LAKELAND, Fla. — If you are a parent, you know raising kids is the most challenging job in the world and the most important one. Sometimes, a little help from some incredible organizations and people can and will make all the difference.
After recent shootings in the Tampa Bay area involving teens, we wanted to highlight solutions to a problem that plagues our society and the future of our country.
For this report, we profiled the Tampa Police Athletic League Boxing program, the work going on in Polk County at the Boys and Girls Club and a school teacher who credits the success in his life to after-school programs at the Boys and Girls Club.
These stories of achievement are a fraction of programs for juveniles across our area. But they represent and embody what so many leaders do without cameras present daily.
BOYS AND GIRLS CLUB OF POLK COUNTY
Monday through Friday, 75 kids make their way to after-school programs at the Musso Boys and Girls Club in Lakeland. A place where they are nurtured, respected and taught the principles of choosing between right and wrong.
"Some of the stories will really make you sad. They'll kind of bring tears to your eyes because these kids open up to us, and we become part of their family," unit director Padraic Roney said.
We watched as Roney greeted the kids coming off the bus. It's a way for him to welcome them back and also learn critical details about what's going on in their lives.
"If you got a good day, give me a thumbs up. If you had a bad day, thumbs down. If you had an okay day, thumbs in the middle," he said. "Listen, you're here now. So I'm glad you're here."
Roney strikes a calm, cool and collected demeanor with the kids. He has a welcoming smile and blue eyes that twinkle behind his long, shaggy beard.
Watching the kids, you can see that he's a mentor and friend.
"What's wrong? Come here, sweetie," Roney said to an 8-year-old girl crying at the door.
Tough conversations come with the job.
"You said her mom is a drug addict?" Paluska asked.
"Yeah," Roney responded. "She's worried about, you know, being with her mom. She wants to go with her mom. But mom's not ready for that."
Juveniles committing crime is a big problem not only in the Tampa Bay area but across the country.
According to the Department of Justice statistics, "in 2020, there were an estimated 424,300 arrests involving persons younger than 18."
However, the report shows progress is being made; there were "38% fewer than the number of arrests in 2019, and half the number of arrests five years earlier."
Locally, for all of 2022 through mid-October, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office arrested 4,718 juveniles, Polk, 2,520, and Pinellas, 2,019. That number may include multiple arrests of the same juvenile.
In September, three teens, ages 14, 16 and 17, were arrested following a drive-by shooting in Lakeland. They are all now charged with second-degree murder.
"And so it breaks my heart to think, what more could I do? What more could our community do as a whole?" Roney said.
"Do the teens that hear about a shooting understand how serious that is?" Paluska asked.
"Yes, and no, you know, peer pressure is important when they're younger, and we just have to be more important," Roney said.
FROM MENTEE TO MENTOR
Despite the overwhelming odds facing our youth, not everyone makes bad choices.
"It's easy to be led to the wrong path," Ismael Celestin told Paluska. "The Boys and Girls Club gonna lead me straight to a nice little narrow path for me to have success."
Celestin is a product of the Boys and Girls Club of Polk County, where he attended afternoon programs from kindergarten to his sophomore year.
He's now a teacher at Compass Charter Middle School. He believes kids have it harder than he did.
"Now, social media has a lot of stuff that we didn't have," Celestin said.
Celestin said pickup basketball games at the club helped him, too.
"Basketball saved me; it really saved me," he said. "Just social skills, life skills, everything West Club helped me with."
Today, he's paying it forward as a mentor to so many.
"I embrace the feeling of being somebody that could influence your life," Celestin said. "Outside of the practices, [students] hit me up and say, 'Coach, can we get in the gym and work on skills?' Or, 'Coach, I got this situation with my family, with my girl,' and they needed my advice. So, like small things like that, that could go a long way."
BOXING OUT OF TROUBLE
Last month, a 13-year-old was arrested for shooting another teen.
ABC Action News wanted to highlight programs in the community helping stop crimes like that from happening in the first place, with one making a significant impact: the Tampa Police Athletic League Boxing program.
"You always remember the kids you can't reach," Officer Adam Harris said. "That always is imprinted in the back of our minds. How can we prevent this here? How can we prevent this in the City of Tampa?"
Harris and Master Police Officer Julius Cannon are dedicated to the program. They are using decades of experience patrolling the streets to help kids make good decisions through core values of commitment, honor, integrity and courage.
"They're apprehensive at first," Harris said. "Over time, as they learn us, they get to speak with us and interact with all of us — their guard goes down. We're able to have a real conversation. They find out quickly we're coach Adam, we're coach Julius."
Cannon said that the PAL boxing program is a safe place where kids can feel safe and escape the troubles they might be experiencing at home.
"We get a lot of single parents, a lot of single moms, we get a lot of kids that have domestic and family issues at home. And they just come here to seek normalcy in their life," Cannon said. "And so we get a mixture of kids, we get the kids who want to participate in boxing and be athletic, and then we get the kids who just need to get away and be mentored."
The officers play a small role in the kids' lives, but hope the time with them will encourage many to make good choices and not fall into the wrong crowd.
"I like to feel like I've at least helped out a small percentage of cases. And for me, that's the biggest achievement of my career," Cannon said. "Through all the cases and putting people in jail and whatnot, being out here is the most wholesome for me. I do enjoy working with kids. I do enjoy mentoring kids. And I would like to feel like I helped them."
We watched Jaden DeJesus, 15, sparring with another teen in the program. Head coach Ramon Ortiz came over and said boxing is "keeping DeJesus out of trouble."
"I always liked to fight, so I was getting into little tussles at school, but now I box. I don't gotta worry about fighting or anything 'cause I do it every day," DeJesus said.
His mother, Stephanie, said it wasn't bad friends but bad choices.
"He never went looking for fights. But he doesn't back down from them either," she said. "He always stood up for himself. This keeps him out of trouble. This keeps him busy. This is good for him."
