Jeff Boyd Receives in the CFL, but Gives Help to Delinquents

Jeff Boyd’s lifestyle is lively and unique. At 31, he’s usually out catching passes or fraternizing with young convicts.

A wide receiver for the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League, Boyd and a partner operate a Los Angeles home for delinquent youths.

In his view, the kids aren’t delinquent, they aren’t convicts, they aren’t criminals--they’re unlucky. But they are wards of the court, meaning they have been convicted of something.

And so they are in Boyd’s charge. Most of them, anyway.

Not long ago, one got away. An 11-year-old thief, the youngster behaved so well that he qualified, along with six others in Boyd’s math class, for a weekend excursion to Venice Beach, where he promptly fled.

“A very sad story,” Boyd said the other day in Compton, where he and former football player Joe Hixon run the Progressive Youth Center. “We felt we couldn’t take him back.

“You can work with some 11-year-olds, but the harm that this one was doing to our program outweighed the good that we could do for him.”

Boyd spoke softly but with self-assurance at the center, a group home for wayward children--one of several supervised by the Los Angeles County Probation Department.

The homes are licensed by the state, operated privately and funded by the county, state and federal governments, all of which would rather have the boys and girls there than in jail--or in the streets.

At the Progressive Youth Center, 16 boys are assigned to Boyd and Hixon on probation and range in age from 11 to 17. Most are 15 or 16. Three are Latinos, Boyd said. One is white, the rest black.

In the state’s juvenile court system, all were found to have committed what would be felonies if they were adults--burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, vandalism, attempted murder, drug use, concealing a weapon.

They’re spending their time in a sprawling, one-story structure on Santa Fe Avenue. It has a nine-bedroom dormitory, two offices, TV room, dining room, kitchen, classroom and minimum but adequate security.

The full-time staff of 15 includes two high school teachers. There is also a part-time staff of three: a licensed social worker, psychiatrist and psychologist.

The county expects these 18 adults to straighten out the 16 kids in the next year or two, if not sooner. Schoolwork gets PYC’s first priority.

“We like to think they’re getting a better education here than they would anywhere else,” said Boyd, who, starting in June, will commute weekly from Canada while playing football for Toronto.

“A guy might be an 11th-grader (technically) when we get him, but he’s only operating at a sixth- or seventh-grade level. Our goal is to push him to 11 as soon as we can in the standard classes--science, history, English, math, health and art.”

Because math is tough for kids who haven’t kept up in school, Boyd, a bright communicator, puts it first each morning, at 8:30, and teaches the course himself.

“It’s a subject that relates to life,” he said. “In math, you use what you know to find out what you don’t know. And as I tell the kids, that’s the best way to solve problems in the real world.”

THE CRIPS ALUMNUS

Against the Saskatchewan Roughriders late last season, Boyd, 6-foot-2 and 180 pounds, was going for his fifth 1,000-yard season as a CFL receiver when he suffered a broken ankle.

He still ranks with the best they’ve ever seen in that league. When he returns to the Argonauts this summer, Boyd will start the season as one of the CFL’s top 12 in touchdowns. Boyd is 21st in receptions and 17th in yards.

“I like football too much to retire when I can still play,” he said. “My wife and (three) children usually travel with me. We’ll be (in Los Angeles) part of every week again this season--thanks to (airline) deregulation and frequent flyer (mileage).”

And thanks to CFL procedures. Football teams don’t practice as much in Canada, and most players hold second jobs. Boyd’s is 2,500 miles down the road.

“(Youth center) work is what I want to do with the rest of my life,” he said. “When I’m out of football, we plan to expand.

“Someday I’d like to have several of these homes in the L.A. area. I want to have at least one girls’ home. There are more boys’ homes--but the greater need is for girls’.”

Need is a meaningful word to Boyd. A lifelong resident of South Central Los Angeles, from which he could have escaped long ago, he has spent most of his days helping the less fortunate as a counselor, coach, teacher--tutoring kids expelled from school--and, now, in rehabilitation.

But don’t talk rehab to Boyd.

“I don’t call this rehabilitation,” he said. “I call it development. Rehabilitation (implies) that the guy was OK once, then lost it, but can be brought back.

