Special From the NLR Dogtown Wire

(Steve Nawojczyk helped set up and ran the city's Mayor's Office on Youth Services from its inception in 2000. He recently left this directorship to take a job as the Program Administrator for Community Services at the Arkansas Department of Human Services. We asked Nawojczyk to share his long connection and experiences with the annual Arkansas Boys State. The following is his account.)

During the first week of June for the last 16 years I have loaded up in my car and traveled the 30 miles to Conway for my yearly rejuvenation.

Back when the gang violence was at epidemic proportions, I was serving as the Pulaski County coroner and had developed a national reputation as being one who was knowledgeable in the dynamics of gangs.

For some reason, the people who put on the American Legion Boys State each year thought my message would be a good one for the thousand or so high school juniors from around the state to hear.

My first year, I was a nervous wreck. I knew that high school boys are always some of the hardest to reach. I labored over the content of my talk and finally settled on just being myself.

I would simply tell them of my “conversion” from being a person who felt the answer to the gang problem was more jails, tougher laws and meaner cops to a person who understood that in order to effectively deal with the problem communities must balance suppression and enforcement with prevention, intervention and treatment programs.

I told them stories of young mothers who I had to sit with and counsel them over the loss of a child. I told of how families struggled to get through the life-changing events caused by a child who made a poor decision.

I encouraged the Boys Staters to engage in some sort of public service as a career. If they weren’t destined for that, I told them to stay involved in their community. I challenged them to become “agents of change” for their generation.
After my first speech to them those long years ago, I got a five minute standing ovation that brought me to tears. It seemed to go on forever. The fires of my hope for the next generation were stoked. And, it gets stoked each year.


The 2008 Boys State attendees fill the hall in Conway. (Steve Nawojczyk)
I always learn more from the young men at Boys State than I teach them. I don’t teach really, I just reflect on my nearly 25 years of studying death. After all, what you do when you study death is done to benefit the living.

I look forward to many more years of my trek to UCA and the feeling of hope in my heart that is always greater on the trip home than it was the trip up.

Next week, a trip to the delta country would bring me before a completely different set of young men.

The following Tuesday, I was headed the other direction from North Little Rock. This time I was making my 9th trip to the Tucker Maximum Unit of the Arkansas Department of Corrections to speak to the 9th class of the U.N.I-TY program. UNITY was started by an inmate serving life without parole, a prison psychologist and a Correctional Officer Captain. The acronym stands for You and I Teaching Youth. It is a program that is mostly attended by lifers and former gang members. They meet for about 15 weeks and work on many problems inmates deal with on a daily basis.

It is a lot different looking into the eyes of these broken but hopeful souls than it is into the eyes of the Boys Staters. One can’t help but wonder if their circumstances had been different when the inmates were younger if their lives would have taken a different turn.

When I converse with the men at the prison, I am also someone instilled with a little hope because they are so willing to share their lives, which in turn helps me to do my job.
Both audiences make me realize we are all in this together. Somehow, whether you are a ward of the state or a future leader of our state or country, there is a common bond. The need to connect. The need for nurturing caring adults in the lives of children. To turn a worn out phrase, it truly does, it seems, take an entire village to raise a child.

Now I’ll wait until it is time to either go to Boys State or prison again. In the meantime, I’ll continue to share the messages shared with me.

(Editor’s note: The American Legion Department of Arkansas inducted Steve Nawojczyk to the Arkansas Boys State Hall of Fame on June 6 for his contribution to the Boys State and the youth of Arkansas.)