Beyond the everyday routine of school and sports, teenagers in Los Altos have creative juices, free time and youthful energy to spare. Local teens pursue interests other than the stereoptypically ascribed shopping, computer games and TV watching.
In an effort to address the needs of area teens, Los Altos’ 12-member Youth Commission, founded in 1998 and comprised of students representing a number of area schools, acts as liaison and adviser to the city council on teen concerns. The students, ranging from seventh- to 12th-graders, serve one-year terms and meet monthly. Last year the commission worked on projects as diverse as the high school district’s “Teens at Work” fair, the annual town picnic and a Tsunami Relief dance.
“The most impressive (experience) I have had working with the city government has been the youth. They’ve got it together,” Los Altos City Councilman Curtis Cole said.
Graham Beck, the commission’s youngest member at 12, said he appreciates that “our city councilmembers and mayor take us seriously with our teen-related issues.”
Homestead High School sophomore Nicole Lew said she joined the commission because she “wanted to be more involved in the city. I live on the outskirts of Los Altos, and I don’t really know what’s going on in town. Most of my friends live in Sunnyvale.”
Lew attended a regional meeting last week that drew youth leaders from Mountain View, Palo Alto and Cupertino to plan the Peninsula’s yearly youth summit, at which youth commissioners network and share ideas.
“It gets kids to think, to have ideas, it encourages them to go out and make a difference in the community,” Cupertino Recreation Coordinator Kim Fry said.
The Los Altos commission’s most ambitious project is planning a permanent skate park for the city, an effort that started a few years ago. The city located a temporary skate park at Hillview Community Center for six years in the late 1990s, but attendance dropped as the park elements aged. Palo Alto, Mountain View and Sunnyvale already have permanent skate parks, according to Los Altos recreation supervisor Donna Legge, and local skaters drive to those.
The planned park would be designed with the participation of local skaters, and would have the potential for programming, such as lessons, competitions and birthday parties. The youth commissioners mailed a survey to 90 California cities with skate parks and received 40 responses about how the skate parks function in those communities.
The commission has met with city staff, researched area parks and drafted a proposal, currently under revision. Locations under consideration include four city parks. Chris Karney, the city’s new teen coordinator, spoke enthusiastically about the notion of locating the skate park at Shoup Park next to The Underground, further centralizing teen events at a location near downtown.
The project’s largest stumbling block may be its price tag, nearly $175,000 to install and $5,000-$10,000 a year to maintain. The city currently budgets a total of approximately $50,000 a year for all teen activities.
Teen center underutilized
The Underground has gotten a boost with the recent hire of Karney. Low attendance has dogged the center in the last year or two, but Karney is encouraged by the previous weekend’s turnout, about 15 young people each day, including some high school students.
The city has earmarked funding – about $10,000, Karney estimated – to renovate the center in 2007. New furniture is due this year to replace the motley assortment of donated sofas that sprawl about the large open space. The parks department budgets nearly $26,000 to the center each year for staff and supplies.
The Underground stocks a snack bar with teen-friendly food and soft drinks. A full kitchen is on the wish list when the center is renovated next year. The newest staff member at The Underground, Tatiana Wiens, has visions of holding make-your-own-pizza events and other activities in an expanded facility.
LAYC dances still popular
Held at the city’s youth center next to city hall, the dances haven’t changed much over time. Wiens’ father described the dances as “rush hour at the airport,” a room of teens walking around and talking in groups. The dances are a social event where only some dance, usually in groups rather than couples.
The younger Wiens grew up in Los Altos attending the dances and found herself on the other side of the dance floor this year when she chaperoned her first LAYC event.
“Now that I’m the female staff, I’ll be doing the dress code, which can be a touchy subject,” she said. She wasn’t aware of a dress code during her middle school years a decade ago. Today it isn’t unusual to see spaghetti-strap tank-tops, miniskirts and bare midriffs sneak out from under sweaters at dances.
The LAYC dances seem to have become a social necessity for many local junior high students, and the $8 tickets regularly sell out, especially for the seventh-grade dances. Kimberly Fletcher even saw a friend buy a scalped ticket for $60. The seventh-grader attends Blach Intermediate School, which has occasional dances planned by the student council, but only one so far this year, according to Fletcher.
A recent review of the fire code forced the youth center to limit attendance at the dances, cutting the number of students admitted from 450 to 310. The Recreation Department now invites seventh- and eighth-graders on alternate months, an unpopular move that has halved the number of dances for each grade. The eighth-graders have been carrying out a bit of a boycott, according to Legge.
Blach counselor Judy Rothenberg speculated that the eighth-grade boys, typically slower to develop than girls, benefited from the presence of seventh-grade girls. According to Rothenberg, and to students like Fletcher, the dances are popular because they represent one of the first times boys and girls interact socially at that age.
Los Altos resident Virginia Roberts remembers taking her daughter Donna to LAYC dances in 1968. She said the rituals haven’t changed: “It was the girls’ and boys’ first social contact with each other off campus. We would just drop them off and go back at 10 to pick them up so that we didn’t cramp their styles.”
The dances are chaperoned by high school students and parent volunteers rather than teachers, which adds to their cachet.
Making downtown teen-friendly
A teen business program similar to one begun in Mountain View last year tops the youth commission’s list of upcoming projects. Such programs recognize and encourage teen-friendly establishments with feedback cards and window plaques, and seek to make downtown merchants and customers more aware of and hospitable to young consumers.
“Someone hasn’t been smart enough to tap into the teen population,” Legge said. “They just want a hangout, a cool business downtown that would be open past 6 p.m. Right now the closest thing is Starbucks.”
The Youth Commission lobbied strongly for a movie theater when the city council evaluated uses for the city property at First and Main streets, but the council opted for a boutique hotel, projected to be more lucrative.
Councilman Cole said it was a purely financial decision. “The city wouldn’t own the business, and we have to manage our citizens’ funds,” he said. “Movie theater owners didn’t step up and say they could make a business viable. I’m hoping some things like combination coffee/bookstores could open.”
