Lorena Ellis

My calling is really helping families, because at Los Padrinos Juvenile Court School where I serve as Assistant Director, we detain youth in a detention facility, and there's opportunity for the kids to do better. But if we don't really work with the families and give the families the support they need, and really identify and listen to families and listen to their needs - sometimes they're spoken, sometimes they're unspoken - that's how we're able to triage them into different community resource centers or different pockets of their communities to be able to give them whether it's the skills they need, whether it's housing, or medical issues. There's a lot of underlying factors. Throughout my career, I've held different parent tutoring groups, teaching parents how to read, financial literacy with parents, just going into the community and really getting to know parents and the families and the way they live. You know, things as simple as teachers assigning homework, but we don't know living conditions - they're renting somewhere and don't even have a table where they can actually do their work. That's a barrier. So getting to understand not just the students, but understand where our different youth live and how they live, and what the school and educators can do to be able to guide them and to give them the resources that they need to want to do better. It's about choice - we can lead them to get the skills and training and resources they need, but they have to make the choice. For me, going to work every day is like going to Disneyland.