Valley youth boast more assets than national average

Search Institute representative and speaker James Volbracht stands with Lynn Borud of Nampa, who has helped implement youth asset building in his own community.

Seventy percent of Blaine County youth are motivated to do well in school, and report they have a positive view of their future. But they don’t feel valued by the community or perceive school as an encouraging place.

Those facts were among the findings presented last week by the Blaine County Youth Partnership from a survey completed by 1,500 middle and high school students last spring.

The survey was administered by the Search Institute, a nonprofit research center located in Minneapolis, Minn. The institute has given the survey to more than 500,000 students in North America.

Titled Profiles of Student Life: Attitudes and Behaviors, it measures a community’s support and the positive development of its youth by determining the number of developmental assets a youth possesses. The institute has determined 40 assets that help a youth make wise decisions, choose positive paths, and grow up competent, caring, and responsible.

The assets are divided into eight categories: support, empowerment, boundaries and expectations, constructive use of time, commitment to learning, positive values, social competencies and positive identities.

The survey includes cross-referenced questions to ensure validity of the test taker; in Blaine County 69 tests were discarded as invalid.

Search Institute representative and speaker James Volbracht presented the results to about 150 community members in two lively discussions last Wednesday and Thursday night.

Assets that are most prevalent in Blaine County include family support, safe neighborhoods, youth programs, motivation to do well in school, honesty and integrity. However, less than 30 percent of youth feel valued by the community, have adult role models, or spend three or more hours a week on creative activities.

"I hope for a few outcomes of this meeting," said Volbracht. "We want to affirm the great stuff the community’s doing. We want to get inspired, because there’s dormant energy in every community waiting to rally around its youth, and we want to ask, ‘What can I do?’"

Volbracht presented key elements needed for a community to support its youth.

"There are key threads that need to be rewoven," he said. "I call this common sense backed up by research."

According to Volbracht, the thread of relationships needs to be strengthened in the community. He said a youth who has one significant relationship with an adult outside of his or her parents has a better chance at success than one who does not. Ideally, he added, a youth should have regular contact with five adults.

"Our young people are desperate for contact with adults," he said.

Secondly, he urged that youth-serving agencies, organizations and parents network and pool resources, instead of compete for them, to support youth on all levels.

He also praised the power of repetition, and suggested a community agree on basic values, such as respect and responsibility, and stress those values repeatedly through organizations, schools, programs and parents.

Most importantly, said Volbracht, is that adults take immediate action to alter the present culture of the community.

"There are lots of things you can do--build one relationship with a young person," he said.

He cited the story of a woman who, on her daily walks, had been crossing the street near the local high school to avoid a corner where teen-agers smoked and talked in a group. The woman vowed to herself to walk through the group and say hello, and a relationship developed from that day, and eventually they got to know one another.

In closing, Volbracht pushed the county to focus on what is working in the valley, not the deficits or problems, visualize the type of ideal culture to live in, and view youth as the hope and future of the Wood River Valley.

Following the presentation, residents formed small groups and discussed steps to take to employ more assets in youth.