D.Y.S. Program to Take Youth from the Streets to the Classroom

Kevin Cadle

During an interview with the Director of the Department of Youth Services, Kevin Cadle, News Five learnt about another initiative which will see young people who may previously have been involved with gangs returning to the classroom. While that programme will soon be launched, Cadle says that the department is working along Leadership Intervention Unit to help the transition from the community beautification programme into the classrooms. Courses will help boost reading and math skills and financial literacy. A total of two hundred and seventy young men directly from those infested areas of crime and violence will be going back to school.

Kevin Cadle, Director, Department of Youth Services

“In the past what we had was that they would say that they are just paying gang members to work or just paying gang members to do nothing. So we decided through the multisectoral approach, along with L.I.U., that that cannot be the case. So what we are going to do is that we already started the first part of it which was the community beautification concept. We are changing that into educating these young men. I know for a fact that in the past apprenticeship programme, the more we educated those young men, the more they became positive and productive citizens and wanted to work and go back to school. They will be doing the apprenticeship programme which will be a step-up programme which is about the level one or entry level to the ITVETs and then we will start working on building their capacity. We have a small fund through the Commonwealth of Learning, COL, and it will be specifically designed to work with those young men. And along with the University of Belize we are also working on a family assessment because we need to know what is going on in those families. Nobody has done that. We don’t have any data on what those young men and their family members live like and we need to know that to be able to better serve them and be able to ensure that we continue to provide the appropriate type of programmes for our young people in this country.”