LYNN — Six local youths participated in a new municipal board this week at the Youth and Adolescence Task Force’s inaugural meeting.
The task force, which Councilor-at-Large Nicole McClain said she started planning when she first took office in April, will allow young people the opportunity to directly participate in drafting policies that concern their futures, with a focus on after-school programming and workforce development.
Laying out the foundation for how the new committee will operate, the six students established accountability, open-mindedness, honesty, and civility as priorities in the task force’s interactions.
The youths were joined by McClain, abolitionist educator Danissa Lopez, Lynn Juvenile Court Officer Stacy Bryant-Brown, St. Mary’s High School teacher and coach Tristan Smith, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer Faustina Cuevas.
After the meeting, Task Force member Dania De La Cruz, a junior at Lynn English High School, said she began doing work for the neighborhood nonprofit Neighbor-to-Neighbor last year, and became interested in community advocacy and politics.
“When this opportunity came, I thought it would make a great outlet for my passion, which is creating a better, improved Lynn,” De La Cruz said. “I want to help direct policies to make this city a safer place, where kids my age can actually live and learn instead of having to be surrounded by violence and danger.”
Task Force member and Lynn English junior Brian Ramos said that he has attended both KIPP Academy Charter School and public high school, and wanted to advocate for increased student resources at Lynn Public Schools.
“I’ve lived here in Lynn for the entirety of my life and I feel as if the youth currently isn’t in the state that it should be in,” Ramos said. “I’ve witnessed firsthand how a charter school is versus a public school. It’s really different because a lot happens in a public school where you don’t have enough resources for the youth… compared to a smaller school, where there’s more of a focus on student development. In a bigger school, it’s more focused on getting them out of there so there can be more space.”
McClain said that ultimately, the task force’s purpose is to inform the policy decisions of a potential council that will be created specifically for youth and young adults in the future.
“We have the Council on Aging, and we were thinking we should also have a council on adolescence,” McClain said in an interview last week. “This task force is really being put together to create something more permanent in the city, to improve and to give obvious resources to our youth and young adults.”
