Vegas offers poor odds for kids

Life in the booming 24-hour town is taking its toll on teenagers

By CHARLIE LEDUFF New York Times

Sunday, June 20, 2004

Las Vegas -- City elders tried marketing Las Vegas as a family destination. The plan was jettisoned for a new campaign that hypes Las Vegas as America's grown-up romper room, the center of sin and indulgence.

Now the hotel rooms are full, and people keep moving here to take jobs building and cleaning them. Las Vegas grows at a supersonic rate. But within this growth lie seeds of conflict. Away from the adult fantasy of the Strip, Sin City and its suburbs crawl with children and parents trying to raise them. One in four Las Vegans is a minor.

The witch's brew of adolescence in a 24-hour town takes a toll on teenagers here. Consider that Nevada, led by Las Vegas and the suburbs of Clark County, ranks among the worst for a host of teenage afflictions: violence, drug use, pregnancy, suicide and dropout rates.

The schools are crowded and underfinanced, leading to a churning system that tends to lose track of children. According to the Nevada Department of Education, more than 12% of high school students drop out in senior year. Moreover, 36% of Clark County students were not enrolled for the entire school year.

"Who needs high school anyway?" teenagers ask. No one, when valet parking attendants tell stories about making $100,000 a year. Here, stripping and blackjack dealing are viable career choices. To a teenager, adult life in Las Vegas can look easy.

Part of the easy life is acting hard. While the juvenile population increased 20% over the last four years, juvenile delinquency increased more than 30%, according to a state report.

All big cities have their problems, city leaders are quick to point out. But Nevada consistently ranks poorly among states on issues affecting children's well-being, according to "Nevada Kids Count," a report by the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Half of Nevada's residents have lived here 11 years or less, said R. Keith Schwer, the center's director.

'Second-chancers'

The chaos of growth is one problem. Another is the type of people that growth and opportunity attract. Broken and blended families come for a new life. Second-chancers, they are called.

"People come here with problems from somewhere else," said Jonathan Vansboskerck, an assistant district attorney who prosecutes juveniles. "Parents work split shifts, and kids take their cues from each other. Unsupervised homes, basically."

Broken families or traditional ones, it doesn't seem to matter. Parents often work the swing or graveyard shifts and don't arrive home until well after dark. With so many families from out of state, there are few aunts or grandmothers or cousins, so there is a tribe of unsupervised teenagers. High school lets out at 1:10 p.m., hours before parents make their long commute home from the Strip.

Teenagers are most likely to have sex when parents are not at home, according to the "Kids First" study, during afternoon and evening hours when parents are working.

While there are after-school activities such as study hall and sports leagues and 4-H Clubs, there are not enough of them, said Donna Coleman, a former state school board member and executive director of the Children's Advocacy Alliance, a non-profit group that studies children's issues.

Parents 'have to care'

Then there is the issue of sex for sale. The billboards featuring tacit lesbian sex are everywhere. Sin City is full of men plying convenience stores and bus stations and street corners for lonely, unsupervised girls. The neon draw of the Strip can be hard to resist.

Parents go to extreme lengths to keep children on the right road. Jannie Poulos, 39, is a daytime bartender at a tavern on the affluent northwest side of town. On days when she cannot find a baby sitter, or there are no after-school events, her son comes to the bar and has a soda in the back.

"I grew up here, and so I know better," she said. "It's the kids from Iowa getting caught up in the moment. If you're going to raise a kid here with these kinds of influences, you have to know what your kid is up to. You have to care about them, basically."

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