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Tallahassee, FL – Gov. Rick Scott is getting good reviews for his choice to lead Florida's Department of Juvenile Justice. It's Wansley Walters, the head of Miami-Dade County's Juvenile Services Department, who reduced juvenile arrests by 51 percent and re-arrests by 80 percent while saving $33 million. As many professionals in the Florida corrections system are finding, education is critical to turning around the lives of youthful offenders. Margie Menzel reports.
"One of the things I touched on with my probation officer: she said that almost 70 percent of kids will fall back into a group that will re-commit crimes, that will do things over again. There's about 20 percent that fall in between. And then there's that 10 percent that will really stay away [from re-offending]."
Brett Pullen was on track for a baseball scholarship when he got into trouble, said his mother, Celeste.
"We were just heartbroken when Brett got into trouble," she said. "And all of his future, in an instant, over the course of a few weeks...when we realized what the repercussions were, what he had done..."
And it's with the hope of making a difference for young people like Brett that Mary Pankowski created the New Start scholarship. The longtime educator, who served at Florida State and Florida International universities, capped her career by retiring, going to law school, and becoming an assistant state attorney in the Second Judicial Circuit. She's trying to reach the roughly 90 percent of young offenders who, she says, can be drawn back from failure.
"And not just young people's lives," she said. "You think about the parents who get the call from a police officer, a law enforcement officer, who says, Hey, we've got your child in the juvenile detention center. He or she did the following..."
So Pankowski, a member of the Tallahassee Community College Foundation board of directors, began the New Start Scholarship.
"When I discovered that these young people who we were encouraging to stay in school, get your high school diploma, that they would no longer be eligible if they had committed a felony...they would no longer be eligible for Bright Futures scholarships."
Nor would a youngster in trouble with DJJ keep his or her Take Stock in Children Scholarship. Now Pankowski has raised more than $100,000 for the New Start scholarship. Brett Pullen, the first recipient says meeting some of his benefactors at a Rotary Club meeting changed his life.
"And it's great to have people like that, because in society nowadays, there's fewer and fewer and fewer people like that, fewer people to give back and more people to take," he said. "And so, to see people like that, it really touched me, and it opened my eyes to the love that there really is out there."
Pankowski says many of the scholarship's supporters come from the juvenile justice system.