New report aims to address Connecticut's crisis of disconnected youth

Erica Soares, 24, of Waterbury, shared her story on Wednesday in front of dozens of local and state leaders to help create change. 

“At a young age, I faced challenges most people don’t experience in a lifetime; homelessness, sexual assault, the incarceration of a parent, losing a parent,” Soares said. 

Soares did not let her circumstances define her. Currently, she is getting her master’s degree and is heavily involved with the Waterbury Police Activity League. In the spring, she met with students and local leaders to help address the crisis of disconnected youth. 

“They were just excited that the mayors wanted to sit down and listen to them, they weren’t questioning them or anything like that,” Soares added. 

Similar conversations have been ongoing in communities across our state during the last eight months to create a new strategy to help Connecticut’s youngest population. 

“How we can reconnect disconnected youth is simply just talking, just filling a part,” said David Mezard, of Stamford. 

Mezard overcame his own challenges of being incarcerated. He now advocates for more programs to be in place to help the youth. 

The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, or CCM, released a new report on Wednesday, outlining a 10-year plan to help re-engage youth who are on a path to drop out of school or out of the workforce. 

“Really it is a report to residents, and to help empower residents to really think about how we can get our youth back on track,” Stonington First Selectwoman Danielle Chesebrough said. 

According to the 119K commission, organized by CCM, 119,000 young people between the ages of 14 and 26 are at-risk or have already detached from their lives. CCM’s proposed strategy focuses on cutting the crisis in half, getting 60,000 people back on the right path over the course of a decade. 

The plan proposes changes to policies in education and calls for more federal funding and incremental state investments of $500 million in public schools. 

“There is a really strong return on investment, we are paying for this over the long term, never mind the human value of all of this,” Chesebrough added. 

Local leaders plan to utilize the report in the upcoming legislative session to advocate for policy changes and more funding.