OCR Text |
Show CAP Sponsors Supervised Juvenile Work Assignments "I hope I'm never back," is the answer Mr. James Walker hears upon asking, "When will I see you again?" of those juveniles who are assigned to work off fines they have received from Juvenile Court. Mr. Walker is the supervisor supervi-sor of the work assignment program in Grand County which is presently being funded through Community Action Program (CAP). The CAP chose to fund this work assignment program with the idea of making a definite improvement in the community. As the juveniles are assigned as-signed to this work program, jobs are assigned to them from the city and county and Mr. Walker supervises. They have taken part in sweeping the curbs of the city, trimming trees, cutting weeds along the city streets, scraping scrap-ing the city swimming pool, and cleaning up the ball park and the visitors center. Mr. Walker works with groups of 1 to 8 juveniles with the average age being 14-16 and the usual reason for the juvenile being present is a traffic violation having to do with motorcycles. Mr. Walker said he is not told the reason ior each person per-son being present but that is always discussed among the juveniles as a new person is assinged to the group. Before CAP took action with this program, the work program pro-gram was working with the maintenance crews at the schools and the court house but it became difficult for those supervisors to supervise these juveniles and also attend to their other duties. Mr. Walker stated that most of the juveniles do excellent work. Included in his duties is keeping track of each person's time and then turning that record over to the Juvenile Probational Officer, Mr. Bill Adair. He does have the authority near the end of the juveniles assignment to bonus the person by taking off three or four hours. He does this if the juvenile has worked hard, been punctual, and caused no problems. In the time Mr. Walker has worked with this program he has only seen one juvenile have to repeat a work assignment. He also reported that he has had juveniles working for as long as 7 hours (one day) up to 150 hours (about 21 days). Tuesday the CAP Board will meet at 8 p.m. in the City Chambers to discuss whether to opt out of the whole CAP or ask to be refunded. The public is welcome to this meeting and encouraged to come by the CAP. |