy food and clothing for his family.
Ortiz planned to spend 2004 teaching Cobbins how to manage his money. When she felt confident he could stick to a budget and pay his bills on time, she would relinquish control. But the lack of power over his money was embarrassing for Cobbins and the source of an ongoing rift between him and Ortiz over the next two years.
AS ORTIZ WORKED to find a home for Cobbins, he unintentionally was undermining her efforts.
She found a small, two-bedroom apartment 2 blocks from Stockton Elementary that she knew would be a tight fit for the family and an economic hardship. But she figured Cobbins could scrape together the $750 monthly rent.
The System of Care team also put together a $4,000 package that included money for the first and last month’s rent, furniture, kitchenware, cleaning supplies and books, toys and puzzles for the children.
To show he was actively trying to turn his life around, Cobbins had to come up with a $750 deposit, which was supposed to come from his monthly Social Security check. But on the day he was scheduled to deliver the money, Cobbins walked into the Stockton office and sheepishly told Ortiz he did not have it. He had given the money to a friend who let him spend the weekend at his house.
Ortiz was livid. She had spent three months hunting for an affordable apartment and convincing System of Care officials that Cobbins was worth the risk. She was juggling eight other families and working 11-hour days to keep up with their demands.
The normally measured Ortiz cracked. “You’ve lost the apartment,” she told Cobbins. “I don’t know what you are going to do now.” She lectured him about consequences and responsibility. She said she was disappointed in him and tired of his excuses.
Cobbins began to cry.
After a brief standoff, when the room was silent, Ortiz softened. Holding Cobbins accountable now would only harm the children, she reasoned. She got on the phone and called every charitable group she could find, hoping to talk someone into donating the deposit. Eventually, a woman at Catholic Charities took pity and donated the money.
“She like our guardian angel,” Cobbins says of Ortiz.
In January 2004, Cobbins and Ortiz met the children after school and walked them to a five-story brick apartment building. The group trudged down a long hallway and stopped in front of a door. Cobbins pulled a key from his pocket and slid it into the lock. He swung open the door and urged his confused children to go inside their new home.
The four stood motionless for a few moments, until Rosetta pushed her way past the others and ran into the living room. Her sister and brothers followed, running from room to room, laughing and jumping up and down. Tears rolled down their father’s cheeks.
The apartment wasn’t much to look at.
Diante and Little John would share one room; Ramania and Rosetta the other. Cobbins would sleep on the sofa in the large open area that was both living room and kitchen.
But no matter how small, the cramped apartment was a safe place in a troubled world, a sanctuary that provided security the Cobbins family had rarely known.
Their first night at home, Cobbins borrowed blankets from a neighbor and made a big bed on the living room floor. With a small radio he had found in an alley to keep them company, the family stayed awake until past midnight to discuss home-decorating projects.
“It was the biggest home we ever slept in,” Cobbins says.
By spring, the children’s grades went up. The C’s and D’s became B’s and C’s. The in-class behavior improved. They branched out and found new friends.
“They finally felt safe,” Ortiz says, “and they became kids again.”
Cobbins, too, became more relaxed. He felt comfortable dropping the kids off at the school’s front door rather than walking them to class. He smiled more and yelled at the kids less. He spent at least an hour every day at the school, hanging out in the community room that Ortiz used as a makeshift office.
“I knew we was going to be OK,” Cobbins recalls.
But Ortiz realized that finding a home was easy compared to what lay ahead. She and other System of Care workers had to teach Cobbins how to run a household, manage his money and discipline his children.
Several months later, Cobbins was pacing the cracked and yellowing linoleum floor of his Uptown apartment, fiddling with the brass belt buckle on his jeans, untying and retying his shoelaces-performing every inane task he could think of to avoid watching Ortiz as she poked through the apartment with the intensity of a detective going over a crime scene.
She peeked into cupboards to make sure there was enough cereal, ramen noodles and canned vegetables to feed the children. Peering into the refrigerator, she checked expiration dates on the milk and the hamburger. She opened a dresser drawer to make sure the kids’ clothes were clean and folded.
She wandered over to a small window that had been left ajar. She shivered and rubbed her hands over her arms to stay warm. “Remember, the hot air will go out and you will have to pay more in energy,” she said, pulling the window closed. “You can’t afford that right now.”
