Neapolitan of Note: Threasa Miller

Following is the unabridged version of the interview I did for our e-newsletter - which you can read here before we publish the newsletter! How's that for exclusive!?

If you are clicking over from said newsletter, you will notice that I left the questions in that you may have already read. Sorry. That's blog quality control for you.

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There are over 500 good causes in Collier County. What makes the top 1% stand out above the rest? Its people. People like Threasa Miller of the PACE Center for Girls in Immokalee.

Neapolitan of Note: Threasa Miller

Name: Threasa (“The- reesa”) Miller
Title: Founder & Executive Director
Organization: The Pace Center for Girls, Collier at Immokalee
www.pacecenter.org
Neapolitan since: 1980
Born in Tennesee

From the PACE website: “PACE provides a non-residential delinquency prevention program in 21 locations statewide, targeting the unique needs of females 12 to 18 who are identified as dependent, truant, runaway, ungovernable, delinquent, or in need of academic skills. PACE (Practical Academic Cultural Education) accepts referrals from the juvenile justice system, the Department of Children and Families, school personnel, community services agencies, parents, family members, friends and self-referrals. Its purpose is to intervene and prevent school withdrawal, juvenile delinquency, teen pregnancy, substance abuse and welfare dependency.”

NSA: How did you get involved in PACE?

Miller: I worked in social services after college – investigating child abuse in foster care, then with the Department of Juvenile Justice. PACE was going to open a center in Southwest Florida, and I helped write the winning grant to bring it to Immokalee rather than Sarasota or Lee. The president of the organization asked me if I wanted to head it up, and I said “No!” – I loved what I was doing – but she isn’t one to take no for an answer, so she asked me to interview people for the job. I didn’t approve of the applicants, after all the hard work I’d put into the project, so she asked me if maybe I shouldn’t do it myself. Like I said, she didn’t take no for an answer. She wore me down, and I’m glad she did.

NSA: Could you explain what the “C” stands for in PACE?

Miller: The word “Cultural” means exposure and appreciation of things that are different for us. It includes all aspects of who we are, including our arts, our belief in humanity; we teach the girls that being different is good. One of our big goals is to stop bullying, and to do that we have to teach the girls to appreciate differences.

In Immokalee, race isn’t usually the problem, but it could be just different size, for instance: maybe the girls are picking on another girl for being big. We have to teach her that to hit is not a solution, and we have to teach them to appreciate her for who she is. That is all included in our cultural education.

Our teachers introduce the girls to the idea of cultural diversity. Well, one time I overheard girls calling it cultural conspiracy. I got a big kick out of the teacher’s explanation of the difference.

NSA: Your SPIRITED GIRLS!® program “teaches positive lifestyle choices.” How?

Miller: One of the things girls tell us is, they’re stressed; even kids these days are suffering from ulcers or high blood pressure. We tell them how to breathe, relax; we help them build a positive body image. We say, “Look at a TV ad. Is this real, is this true life?” Wellness, healthy eating, the need to drink more water are all things we cover. Right now, we’re working on teaching them how to express themselves, how to talk things out rather than fight.

NSA: It seems that PACE steps in to fill a need that the public school system can’t. Is that right?

Miller: This isn’t an either/or – it isn’t true that either they’re at PACE or they’re in public school. Without PACE, most of our girls would have dropped out or been kicked out of public school. There would be 100 more girls on the welfare role; and this is not just for them but for their family members, for all the children they would have.

Sometimes people can get narrow-minded and mean, and say things like ‘Why have a school like PACE? Kids should be able to tough it out with everybody else.’ That’s so wrong. Sometimes, especially when you have victims of trauma, one more hard knock pushes them over the edge. A gang doesn’t always seem so bad when you have that kind of background. We’re here as an alternative.

NSA: PACE has a 10:1 student-teacher ratio, yet it is only a little more costly for you to run than regular public schools, where classes are crammed at least 25 kids to a teacher. How do you do it?

Miller: We have very little administration. I double as a teacher; we’re all cross-and triple-trained because we have to fill in where we’re needed. We also operate less expensively because we use support services from public school administration, so we don’t have to duplicate them. We partner efficiently.

NSA: How important is that 10:1 ratio?

Miller: Class size is the number one factor to our success. Our girls need extra attention, and they get that. Nothing is more important in education than small class size.

NSA: You’ve bragged to me about the quality of your teachers. How do you attract and keep talent?

Miller: It’s always a challenge. Right now we have an awesome pool of teachers. We have alternative teachers; our science teacher is a retired scientist, a Ph.D. from Proctor & Gamble. He retired early, wants to make a difference, drives every day from Marco Island. He says, ‘I have a small class, I can get creative, I like the support from our administration, we have support via behavior management (public school teachers don’t have that to help them), I like to be able to give suggestions and the administration actually listens.’ Our math teacher has patents from his work with U.S. Surgical Steel. Our teachers are quality. We have to support them with the teaching part, because they didn’t study teaching in college; they have the knowledge part. They see that they’re making a difference. That’s what they want; that’s their challenge.

NSA: Is the PACE model something all school kids could benefit from?

Miller: Oh sure. It’s so embedded in respect, and who couldn’t benefit from that?

NSA: Your girls, who themselves are receiving help, also help others through volunteering. You say that makes a difference in their own lives. How?

