WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 27 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A23
WEDNESDAY Opinion
BY KATHARINE WEYMOUTHP
rograms for struggling or at-risk
youths need better regulation.
P aris Hilton’s compelling and dis-
turbing Oct. 18 Post op-ed about
her experience and those of other youths
in programs that purport to help “trou-
bled teens” highlighted this issue, as did a
recent New Yorker article on the devas-
tating journey of a pregnant girl sent
away to a Pentecostal-affiliated program
for adolescents. Federal standards are
critical to protect the vulnerable kids in
such programs.
But let’s not forget that there are many
outstanding programs working hard to
help kids and their families. I know how
wrenching it is for parents who decide to
send their child to one of these programs.
I am one of those parents.
Adolescence is hard. Social media’s
carefully curated images and constant
reminders of parties and other events
teens may be excluded from have added to
other pressures. And we are only just
starting to see the effects that technology
has had on a generation that has grown up
with smartphones. Depression and anxi-
ety among teens were issues even before
the coronavirus struck, and pandemic-
driven isolation has intensified some
mental health issues. Suicide is the
s econd-leading cause of death among
those ages 10 to 34. Many struggling kids
turn to substances to try to cope with their
feelings. Young people ages 15 to 24 ac-
count for 11 percent of overdose deaths,
according to 2019 data from the National
Center for Drug Abuse Statistics.
Most parents find ways to help their
kids at home. But some kids need full,
wrap-around treatment, and they need to
get out of the environment exacerbating
the problem — whether it is family dy-
namics, peers or both.
My son is in his fourth treatment
program. He struggled early on with
anxiety. Unlike many families, I was able
to afford excellent mental health care. Yet
despite early intervention from thera-
pists and psychiatrists, he continued to
struggle in ways that I feared put him at
risk of serious consequences. When he
was 15, I made the hardest decision I h ave
ever made: to send him away to a thera-
peutic boarding school. Such schools and
residential treatment programs offer aca-
demics in a boarding-school-like setting
but with individual and group therapy as
well as access to psychiatric evaluation
and medication.
It took all of my strength not to cry in
front of him when I dropped him off. I
cried all the way home.
Of the four programs my son has
participated in, three were amazing and
one was good — just not a great fit for
him. I am so grateful to the incredible
professionals — therapists and staff —
who help kids struggling with eating
disorders, tech addiction or the other
myriad issues kids face today. In my
experience, no parent or guardian makes
the decision to send a child away lightly.
They do it when their teen gets in legal
trouble or when their child’s behavior
takes too big a toll on the rest of the
family. They do it when they have tried
everything and nothing else works.
I have come to know many parents on
this challenging journey. All love their
kids fiercely and are fighting to get them
the help they need to live healthy and
productive lives. On a Zoom parent meet-
ing last year, one dad said: “Most of my
friends are debating which college their
kid should go to — I worry about keeping
my son out of jail.” For many parents, that
is all too real.
The financial burden of this experience
is its own issue. These programs are ex-
pensive, and many don’t offer financial
assistance. Health insurance, if it helps,
often covers only a tiny fraction of the cost.
I have met parents who have taken out a
second mortgage to afford the help their
child needs. Those who have 529 savings
accounts for tuition costs can’t use them to
cover these programs, even though many
include educational components in addi-
tion to therapy. In some cases, Medicaid
will help with the fees.
And due diligence is necessary. Online
searches for “wilderness programs” or
“residential treatment programs” yield a
ton of links, many of which appear to be
objective websites seeking to help par-
ents. But most are just trying to drive
business to their program. It is easy to
build a nice website. Parents need to
know what the program’s approach is
and whether they have licensed profes-
sionals to work with your child. You want
to know that your child will be safe and
not be punished or shamed.
While there are horror stories of kids’
terrible experiences, I know far more
families who would say these programs
saved their kids’ lives by helping them
through an incredibly difficult period.
All this is to say, from a parent’s
perspective: Congress should absolutely
regulate the so-called troubled-teen in-
dustry — not to eliminate it but to ensure
standards that protect vulnerable kids.Katharine Weymouth, a former publisher
and CEO of The Washington Post, is chief
operating officer of Family Care, a start-up
digital platform for parents of struggling teens.A parent’s
perspective on
the ‘troubled
teen industry’
C
laudette Colvin was 15 years old when she was
arrested in Montgomery, Ala., and placed on
indefinite probation, after refusing to vacate
her seat on a bus so a young White woman
could sit down.