“Yeah, I know,” Cobbins said. “I forgot to close it. I’m stupid sometimes.”
“Nah,” Ortiz said, patting him on the back. “You’re just forgetful.”
Ever since the Cobbins family moved into the apartment, Ortiz conducted this monthly inspection to scrutinize Cobbins’ homemaking skills. During the first tour through the home, the kitchen cupboards were a hodgepodge. Canned peas and corn shared space with dinner dishes and Tupperware containers. Sometimes, Cobbins was so forgetful that he’d leave uncooked meat on the kitchen table for hours. He fed the children hot dogs and corn for breakfast.
But today, the home was spotless and well organized. The breakfast dishes were washed and stacked neatly in the drying bin. Little John’s collection of Matchbox cars sat in a neat line, as if ready for a race-day starting flag. Even the wall decorations trumpeting the children’s progress were neatly arranged, with Ramania’s “Student of the Month” certificate taped next to Rosetta’s spelling test with the “100%, A” on top.
“You’re doing a great job,” Ortiz told him. “I’m proud of you.”
THOUGH COBBINS PICKED up homemaking skills relatively quickly, his child-rearing abilities were another matter. Defining himself as a father-and not a friend-to his children has been one of his greatest challenges.
Early last year, Ortiz stopped by the Cobbins home for another of her monthly inspections but soon found herself teaching parenting skills. As John meandered around the apartment, Ortiz sat in a folding chair in the kitchen, her right hand cupping Rosetta’s tear-streaked chin as she spoke to the child.
“You know you are going to have consequences for your bad behavior,” Ortiz said. “You’ve got to learn that you cannot say nasty things to people just because you are mad.”
Rosetta had been suspended from school for the day because she talked back to the teacher. It was a continuing pattern with the 8-year-old, the most mischievous and chatty of the Cobbins children.
Rosetta frowned as Ortiz scolded her and her bottom lip jutted forward. Her tear-swollen eyes darted around the room looking for her father, an ally she hoped would save her from certain punishment.
Ortiz did not want it to come to this. She had hoped Cobbins would take the lead in disciplining his child. Instead, he stood a few feet away, his head down and his eyes fixed on the floor as she talked to Rosetta. A small laugh escaped from his throat, compelled more by uneasiness than humor.
“John, this is not funny,” Ortiz scolded. “This is serious.”
Ortiz chastised Rosetta in a measured tone and then sent the child to her room. She told Cobbins to pull up a chair and asked him what he thought about a proper punishment.
“She likes to read,” he said. “Take her books away?”
Ortiz shook her head. That would only harm Rosetta, she said. “Think of something she likes to do but won’t hurt her in school if she doesn’t get to do it,” she suggested.
“Color,” Cobbins said. “And watch TV.”
Together, Ortiz and Cobbins decided to take away Rosetta’s coloring books and her TV privileges for a week.
“This is going to be hard, harder for you than for her because I know you are a softy,” Ortiz said. “You are the dad and you have to teach them who is the dad. You have to be strong.”
Cobbins shrugged his shoulders.
“I can do it,” he said.
Ortiz was barely out the door when Rosetta sprung from her room and, with tears rolling down her cheeks, begged to watch TV. This time, Cobbins stood his ground and sent Rosetta back to her room. The following week, he kept her away from the crayons and television set.
AS THE 2004-2005 SCHOOL year came to a close, both Ortiz and Cobbins felt they had made great progress.
Under her watchful eye, Cobbins was paying his bills on time and attending a mandatory alcohol and drug rehabilitation course. He was looking for a job as a neighborhood handyman and had asked the Stockton assistant principal to help him find work at the school.
The family attended counseling twice a month, and Cobbins received individual counseling if he needed it.
The children were doing well in school and rarely ended up in the principal’s office for misbehaving. Diante, Ramania and Little John each had been honored as Student of the Month in their respective classrooms. The children also had found new friends at school and actually looked forward to going to class.
For the first time in a long time, they talked about their future. Diante said he wanted to go to college and get a job working with computers. Ramania was laying plans to become a nurse. Rosetta had a more short-term goal: to become Student of the Month next school year.