“At the (youth center), we’re trying to develop kids who never had it. They’ve been shortchanged since the day they were born.

“They won’t open their mouth in class because if they say something, they know it will be wrong. They’ll be embarrassed, and fear of embarrassment is a big block to learning.

“They’ve had no support at home. Only one of our kids has both a mother and father at home. A couple of them have lived in the streets most of their lives. Three are here because they have nowhere else to go. They’ve been (convicted), they’ve served their time, they’re out--and there’s no family to return to.”

Boyd said that drugs are normally but a peripheral aspect of juvenile delinquency.

“Drugs are often a contributing factor, but they’re almost never the real problem,” he said. “The root of the problem is always somewhere else--lack of supervision, usually, or you only get attention when you do something wrong.”

Gang involvement is the great tragedy of Boyd’s world, he said.

“These kids today are initiated into the gangs at the age of eight months, if you can believe that, and the gang is the only family they really have,” he said. “Gang life is the only life they know.

“I came up through the Crips myself, but it’s much worse now because there are not as many leaders now. They’re all warriors out there today. Nobody tells them to do these drive-by shootings. They’re just reacting to the way they feel.

“At our (youth center), we want to develop a kid to the point where he doesn’t feel contained by the gang setting. That means he has to learn to make right decisions. You can’t just tell him, ‘I don’t want you in the gang anymore.’ You have to get him to where he wants to move the gang down on his priority list. The best way is developing his skills, whatever they are.”

Everybody can do something well, in Boyd’s opinion.

“Every kid has a skill if you take the time to discover what it is and nurture it,” he said. “As a math teacher, I know that some of them could be bank tellers--but they’ve never even been in a bank.

“They could be a store clerk or salesman or artist--but they’ve never been exposed to any of that. They don’t know what a profession is. Most of them have hardly ever been more than a few blocks from where they were born.

“It isn’t anybody’s fault. It isn’t their teachers’ fault. It isn’t the public school system’s fault. It certainly isn’t the kids’ fault. It’s a no-fault problem, but it’s a big problem.”

$200-MILLION TAB

If every deprived teen-ager in Los Angeles were in a youth center of the kind that Boyd and Hixon conduct, Southern California would be a more comfortable place.

“At first, some (investigators) objected to a group home in that community,” licensing analyst Diann White said at state social services. “But (Boyd and Hixon) wanted to serve that population, and we’re proud of them. They really care about the kids.”

Still, the Progressive Youth Center is home to only 16 of the 17,300 juveniles under the wing of the County Probation Department. What’s happening to the rest of them?

Said Michelle Lewis, the department’s placement director: “The majority, including most first offenders, have been returned to their own homes on probation.”

She said many of the others are repeat offenders who have been funneled into either group homes, probation camps or one of the county’s three juvenile halls in Sylmar, Downey and downtown.

This month:

--About 1,300 teen-agers are in the 200 group homes maintained throughout the county by 80 private operators, Boyd and Hixon among them.

--Another 1,600 youths are in the 15 probation camps operated by the county.

--About 1,000 are in state facilities.

--More than 2,000 have been jammed into the county’s overcrowded juvenile halls.

In this mix, how successful are group homes?

Said Lewis: “They’re successful with the youngsters who stay awhile, who eventually learn to think more highly of themselves, and become more aware of their options. But a group home can’t change a kid’s family or community. Going back home is the problem. After-care is the big lack.”

California welcomes administrators who, like Boyd, aspire to operate two or more group homes.

Ephraim Mochson, a district manager for the state, said: “Some can run 15 places, some can’t run one. The good ones are a big help.”

How does the probation department monitor the institutions?

“The homes are scrutinized continually by two county agencies,” said Bogus Miller, a county consultant who oversees the Progressive Youth Center and other group homes. “The (homes’) administrators submit, in writing, their plans and scheduled services, menus and the like. Then we go out and make sure they’re meeting their schedules as well as our standards.”

How does Miller grade Boyd and Hixon?

“They grade high on the essentials,” he said. “I mean their treatment program, cleanliness, menus, willingness to take hard-to-place kids, things like that.”

