Parental Involvement Sinks Planned Youth Conference

SANTA CLARITA — A city-planned conference for youths and parents on issues ranging from gang awareness to volunteerism has been scrapped for this year, in part because youths’ interest waned when they learned that parents would be involved.

Initially set for June and then rescheduled to this month, the Parent to Youth Conference was to be the 1993 sequel of Santa Clarita’s Youth to Youth Conference held one year ago Tuesday, which drew about 300 participants.

“The feedback we got from a lot of kids was they didn’t want to go anywhere with their parents,” said Cecilia Burda, city special projects coordinator who organized the 1992 conference.

Cost concerns and questions about who actually attends such a program also were cited as reasons why a conference described as “important” and “highly successful” the first time around has failed to come together this year.

The original Youth to Youth Conference focused on leadership-training activities and discussions about youth issues. It ended with a survey about problems facing Santa Clarita Valley teen-agers.

“I think that everyone that went thought it was highly successful,” said John Danielson, city Parks and Recreation Department superintendent. “The question is, did enough people attend?”

Critics asked whether the conference, with an $8,000 price tag in 1992, would be worth the expense in a tight budget year. Closer to the point, some said that it catered to those students already involved in extracurricular activities and missed many who would benefit most from discussing issues facing teen-agers, Danielson said.

Many of the benefits from the 1992 conference were intangible, Burda said.

“I’ve seen, for over a year, a core group of kids that have stayed involved and interested in this,” Burda said. “We didn’t see those kids before.”

Supporters had decided to host an all-day Parent to Youth Conference to help bridge the communication gap they saw in the differing responses received in surveys collected last year. Youths indicated that the top issue facing them in Santa Clarita was racism, while parents identified a lack of family values.