New program fosters leadership in local youth

BY ALEX CANTATORE
Staff Reporter

“Am I too late to grab a brownie?” asked one Turlock teenager as he slid into the Turlock Chamber of Commerce as the clock struck 8 a.m. Wednesday morning.

The four administrators, with a quick glance to one another, decided that there was, indeed, enough time for the late student to grab a snack before the inaugural meeting of Teens in Action came to order.

Teens in Action, first conceived just over a year ago, is an effort to extend the popular Leadership Turlock program to the city’s youth. Eighteen Turlock area high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors will come together on the second Wednesday of each month from August until April to learn leadership skills and develop a working knowledge of Turlock’s community and businesses.

“Really, this is not one of those deals where you sit in classrooms all day,” said TIA Steering Committee member Juliene Flanders. “Yay!”

The steering committee, composed of community members, Leadership Turlock veterans, Turlock Unified School District personnel, Chamber of Commerce members, and Recreation Division staff, represents a cross-section of the community. At various meetings, the activities will range from visiting City Hall to helping to building a house, giving the teens a detailed picture of everything that goes into making a city work.

“It’s a format for the teens that will allow them to really learn about different career opportunities and what really goes on out there behind the scenes,” Flanders said.

Taking place during the school day, the Teens in Action meetings are seen by the school district as something similar to an educational, monthly field trip that gets students back in time for sports, clubs, and afterschool activities.

For the first day of Teens in Action, however, the students worked on getting to know one another and the lay of downtown Turlock, playing various ice breakers and games.

“That was the concept, to get them to be a team, to work together in a way different from students in the classroom,” Flanders said.

To start off the day, students were asked to describe themselves to the group with all the standard information, including name, age, pets, family, hobbies, and more. The catch, however, was that one of the things that each teen told the group had to be a lie.

“Acting is not going to be a good future for you,” Steering Committee Member Martin Purdy said to one student whose clearly false lie sent the whole room into uproarious laughter.

The game forced the students to open up, and to pay close attention to one another’s words in hopes of discerning the lie.

Some of the falsehoods were easier than others to eke out. When Teen in Action Tatiana Fregosi mentioned that she loved going to her family cabin in San Andreas, fellow teen Michael Kingsley-Hurst thought he’d found the lie in her game.

“Isn’t San Andreas in ‘Grand Theft Auto’ or something?” Kingsley-Hurst asked.

“No, it’s a real place,” Fregosi said, “but I don’t like going there.”

After getting to know each other, the centerpiece activity of the first day of Teens in Action began, an incredible downtown scavenger hunt known as The Go Game.

Put together by a San Francisco company, The Go Game is nothing if not high tech. Each team of four or five teens was sent out into Downtown Turlock with a sophisticated Web-enabled cell phone and a digital camera.

Throughout the two-hour long game, players received missions on their phones where they were ask to solve puzzles, answer questions, and perform ridiculous activities.

“You guys are going the wrong way!” Flanders shouted as the first teams, in their haste to start solving puzzles, ran across Golden State Boulevard in the opposite way from any challenges.

As teens found strangers to take their pictures, videotaped reenacted scenes in history, named characters in “Talladega Nights,” and played Chubby Bunny, the students bonded together and raced through challenges.

“It’s not ‘home cot deer’?” asked one student as he raced to unscramble Scrabble tiles meant to spell “The Morse Code” while a group of other-male-students raided Hawaiian Reflections to don grass skirts and coconut tops.

In inter-team challenges, more students struggled to count the number of hippos and penguins represented by 200 legs, while three paid actors, one of whom is a world-champion yo-yoer in real life, pretended to be Russian operatives and other shady characters. However, things went a little too far for Steering Committee Member Martin Purdy when his son, Trevor Purdy, scaled to the top of a downtown light post in search of the perfect picture.

“I don’t think we need to do that again,” Martin Purdy said after his son had safely made his way down.

After dance-offs and spirited roshambo competitions, for the day’s final task each team had to write an anonymous love note, which was then left on the hood of a random car downtown. As a whole, Turlock’s teens raced through more activities than any other team that The Go Game’s Roxy Taghavian had ever seen before.

When the clock turned to noon and the students’ phones indicated that there were no more tasks to be completed, the students walked to Bistro 234 for a donated lunch. In fact, all elements of the Teens in Action program are completely funded by local businesses and clubs, including the Sunrise and Noon Rotary, the Kiwanis Club of Greater Turlock, the Turlock Exchange Club, Lancaster Painting, and MOCSE Credit Union.

After lunch, the students met one more time at the Chamber to review the various pictures and videos they had taken and to vote for their colleagues’ productions in American Idol-style competition to determine the winning team.

In the end, the team “The Legitness” lived up to their moniker to come out on top by a landslide, but winning didn’t seem to matter too much to the Teens in Action.

“Really, it was more about the accomplishment of getting it done,” Flanders said. “The kids had a blast”

To contact Alex Cantatore, e-mail acantatore@turlockjournal.com or call 634-9141 ext. 2005.

Originally published in the Turlock Journal 8/22/2008.
Retrieved from the Turlock Journal Web site.