Miller: They feel so much pride by being able to help someone else. 93% of our girls are on free or reduced breakfast and lunch. That’s a blow to their self-esteem. But once a month they have to serve lunch at the Guadalupe Center soup kitchen. The girls come back and say, “Those people are so poor, they have nothing. I feel so good about myself because I could help them.” I want them know that they’re part of the solution.

The United Arts Council sent a teacher out here a few years ago who taught them how to make pottery. The girls sold it and made $1,500, which they had to give away. The first year, they donated the money to buy snacks for the diabetic kids at Highlands Elementary School, because they were visiting and noticed that some kids weren’t getting anything at snack time, and they asked why. The girls made Highland’s nurse come and give a report on how their money was spent – it was terrific! The second year, they raised money and gave it to the Make a Wish Foundation. Giving deeply affects our girls. It’s so good for them.

NSA: The PACE website says you “deliver just and fair consequences and (the girls must) be accountable for our actions.” This isn’t the usual touchy-feely approach, is it?

Miller: Kids need rules and they need structure. There are some good consequences, and that is praise and reward. There are also bad consequences. If a girl comes in wearing flip-flops, that violates our dress code. We have shoes for her to wear – she may not like the shoes, so maybe she won’t do it again. If she swears, she’ll have to pick up trash. Our girls don’t swear that much.

NSA: Brilliant! Your advice to parents…?

Miller: Don’t make threats; don’t even say a word if you aren’t going to do it. “If you do that again, you’ll be grounded for a year!” You’re not going to ground anyone for a year. Try a night. And don’t say, “If you do it again.” They’ll do it again. Consequences have to be reliable.

NSA: What do you do if a student gets pregnant? Does PACE council its girls on birth control options? Do you provide birth control for them? What about if one of your students gets caught drunk or high – even off campus and after school hours?

Miller: We have partnered with Planned Parenthood, who taught them about abstinence. We teach them to have goals and a future; they can have kids any time. We train the girls to wait, but not all girls will wait. They can go to Collier County Health Services. If they get pregnant, we transfer them to the Teen As Parents Program (TAPP), where they get parenting classes and healthcare – that’s a critical need, and they can have their classes scheduled around their healthcare needs.

We lose about one girl a year this way. It’s always depressing, and we examine what we did wrong, where we can improve.

One way we handle this is through our Baby Can Wait program – we have an actual computerized baby, named Erin Pace. A girl will carry this heavy computerized baby around with her everywhere she goes, all day and night. We can check when it was changed, how long it was ignored - everything. It even has computer. In the car, it goes in a baby seat. At first, they think they want a baby, but we can barely make them keep it for 3 days. The girls say, “Would you do something with this baby?! It’s driving me nuts!” and we say, “No. it’s a baby. What can we do?” Any trick you can pull….

As for drugs: if you ignore that someone’s using, you’re condoning it. You can’t ignore the possibility that they’re high. Confront it. We have substance abuse prevention for high-risk girls. We refer them to David Lawrence for more intensive counciling if it’s needed.

One way we keep the girls from possessing drugs on campus is that they don’t carry anything – no purse, no book bag. There’s no place for them to hide drugs.

NSA: What about when a girl’s family is uncooperative or hostile to her involvement in PACE?

Miller: We sit down and talk with them. Usually when they’re upset, they’re angry because they feel they’re being ignored. When we listen to them, they usually calm down. It’s how respectful you are and how you treat the other person. You can give them the worst news in the world, and if you tell it to them in the right way, respectfully, you won’t have a problem.

NSA: Is there ever a time when you turn an applicant away as hopeless?

Miller: No. We don’t turn girls away.

But last year, for the first time, we sent two kids back to the public school, which I consider a loss on our part. We just had to tell them, you aren’t ready to change, to try counciling, to work on yourself, and our tax money is being wasted.

NSA: What happens to your girls? What percentage graduate? Do they work in the fields? Do any of them go on to college? Once they’re gone, do you give them any kind of follow-up support?

Miller: We stay with the girls after graduation, giving them at least three years of follow-up – we do everything, whatever they need. Tutoring, college applications, helping them find a job, crisis counciling…. One of our first graduates came here after a fight with her dad, a few years after graduation. She said she came here because she knew we’d listen. And we did. I spent an hour with her, talking it over in my office.

Last year eight girls graduated, and six went to college. We hired one of our former graduates to be our chef – she went to culinary arts school, and now she’s back to help us. Now she teaches the girls how to cook, and she says, “Look at all their energy! They can’t stay still.” We tell her, “Yes, that was you.” We’re very proud of her – and she’s a great chef!

NSA: The PACE Center, the actual facility, is an oasis in Immokalee – it’s gorgeous inside and out. I understand that its funding and construction was a huge feat: congratulations are in order! Now that is behind you, what is your next big challenge?

Miller: There are a million things I want to do. I want to truly do a culinary arts program where our kids run a business. I want us to have full-time nursing care. Now, we have a girl with lupus; earlier, we had a girl with a halo brace for a neck injury. I want to set up good solid career training, so that employers say, “This is a PACE graduate. They know how to do this – interview, dress for work, MS Office, spread sheets…. Yes, I’ll hire this person, because she’s from PACE.” I want us to have an after-school program for middle schoolers – we have the facility right now, and nowhere else in Immokalee does that. We just need funding to get it started.