PROGRAM TRIES TO ENSURE THAT NEXT STEP FOR TROUBLED TEENS IS THE RIGHT ONE

WHAT is respect?

Yvonne Sorrentino poses the question to the eight teens who sit facing her.

They fidget. There are mumbled answers, barely audible. More fidgeting.

``It's backing each other up,'' someone finally says, loudly. Clearly.

For the last 10 weeks, these teens have spent their Wednesday evenings at
the downtown YWCA in a program called Next Step. They've been ordered by
the Santa Clara County juvenile court to attend a year-long series of
workshops designed to give them hope, clarity and respect for themselves.
And others. The alternative is Juvenile Hall.

If Next Step works the way it's supposed to, the participants will stay
clean and off the streets. They will avoid further legal proceedings except
for checking in with a probation officer. Their futures will no longer be
careening toward detoxification centers, prisons or the morgue.

What the teens in the class have in common is that they were all first-time
offenders and drugs or alcohol were involved at the time of their arrest.
Jonathin, 15, says he was hauled in for public drunkenness. Felicia, 15, is
a heroin addict. Ben, 16, was caught tagging, but also had a problem with
marijuana. Others were gang bangers, shoplifters, truants.

``I call them on their attitudes,'' says Sorrentino, 39, the program
director and coordinator of Next Step and the reason, the kids say, that
they keep coming back week after week. To them, she's the real thing,
someone who's gone through what they're going through.

``She makes us feel real good,'' says Jonathin. ``I been through these
programs and the thing is, they're dumb and boring -- makes me wanna bounce
right out. Yvonne -- she makes me wanna come in here every week.''

``She's like a big sister,'' says Angelo, 16, who joined the class simply
because he heard good things about it from Jonathin. Although he's on
probation, the workshop isn't a requirement for him. But he says it's
helped him set goals and kept him from drinking.

``She doesn't preach or lecture,'' says Angelo. ``She puts something good
in your thoughts and it stays there.''

Those thoughts include a future.

``By the time they get to me, they've messed up and this is a chance for
them to get clean,'' she says. ``But for a kid to want to stay clean, they
have to have an incentive. I say to them `Let me teach you some skills that
will help you get through life.' They respond to that.''

Next Step, a pilot project of the YWCA and the county's juvenile court,
started exactly a year ago. While the young participants -- all minors --
are usually given a choice of programs by the juvenile court, Next Step
appeals because it provides more than lectures. It stresses both physical
and mental recovery. Each participant is expected to complete the entire
program over the course of a year. The alternative if they fail to show up:
back to court. The first ``team'' to complete the full run of workshops
will graduate Friday. So far, 80 teens -- an ethnically-mixed group of
white, black, Latino and Asian youth -- have participated in Next Step.

Surviving their youth

Jonathin's and Angelo's team is just finishing the first phase, called
Survival Skills for Youth, a 10-week series of classes that best can be
described as teaching the basics: communicating effectively, managing
money, controlling anger and goal-setting. They talk about life expectancy
- -- will they live to be 20? 70? 100?

>From the first class on, they are asked to think and act as a team, even
>coming up with a name that describes their spirit. Role-playing games
>teach them to be assertive without aggression.

Next, they move on to ``Job Club,'' another series of workshops where they
will learn about work ethics, plan careers and find part-time jobs. They
also will be enrolled in a martial arts class to learn self discipline. At
the same time, parents are encouraged, or ordered by a judge, to join the
``Parent Project,'' a program that teaches parents how to cope with
troubled adolescents.

By this time next year, Sorrentino hopes the members of this class -- who
call themselves the Bomb Dosh Click -- will be doing well in school or
working full or part-time, with definite plans for a productive future.
Some participants already work at places like Togo's, Blockbuster Video,
Starbucks and Lucky supermarket.

``What takes courage?'' Sorrentino asks the class.

``Staying clean,'' says Felicia.

Resisting a relapse

``Not hanging out with the same bad crowd,'' says Sean.

``Knowing I can get somewhere and I can do something with my life,'' says
Justin.

Ben, the tagger, starts telling the others about how difficult it is to
ignore his brother when the sibling is smoking pot in his bedroom.

``I've been clean since Oct. 19,'' says Ben, ``and I just walk away from
the door but I can smell it and I get kind of nervous because I always
relapsed on smoking weed before.''

His teammates encourage him to shut the brother's door and to resist the urge.

Ben comes to the conclusion that gaining respect from having courage is
more important than smoking the joint.

It's the kind of cognitive thinking that the members of this class weren't
doing at the beginning, says Sorrentino, clearly proud of their progress
and the discussion that's evolved from Ben's predicament.

``For the first time, they're able to look people directly in the eye,''
she says, ``to give and accept compliments. Understand what it means to
have good character.''

Sorrentino's empathy and effectiveness come from her own background. She
was raised in poverty in the barrios of East Los Angeles with ``15 people
in a two-bedroom house,'' she says. She was surrounded by relatives who
were drunk or high or both. By the time she was seven, she was visiting
uncles in jail. By the time she was 12, she was in a gang. A friend's
shooting death -- at the hands of her own leader -- was Sorrentino's
wake-up call. She began to ease her way out of that lifestyle. Her story
fascinates and inspires the Next Step teens.

Some who have gone through the year-old program return as peer counselors,
or just to visit.

Not everyone succeeds

``Respect was something that really sunk in,'' says Jennifer LaBarr, 18,
who just completed the entire program. About a year ago, she was caught
with drugs. She came to Next Step to avoid going through a program at
Juvenile Hall. At first, she says she thought it was going to be another
series of lectures she'd have to endure. But by the third week, she had a
job. Now she has two part-time jobs and is about to enroll in college. Her
relationship with her parents improved -- ``I talk a lot with them now,''
she says.

Although the program appears to be a success -- officials hope to take it
into the continuation schools at some point -- Sorrentino says a few teens
have slipped through her fingers.

``One kid was so heavily into gangs that he said, `Save me by locking me up
because I will die on the streets.' The reality was that he was right,''
she says. He violated probation by having illegal gang tattoos put
prominently on his neck. ``Now he's locked up. But you know, he didn't rob
or hurt anyone to be put away. He did it with tattoos.''

If nothing else, she wants the teens enrolled in the program to know what a
little success feels like.

``It's a wake-up call to change for the better,'' she says.