On the last day of school, the family walked out of Stockton hand in hand. Cobbins spotted a group of System of Care workers in the hallway and rushed over. “I got something to show you,” he said, a grin spreading across his face. “Look how my kids done.”
He pulled the report cards out one by one. Diante’s was filled with B’s and C’s and an A in library sciences. Ramania’s boasted all A’s and B’s. Rosetta barely squeaked by, her report card filled with C’s and D’s, and an F in math. But her grades were a reflection of her behavior, not her intelligence. She scored far above average on the mandatory city reading exam and met the averages on the math test.
Little John had struggled in kindergarten. But Stockton officials had run a battery of tests on him and, at the end of the year, moved him into a special-education class where he could get the services he needed.
“That’s wonderful, John, you should be proud of them,” said Alan Robinson, a System of Care coordinator.
“Yeah, they getting there,” Cobbins said. “All the hard work paid off. We done good this year.”
LAST FALL, the school year appeared to begin as positively as the previous year had ended. By late October, the children were doing well academically and socially.
Ortiz and other System of Care workers were so pleased with John Cobbins’ progress that they held him up as one of the program’s most noteworthy successes, publishing his photo in a program announcement. They persuaded him to become vice president of a newly formed parent-support group. Ortiz had taken to calling Cobbins “the voice of System of Care.”
But as had often been the case throughout his life, Cobbins was about to undo much of the progress he had made. He had tested positive for cocaine during his court-mandated drug and alcohol rehab class and he had stopped attending anger-management sessions. As a result, he was dodging a warrant for his arrest. He was drinking again and was behind in his rent.
Most troubling to Ortiz, Cobbins was back with the mother of his children, who was visiting at least twice a week, Cobbins said, and often was there on weekends. Ortiz feared the caustic relationship would lead to a setback for the children.
“Don’t let her undo all the progress you have made,” Ortiz warned Cobbins.
In mid-October, members of the System of Care parent-support group gathered for their semi-monthly meeting at Stockton Elementary. Cobbins was nowhere to be found. A half-hour into the meeting, Little John’s classroom teacher came looking for Cobbins. The boy was sick, and the teacher thought he should go home.
The president of the parent group called Cobbins at home: no answer. She called his cell phone: no answer. Finally, she told the teacher to leave Little John with her. For an hour, he sat in the conference room putting together a “Masters of the Universe” cardboard puzzle as he suffered through fits of coughing and nose-blowing. At one point, he put his head down on the table and closed his swollen and bloodshot eyes.
“I don’t feel good,” he said to no one in particular.
When the meeting ended, Ortiz rushed over to Cobbins’ house and knocked on the door. A woman on the other side said Cobbins was not home, but she refused to open the door.
As she walked back to Stockton, Ortiz left a message on Cobbins’ cell phone, threatening to call the Department of Children and Family Services if he did not get his act together.
Throughout her two years working with the Cobbins family, Ortiz had never given up hope that she could teach Cobbins the skills he needed to rebuild his life. But on her walk back to Stockton, she reassessed her optimism.
“I am heartbroken,” she said. “I don’t know what more I can do to help these kids.”
Two days later, Cobbins came to Ortiz’s office to apologize. He missed the meeting, he said, because he was on the city’s West Side looking for a new place to live. He could no longer afford the rent on his Uptown apartment and hoped to find a government-subsidized home for less. His cell phone wasn’t working, he said, so he didn’t get the message about Little John.
“I didn’t know y’all was looking for me,” he said. “Sorry, man.”
Ortiz was expressionless. But underneath, she was ready to erupt. As Cobbins pleaded his case, Ortiz leafed through a pamphlet on a nearby table. Finally, her anger bubbled over.
“John, you are messing everything up,” she said, the decibel-level of her voice rising with each word. “You worked three years to get it together and now you are throwing everything away. You’re going to end up homeless, dumped in the street with no one to help you. The kids are going to suffer the most.”
Cobbins said nothing.
“I am not here to be your friend,” Ortiz said. “I am here for the kids, not you. I will fight for them. I will fight you for them. I have worked too hard to let you mess it up for them.”
