From The Press Democrat.

SONOMA COUNTY, Calif. – February 19, 2025 –  When poetry teacher Pamela Michael walks into her classroom at the Juvenile Justice Center on Rancho Los Guilicos Road in Santa Rosa, things look different from the other classrooms where she’s taught for decades.

In this room, as Michael describes it, all students are dressed the same in county-issued olive green garb. No phones are allowed here. Students don’t have access to computers. They cannot bring in their own pens or pencils. Instead, they “check out” shortened pencils that they must return by inserting into a block of wood at the end of class. Throughout the class, a guard stands to the side of the room.

Juvenile Hall can feel a world away from other places where Michael has led young students to explore poetry, but in some aspects, there is a universal feeling to this room, she said.

Just about every student wants to be seen, wants to be heard and wants their experiences validated.

Poetry can help make that happen, Michael said.

“Poetry helps you see the world through new eyes, and it helps you perhaps help others see the world through new eyes,” she said.

In this day and age, that is no small thing. And Michael knows it. 

“It’s good for the world,” she said. “It’s good for the soul.”

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It’s with that in mind that Michael and others are celebrating the release of Sonoma County Office of Education’s Sonoma County Youth Voice magazine. The inaugural issue features the poems of students at the Juvenile Justice Center.

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The first issue of the magazine came to be with good luck and even better timing.

While Michael was looking around for ways to give her Juvenile Justice Center students a hard copy of their collective works, Jacob Ramírez and staff at the Sonoma County Office of Education were working to launch a literary magazine for student voices.

Ramírez, social justice and equity project coordinator at SCOE, was alerted to Michael’s work and connected with Angie Scardina, the director of alternative education at SCOE. SCOE operates the educational programs for youth in grades 7 to 12 at the juvenile justice center. It was Scardina who brought Michael into the curriculum lineup.

Turns out that all of these voices, all of this student poetry was right there ready to share with the world.

So after some discussion it was decided that Volume 1, Issue 1 of Sonoma County Youth Voice would feature student work from Juvenile Hall exclusively.

“It became perfect alignment,” Ramírez said. “This first issue sort of symbolizes all of our kids having so much to say. They just need an opportunity to say it.”

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“It’s another way to teach them, ‘Hey here is one way to work with some emotions, here is one way to process things,’” she said.

And nearly everyone, young and old, wants to be validated, she said. To see their words and their work in print? It’s special, she said.

For the first issue 300 magazines were printed at a cost of $15 a piece, Ramírez said. They can be read online at the SCOE website.

But there were certain issues that arose because of the nature of incarceration.

“I obviously wanted to protect their rights. What can I do? What can I share?” Scardina said. “I was just kind of trying to find the right way, to respect them, their privacy and acknowledge the good work they did.”

Read the full article here.