Us & Them Encore: Disconnected Youth

There are so many young people in the U.S. who are not in school, working or training for work, that there’s a name for it. They are ‘disconnected youth,’ and while West Virginia’s rate has dropped in recent years, it’s still one of the highest in the nation. 

Just under 12%, or 24,000, young people are in this category, and they can be tough to track down because there’s a stigma attached to this status. However, some programs are trying to bridge the gap – to connect with young people and help them train for a job and a career. 

On this Us & Them episode, we’ll find out why some young people get stuck and the things Mountain State leaders say could help this next generation.

This episode of Us & Them is presented with support from the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation and the West Virginia Humanities Council.

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“A lot of them have not had basic needs met for a while. They haven’t been able to get to the dentist, they haven’t been to a doctor, they need to get eyeglasses, they don’t have a driver’s license, they can’t find their Social Security card or their birth certificate. So, we walk through those things to get them to a stable place, where they then feel comfortable to even be in a classroom and start thinking about their education, start getting marketable job skills.”

— Michelle Ferris

“I generally don’t like to characterize people in a negative connotation, and ‘disconnected youth’ seems to me to be a negative connotation. I’m sure that those students are connected to something. It’s our job to figure out what they’re connected to, to tap into that and to get them to connect to other things.”

— Sarah Armstrong Tucker, chancellor of the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission and the West Virginia Community and Technical College System

“I grew up in Elkins, West Virginia, in a fairly lower, middle class family who had periods of some pretty acute poverty. And as a queer teenager trying to figure out, ‘OK, what comes next out of this tiny town?’ there was a lot of, ‘Where do I go? Where do I look? How do I get connected?’ And if it wasn’t for the social connections that I was fortunate enough to have, there is no way that a lot of this stuff would have happened. … Unless I had people who were like, ‘Oh, here’s how to do this,’ there’s no way I would have gotten the drive to go to college or the push to keep going further.”

— John Prentice

“You don’t fix anything. You provide skills. You teach abilities. You support. You encourage. You guide. We don’t ‘fix’ because these people aren’t broken. They have been through some horrendous experiences, or they have chemical imbalances, or they are in bad situations. They are not broken. They just need help, support and skills.”

— Colleen Moran