High Expectations will be hosting two meetings next week to help community members better understand how teens feel about growing up in Beaver Dam.
The meetings will be held on Monday from 6:30 to 8 p.m. and Tuesday from 9 to 10:30 a.m. at the Teen Center, 116 S. Spring St.
“We want to see as many people as we can,” High Expectations development director Marty Stanton said. “Parents, teens, business owners and government officials are all needed to have that discussion.”
High Expectations, a non-profit organization that has started many teen-friendly programs in the area including the Teen Center, paid for the Search Institutes assets survey. The survey was given last spring to students in grades seven through 12 in the Beaver Dam Unified School District and seventh and eighth graders at St. Stephen’s Lutheran School.
The Search Institute has used the survey for the last 20 years to ask nearly 3 million youths about how they experience the 40 developmental assets that the Search Institute identifies as basic building blocks of human development.
The Search Institute believes the higher the asset level students have, the more likely they are to engage in thriving behavior. The lower the asset level, the more likely they are to engage in negative, high-risk behavior.
“With the meetings, we will talk about what we have good in the community and then go from there,” Stanton said.
Part of the meeting will be explaining the 40 assets.
“We want to bring everyone together and talk about what assets are and how we can build assets in the youth throughout the community,” Stanton said.
A few areas of the survey that bothered Stanton was the low number of students who participated in creative activities and the low number of students who say they have positive family communications.
Fifteen percent of the students surveyed said they spend three or more hours a week in music, theater or the arts. Only 24 percent of the students surveyed said that young people and parents communicate positively.
“”Another thing that hit me and the staff here was that only 17 percent of the kids felt the community valued them,” Stanton said. “It’s a survey of attitudes and perspectives but a lot of times perspective is a reality. The kids don’t feel that the community values them.”
Stanton said the meetings will hopefully help the community come together to make changes for the youth.
“The last thing we want to do is to discuss this and not see anything happen,” Stanton said. “We have to get started working together.”
tpederson@capitalnewspapers.com