This was March 1955 — nine months before Rosa
Parks was arrested for violating Alabama’s racial
segregation laws after refusing to give up her seat to a
White man, an act that sparked the year-long Mont-
gomery Bus Boycott. Parks, who died in 2005, went on
to become an icon, widely celebrated as the “mother
of the civil rights movement.”
What about Colvin? Though she was one of four
female plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the Supreme
Court case that overturned Montgomery’s bus segre-
gation laws, her role in challenging the Jim Crow
system has been largely overshadowed. What’s worse,
Colvin, who is now 82, was never taken off probation.
That needs to change — and perhaps now it will. On
Tuesday, Colvin went back to Montgomery to petition
for her record to be cleared. She also, in a carefully
detailed 30-point affidavit, addressed something
else: the fact that her story was largely expunged
because civil rights leaders didn’t see her as an
appropriate symbol for the movement.
Colvin got pregnant not long after her arrest. And
she was defiant. She was also charged with a felony for
assaulting a police officer who said she had kicked
and scratched him.
I interviewed Colvin in March 2020, and offstage
she told me she believed there was another reason her
story was shunted aside. “Rosa Parks had the right
background and the right skin color,” she said. Colvin,
whose skin is a beautiful shade of chocolate, said the
bias still stings, but she let go of anger a long time ago.
“We were all seeking one thing,” she said. “Justice.”
Now, the gray-haired Colvin is seeking delayed
justice in the Juvenile Court for Montgomery County
— and on Tuesday was accompanied by the 90-year-
old Fred Gray, the civil rights lawyer who represented
her back in 1956.
For a woman silenced so many decades ago, it is
fitting to let her tell her own story. She does so in the
following excerpts from her affidavit, beginning with
the day she got out of school early and walked
downtown to catch a bus home.
“When the bus arrived, I paid my fare and I sat
near the front of the colored section. I did not violate
the segregation law.”
“But a young White woman got on the bus and there
were no seats left in the section designated for Whitepeople. The driver told my friends and I that we would
all have to clear out of our row so the White woman
could sit. All four of us were going to have to stand up
so she would have the whole row to herself... .”
“My three seatmates got up, but I f elt glued to the
seat. People think it was just about a seat on a bus but
it was about so much more than that. It was about my
constitutional rights. It was about history. It was
about injustices that I personally witnessed every
day.”
Colvin explains that she feared for her life.
“I was dragged off the bus, handcuffed and taken to
the jail. I remember the sound of the key turning in the
lock. I remember there was no mattress on the cot, but I
curled up and tried to sleep... .”
“I sat in jail and thought about heaven and hell... .”
“Eventually, I was sentenced to probation pending
good behavior. I c ried when that happened.”
Colvin did behave well and tried to move on,
earning a GED. Life in Alabama was hard, though,
because Black and White residents shunned her as a
troublemaker.
“I was afraid to work as a domestic servant because
you never knew who might be in the Klan.... So I
worked at restaurants. And over and over again, I
was fired from those jobs after my bosses found out
that I was ‘that girl’ who had sat on the bus.”
Around age 20, Colvin was a single mother with
two sons. She says she left Montgomery because she
couldn’t find a job.
“I moved to the Bronx and found a c ommunity of
Jam aican women. We worked as domestics, but we
unionized with 1199. I’m proud of that.”
Summers, she returned to Alabama to visit family.
“I know they were terrified every time I came home
because I was on probation from the court.... Every
time [they] saw a p olice car in the neighborhood, they
thought the police were there to get me.”
Colvin lived in New York for decades.
“Things were better and safer for me there. People
did not know me for what I did... .”
“I am an old woman now. Having my records
expunged will mean something to my grandchildren
and great-grandchildren. And it will mean something
for other Black children.”
Clearing Colvin’s record — i n a moment when so
many people are trying to expunge the teaching of
America’s troubling racial history — will also mean
something significant for the city of Montgomery, the
state of Alabama and the entire United States of
America.MICHELE L. NORRISBefore Rosa Parks,
Claudette Colvin refused
to give up her seat on a bus.
S he’s still on probation.
