Youth program all but buried

COSTA MESA — If the City Council creates a program to involve teens in local government, it won’t be the one council members spent more than two hours discussing Tuesday night.

And any program at all now seems unlikely, unless one of the three council members who rejected it in January proposes something else.

Several students, parents and a teacher involved with the fledgling program said at a Tuesday study session that they couldn’t understand why the council majority took issue with the program, which would have included a youth council that would discuss city issues and report on them.

“It seems like you don’t want to listen to what we have to say,” Kiope Gyzen, a Costa Mesa resident who is a sophomore at the Orange County High School for the Arts, told the council.

The first-time program to give local students a closer look at government began in December. It was suggested by Councilwoman Katrina Foley and vetted before the parks and recreation commission, and the council approved funding for it in the 2006-07 budget.

When the council canceled the program in January, those who voted it down said it should have been voted on separately by the council. Some members said then that they wanted more say in the program’s content. City Manager Allan Roeder said the procedural hitch was his fault — the program was a quasi-committee and as such the council should have received final say.

On Tuesday, Mayor Allan Mansoor and council members Eric Bever and Wendy Leece, who voted the program down in January, raised a variety of concerns with it, asking what students would discuss and commenting that education on government is the school district’s job.

The debate came down to whether the program will include the youth council, which could have advised the council as other committees do.

Mansoor suggested the students only discuss issues the council already has decided so they can see what the outcome was and learn from it. But council members Katrina Foley and Linda Dixon, who backed the program, as well as the students and the parents who support it as is, couldn’t get an answer that satisfied them as to why the kids shouldn’t decide themselves what to discuss.

“There is nothing in a classroom that can take the place of engaging students in the real thing,” said Chris Cameron, whose daughter was one of 17 students in the program. “Three of the people here tonight seem to be fearful of this.”

Leece proposed that any advice-giving part of the program be taken out because students can speak at council meetings.

“I don’t believe it’s the function of city government to spend a lot of time listening to their advice in that setting,” Leece said. “It’s not that we don’t want to listen to what they have to say, but let them come in the natural course of events.”

Ultimately, Mansoor said he might support a teen government program that’s purely educational, provided he knows exactly what’s in the curriculum. But the mayor and Bever said there are already forums for teens to have input, including various existing committees.

“The youth in our community, the seniors in our community, the middle-aged people, everybody who has a brain and a mouth and a viewpoint, has access to share those viewpoints,” Bever said.

Mansoor, Bever and Leece have said they’re not against the program per se, but they never definitively said how it should be composed. Foley said she won’t try to revive the program because, “I know how to count to three, and we don’t have three votes.”

The students who came to the meeting probably learned a little about the process of government, but to Estancia High School government teacher Jennifer Perry, it wasn’t a useful example.

“I’m so disappointed to hear that members of our community don’t want our youth participating in government,” she told the council. “The only lesson I feel they have learned today is how bureaucracy works.”