Cobbins was taken aback. As Ortiz scolded him, he finally realized that the two-year effort by System of Care workers was about helping Diante, Ramania, Rosetta and Little John-not him.
He tried to defend himself. He, too, had worked hard to make life better for his children, he said. He had done everything Ortiz had asked, he said.
“Don’t give up on me,” he begged.
THE COBBINS FAMILY has come a long way since they first stepped into Ortiz’s Dodge minivan that fall day in 2003-homeless, depressed and without hope.
John Cobbins has his own apartment and is running the household by himself. He has learned to cook, discipline the children and finish the laundry without accidentally dying the whites strange colors. He gets his children to school on time every day and sits them down at the kitchen table every night to make sure they finish their homework.
Most important, he has set his children on an academic path far different from the one he had taken. Diante, Ramania, Rosetta and Little John bring home mainly A’s and B’s, with a C here and there. Except for Rosetta, the children have stayed out of the principal’s office this year.
As 2005 came to a close, System of Care workers and the families they work with gathered for an annual Christmas party at Stockton Elementary. As children and parents streamed into the room, John Cobbins, adorned in a green and red Santa cap, stood near the door as the official greeter.
“Merry Christmas,” he called out, his toothless grin lighting up his face.
Little John, 8, stood at a folding table, piecing together a puzzle with a friend. Rosetta, 9, sat on Ortiz’s lap, regaling her with a lively story about how she intended to stay out of trouble in 2006.
“I promise to be good,” she said. “I promise to do what my teacher says.”
Ramania, 12, scurried around the room, stacking presents and making sure there was enough food for everyone. Diante sat in silence with a friend at a long folding table. At 13, he is way too cool to carry on a conversation.
Two years ago, the Cobbins family gathered in this same room for a similar Christmas party. Back then, they sat by themselves in a corner of the room.
“They were transformed before our eyes,” Ortiz says.
Ortiz knows that the real test of the System of Care program will come when she and the other workers step out of the Cobbinses’ lives and leave John to raise his children on his own.
“We can only hope that we have given him the right tools,” she says.
Cobbins also realizes he must soon fly solo. Like a teenager going off to college, he wants his independence from Ortiz, but he fears what it might bring. “It’s kind of scary to think about her not being here,” Cobbins says. “But I know it’s time. I have to be a dad on my own now.”
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WHAT’S AT STAKE
HISTORICALLY, schools have addressed students’ emotional problems as isolated issues, focusing on the child and behavior in the classroom. System of Care Chicago shifts the attention from the student to the entire family.
Using a phalanx of social workers, therapists, family counselors, psychologists, teachers and school administrators, the program goes into the home to deal with problems that can disrupt a child’s education.
“The old notion that you could just counsel a kid in school, well, we have come to realize you really can’t change the student with that process,” said Gary Blau, who oversees System of Care for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which funds the national program. “The best way to effect change is to have the parent as a partner and to deal with the larger issues affecting the entire family.”
System of Care was born in the mid-1990s when Congress set aside $4.9 million to establish a handful of comprehensive children’s mental-health programs across the country. Since then, it has grown into a $105 million effort, with 56 sites, including two in Illinois. It enjoys bipartisan support.
The Chicago program operates on a $9.5 million, six-year grant. It is based at Coles, Dixon, Gladstone, Lozano, Randolph, Reavis and Stockton elementary schools and Milburn Alternative High School.
In some cases, a family might need only minor intervention, such as free counseling. In others, more intensive services are warranted. With the Cobbins family, System of Care workers taught John Cobbins how to cook dinner, grocery shop, manage his mone and discipline the children. They enrolled three children in special-education classes and arranged family counseling sessions.
Research has shown that more than half of students with severe emotional disorders do not finish high school. Dropouts are more likely to be unemployed and more likely to be imprisoned. As many as 60 percent of all youngsters in the juvenile justice system suffer from mental-health problems. Illinois spends about $64,000 a year to house a juvenile offender.
Yearly analysis of the national System of Care program has shown that children who enroll are less likely to be arrested and more likely to stay in school. They bring home better grades and post higher scores on exams.
System of Care Chicago was designed to enroll about 600 students over six years, costing roughly $16,000 per student per year.
— S.B.
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sbanchero@tribune.com