FAMILY PHOTO
Claudette Colvin as a t eenager.CRAIG BARRITT/GETTY IMAGES FOR TORY BURCH FOUNDATION
Claudette Colvin speaks with the author, Michele L. Norris, during the
Embrace Ambition Summit in New York City on March 5, 2020.I
n his skirmishes with the liberals of
his party over the size and shape of
their agenda, Sen. Joe Manchin III
(D) has repeatedly warned that the
left would lead the nation into a crippling
dependency on government.
“I’ve been very clear when it comes to
who we are as a society, who we are as a
nation,” Manchin has said. “I don’t be-
lieve that we should turn our society into
an entitlement society.”
That phrase — “entitlement society” —
has become something of a battle cry for
the senior senator from West Virginia as
he works to slash the Democrats’
$3.5 trillion domestic spending package
to less than half its size.
Not surprising from a senator who
hails from a state that presents itself as
fiercely self-reliant. But in fact, West
Virginians are not only older, sicker and
poorer than most of the nation; they are,
by some measures, more reliant on the
federal government than any other state.
Manchin’s political maneuvering has
more to do with his state’s political
culture than any other factor. As the last
remaining Democrat in a congressional
delegation that was entirely blue as re-
cently as the 1990s, Manchin is probably
the only member of his party who would
have a prayer of winning statewide in a
place that is now deep red and that
President Donald Trump carried by near-
ly 40 percentage points in 2020.This helps explain why Manchin
scratched some of President Biden’s initial
climate change proposals, including a
plan to penalize utilities that do not switch
to clean energy. He did this not because
the coal industry plays as much a role in
the state’s economy as it has historically —
in 2020, coal mining employed fewer than
12,000 West Virginians, less than half the
number it did only eight years earlier —
but because coal continues to have a hold
on the state’s psyche and its identity.
Yet even as West Virginia’s hostility
toward W ashington has grown, the reali-
ty of its situation remains a very different
picture.
According to statistics compiled by the
Commerce Department’s Bureau of Eco-
nomic Analysis, about 32 percent of West
Virginians’ personal income last year
came in the form of transfer payments —
that is, government checks that include
retirement and disability benefits, medi-
cal benefits, welfare payments, veterans
benefits, unemployment compensation
and education and training assistance.
That is a higher rate of government
dependence than any other state. Missis-
sippi comes in second — at just under
30 percent.
The state has a long history of turning to
Washington for help. When John F. Ken-
nedy campaigned in West Virginia in 1960,
he was moved by the poverty and malnu-
trition he saw in a region that had been
devastated by a decade-long decline in the
coal industry and the lingering effects of
the Great Depression. Kennedy promised
that, if elected, he would use his first
executive order to expand food assistance
— to create what is today the Supplemen-
tal Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),
formerly known as food stamps.
The day after he was sworn in to office,
Kennedy fulfilled that pledge, and West
Virginia’s southern coal fields became
the initial region included in the pilot
program. Its first recipients were Alder-
son and Chloe Muncy of Paynesville,
W.Va., the parents of 15 children, 13 still
living at home, who used the $95 worth
of stamps they received to buy, among
other things, a gallon jar of apple butter
and a watermelon.
Today, about 1 in 6 West Virginians
relies on the anti-hunger program that
has helped lift millions out of poverty.
That is the second-highest participation
rate in the country.
Does government assistance make West
Virginia, to use Manchin’s term, an “enti-
tlement society”? Of course not — at least,
not if the term implies they are undeserv-
ing. Even with all the assistance its citizens
receive from Washington, it has one of the
highest poverty rates in the country.
Manchin recognizes that as well,
which is one reason he has remained at
the negotiating table. The components of
the social-spending package, which in-
clude a tax credit that would give be-
tween $3,000 and $3,600 per child to
almost every family, will have a greater
impact in West Virginia than they do in
wealthier states.
As the state’s then-Sen. John D. “Jay”
Rockefeller IV (D) told me years ago, West
Virginians “don’t have to like govern-
ment, but they really need it.” And they,
more than most states, have a lot to lose if
Democrats fall short in getting their
agenda over the legislative finish line.KAREN TUMULTYWest Virginia
is not as
self-reliant as
Manchin acts
Even as West Virginia’s
hostility toward Washington
has grown, its reality is a
very different picture.