Coupeville kids discuss juvenile detention

By NATHAN WHALEN

What should a juvenile jail have to offer? One good way to find out, perhaps, is to ask kids, like a bunch of Coupeville fourth graders.

The Island County Juvenile Detention Advisory Committee spent months figuring out the design guidelines for the soon-to-be-built Juvenile Detention Center. In gathering information, the committee heard from one last group before sending recommendations to the architectural firm. That group was Deb Sherman’s fourth-grade class at Coupeville Elementary School.

The fourth graders produced a PowerPoint presentation and gave it to the advisory committee April 30.

Fourth grader Colin Goddard said the class worked together to make suggestions that would make the facility comfortable, but “we didn’t want it to be a place where they would want to come back.”

Fellow classmate Chantal White added that the fourth graders utilized the idea of the scale to balance comfort and punishment.

Ideas presented to the advisory committee ranged from having a gym for working out aggression to education and community service for juveniles.

“When I saw this presentation, I was just blown out of the water,” said Mike Merringer, Island County Juvenile and Family Courts administrator.

Merringer is a learning partner of one of the Coupeville Elementary School fourth graders, and as such, gave a presentation to the class about the plans and needs for a juvenile detention facility. After his talk, he mentioned that he would like to hear any suggestions the students may have.

When Merringer came back to the class about a month later, he saw the PowerPoint presentation.

The juvenile detention center presentation was the fourth-graders’ first foray into PowerPoint, but the kids have been learning all about the structure of government. They even took trip to Olympia.

Goddard added that he and his fellow students also learned how to work in a large group through compromise.

The Juvenile Detention Center has been a project the county has been planning the past several years, since voters funded it with a sales tax increase.

The short-term facility is needed because Island County is under state mandate to build such a facility. The county presently contracts with Snohomish and Skagit counties to house juvenile offenders, which makes it difficult to offer locally-based programs for young offenders.

The advisory committee created the design requirements for the juvenile detention center and the county hired KMD Architects of Portland to design the structure.

Merringer said that the firm has experience with similar structures such as a recent detention center built in Clallam County.

He added that he hopes construction for the new facility will begin sometime in early 2004.

You can reach News-Times reporter Nathan Whalen at nwhalen@whidbeynewstimes.com or 675-6611.