Mentoring Troubled Teens

The world is shrinking, as everyone knows, and the tragedies and injustices in off-limits neighborhoods and distant countries are not nearly as easy to gloss over, morally, as they once were. The six Boston University alumni we’re profiling this week have chosen work that brings them into contact with the neediest people in our global society. Yet they do not consider themselves extraordinary. They are responding to an urge to engage that feels both necessary and obvious. As one says simply, “There isn’t a choice.”

On a spring morning at a Boston high school, Wyatt Posig, a caseworker in the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services, has some good news for Chris, an affable 17-year-old with a sleepy smile and an armed robbery conviction. Posig thinks he may have found Chris an office job for the summer.

There’s only one problem — the internship calls for business attire. Posig has been trying to get clothing vouchers for Chris, whose wardrobe runs to the type of oversized checked shirts and baggy pants he’s wearing today. “I might have some ties for you,” Posig says. Chris shrugs indifferently at the dilemma. (Some names and details have been changed.)

It wasn’t too long ago that Posig (CAS’07) was an intern himself. Now, just a year out of college, he is one of a handful of caseworkers assigned to a pilot program designed to give Boston’s juvenile offenders some much-needed support as they leave detention centers and reenter their communities. In search of a better way to cut recidivism, the state introduced the program last year, tweaking a model developed by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Each of Boston’s neighborhood community centers now has a dedicated caseworker to act as a consistent presence in these troubled kids’ lives: an amalgam of older brother, life coach, negotiator, and friend. For Dorchester’s teens, that person is Posig.

He started prepping for the role years ago, studying sociology at BU and coordinating the Big Siblings program. He worked summer internships at the Department for Children and Families in his hometown of Burlington, Vt. “I’ve always known I wanted to work with young people in this situation,” Posig says. “I really thrive on being able to help them out. And for whatever reason, I’ve been able to connect with kids really easily my entire life.”

It helps that he could almost pass for a teenager. Tall and lanky, with a smattering of freckles and a dark red beard, he sticks to a uniform of T-shirts and jeans. He spends most of his day checking up on his clients, taking them to dental appointments, or letting the kids vent to him in his office. For the 10 boys in his caseload, none of whom have fathers living at home, Posig is a role model, but not in the traditional sense.

“The other caseworkers are the parent figures,” he says. “I’m more of a brother. The difficult part is that you want to be the kids’ friend, but you also want to get that respect” — a hard thing to earn as the youngest guy in the office. But Posig brings a youthful energy to the Dorchester Community Re-entry Center: he leads the daily staff meeting, chats up his coworkers, and — perhaps a first for world-weary social workers — does it all without caffeine. (He’s never had a cup of coffee, he says.)

“I turned 23 yesterday,” Posig says. “But none of the kids knows that.”

Curtis, one of the center’s charges, just celebrated a birthday as well. There were no parties, as Posig and coworker Sheila Cooper learn when they visit him that afternoon at Casa Isla, a lockup in Quincy for 20 boys ages 11 to 17.

Curtis arrives in the visitors’ room, and Cooper and Posig quickly assume their roles: Cooper, the tough-love veteran caseworker, and Posig, the tentative, encouraging upstart. “It’s good to see you,” Posig says. “It’s not good to see you locked up, but it’s good to see you.”

Cooper starts to grill him: why did he call them down for a meeting?

“I miss y’all,” Curtis finally confesses. Just seven days away from his release, the 15-year-old is tense. “Don’t tell the other kids you’re waiting to get out,” Posig advises, “or they’ll test you.” He later explains that it’s not uncommon for an offender to slip up near the end of a sentence or to be sent back for a new crime just weeks after being let out. When Curtis is released, Posig’s task will be to help him navigate the everyday challenges of school, family, and work that can make life on the inside seem relatively easy — even desirable.

Still, Posig is optimistic about Curtis’s chances, perhaps more so than Curtis himself. In the year he’s been on the job, he’s witnessed success stories: one of his kids has never missed a day of work, and another recently made the honor roll. His attitude, he hopes, is contagious.

Katie Koch can be reached at klkoch@bu.edu.

Check back tomorrow to read part five of “The Good Life: Six Alums at Work in the World.” Click here to read part one. Click here to read part two. Click here to read part three.

“The Good Life” was originally published in the summer 2008 edition of Bostonia.