The Progressive Youth Center has nonprofit status. “Many, if not most, of them are nonprofit homes,” said a regional director for the county, Raul Solis. “The personnel are salaried, and it can be a good living, but this isn’t a field in which you get rich.”

How costly is this whole program to the taxpayers?

At the probation department, Michelle Lewis said: “Placement costs run from $1,700 a month to $3,500 a month per child.”

If the average is $2,000 and if there are 5,000 boys and girls in the county’s various group homes and probation camps, that’s $10 million a month, or $120 million a year.

Associated expenses run the annual bill to more than $200 million.

Is there some alternative to spending all that?

“Total costs would go down considerably if we’d all get together and make a real effort to lower teen-age pregnancy,” Lewis said. “If you’re in probation work long enough, you see many daughters of 14-year-old mothers become 14-year-old mothers, whose daughters grow up to be 14-year-old mothers.

“And the 14-year-old sons of these immature mothers keep adding immensely to the problem.”

YOUNG MAN’S GAME

His real name isn’t Gerald Johnson, but his plight is real enough. Arrested for packing a gun and carrying a can of spray paint at 15, Gerald wound up at the Progressive Youth Center, where graffiti are out, but art class is in.

“I saw him making sketches in art class one day, and right away I thought, ‘Here’s a kid with talent,’ ” Boyd said. “But Gerald couldn’t see that he was anything special. So I took him with me to call on a friend of mine who’s a commercial artist, and my friend agreed with me.

“Now we’re trying to get him into the city schools’ magnet program for kids who excel. I’m hopeful they’ll take him. It would be the start of a new life.”

Starting new lives is what they do at the Progressive YC.

“We want you to grow every day,” Boyd said.

It isn’t easy in a gang environment. It hasn’t always been easy for Boyd, either. Born across the street from the Los Angeles Coliseum in a hospital that is defunct, he was 18 when he met his jobless father.

Along with two brothers, he was brought up by his mother, a nurse then, a travel agent now.

Jeff Boyd and his wife, Saundra, former classmates at Inglewood’s Morningside High School, live in Ontario with Jayson, 6; Kristen, 3, and Jonathan, 3 months. Saundra is a registered nurse.

In college, Jeff played football at the University of Colorado after beginning at Los Angeles Southwest Junior College, where, on an 0-10 team, he and a teammate were the two all-league wide receivers.

The teammate, Joe Hixon, who went on to play football at New Mexico State, is his partner at the youth center, the administrator of the home that he and Boyd founded a couple of years ago.

“For any new (PYC) kid, the first 31 days are the hardest,” Hixon said. “The discipline and everything is so new, you never know whether they’ll make it.”

Regardless of the crimes they have committed, PYC youngsters almost never flee after the first month, Hixon said.

“We want them to want to be here, and after a while, they almost all do,” he said. “They’ve probably come out of a family where there were six or seven children sleeping in the same bedroom.

“Here, they have their own bed. They have their own bedroom, with only one roommate. They have their own toothbrush. They get three square meals a day, and after a month or so, they begin to feel that leaving would be punishment. That’s exactly how we want them to feel.”

Hixon has discovered that the most difficult job for a group home administrator is keeping a first-class staff intact.

“It takes a 15-person staff for 16 kids because we want three staffers here every hour of the day and night,” he said. “And we train them well. So as soon as they get some experience, they want to move on and up. And they do.”

To Boyd, the assistant administrator, a group home is a young man’s game.

“Joe and I are not too much older than some of these kids,” Boyd said. “The (age) gap is smaller here than in some (group homes), and I think that’s an advantage for the kids and us, too. What these guys are going through now, we went through just a bit ago.”

Nonetheless, every PYC adult is addressed as “mister.”

“If you’re Joe Montana, you can have them call you either Mr. Montana or Mr. Joe,” he said. “But it has to be one or the other. We feel that we have to keep the respect level up.”

The Boyd-Hixon approach is strictly carrot and stick. The kids can earn daily or weekend passes. They are on allowances of $5 a week, and can earn up to $10 more--but they also can blow it all.

“There are penalties for everything you do that’s short of good behavior at all times,” Boyd said. “A curse costs you 25 cents.”

At PYC, that has nearly wiped out cursing.