East Haddam Forum Focuses on Youth

About 70 middle and high school students from East Haddam took part in a youth forum today aimed at discovering the students’ attitudes and perceptions about issues they face at home and at school.

The Community Youth Forum was hosted by the East Haddam Youth and Family Services at the Riverhouse at Goodspeed Station in Haddam. Students, who participated anonymously in the forum, broke into small groups scattered throughout the main meeting room at the banquet facility. Once in those groups, they were assisted by a facilitator to discuss three main issues that the family services agency had identified as areas of concern that they wanted additional information about from the teens.

Toni McCabe, executive director of the town’s family services agency, said the three issues – how the teens view parental expectations of them, whether they think their community values them and how they view the role of violence in their lives – were identified as needing more elucidation following a survey of the youths’ attitudes that was taken recently.

“We got a lot of information from (the survey) but we wanted more information,” McCabe said.

During the forum, the students will talk to each other and facilitators about the three topics and the information developed in the session, which ran from 8:30 a.m to 1:30 p.m., will be analyzed by a team of experts from the family services agency, local schools and members of the local prevention council. The group will then develop a report on those findings that would be presented to students, schools, parents and community organizations, McCabe said.