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TO DETER SCHOOL VIOLENCE DYS eyes deployment of officers to campus
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Posted on May 03 2000
The Division of Youth Services Juvenile Corrections Unit revealed yesterday plans to deploy juvenile probation officers to school campuses to monitor students under its juvenile probation program.
Juvenile Corrections Supervisor Sylvio Ada stressed the need to keep track on some of its clients under probation once or twice a week to ensure that they are religiously following conditions set forth by the youth services.
“We need to make sure that these kids are not cutting classes. With illegal position and truancy, there’s a lot of these cases in schools,” said Mr. Ada.
But the five-man DYS Juvenile Corrections team still needs three more to sufficiently address the demands of juvenile delinquency cases in the CNMI.
There is currently an uneven ratio of juvenile delinquency cases versus the number of social workers or probation officers who handle them, according to Mr. Ada.
He added that every probation officer on his team handles an average of 40 cases per month.
There were 87 noted cases of burglary, theft, and robbery committed by youth offenders in 1999. The last quarter of 1998 also recorded some 25 theft, burglary, and robbery cases among juveniles.
Assault and battery by juveniles reached 23 cases last year. While 51 truancy cases were committed in the same year.
As per ethnicity, 55 Chamorro juvenile offenders were recorded in 1999, followed closely by 53 young Carolinians, and 44 Filipino juvenile offenders.
“To effectively run the division, we need to increase the number of our probation officers. Bear in mind, it’s not just probationers that we deal with but also runaways and truancy cases,” Mr. Ada said.
Focused on improving the intervention skills of its officers, DYS under a federal grant is set to send three of its staff to San Diego, California this Friday to undergo a one-week probation officers’ training.
Mr. Ada himself is scheduled to go on a similar training conference in Phoenix, Arizona sometime in July.
In August, the Guam youth services division will also hold an onsite training for probation officers to be participated in by DYS.
