A local moderate-risk residential juvenile justice program known as the Red Road Academy could be receiving the benefit of a portion of the Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations Bill.

The academy was formerly known as the Okeechobee Redirection Center.

This bill cleared a major hurdle by gaining approval of the House Appropriations Committee on Monday, July 16. It includes $1.8 million for public safety funding requests from Hendry, Glades, Palm Beach, St. Lucie, Okeechobee and Highlands counties.

The Red Road Academy would be benefiting from a portion of this bill that would allocate $500,000 to ARISE Life-Management Skills Intervention/Re-Entry Program that the local center uses with the approximately 50 youth that reside there.

According to their website, the program serves committed male offenders 14 to 18 years of age. The program provides an array of services including but not limited to case management, behavior management, mental health and substance abuse counseling, educational and vocational programming, social skills development, health and physical education and transitional services.

The average length of stay is six months.

ARISE was co-founded by husband and wife Edmund and Susan Benson.

The ARISE program is an interactive life skill curriculum that has been used by this facility since 1998. According to Mr. Benson, they teach the program six days a week for approximately 300 hours per week.

The Red Road Academy has a capacity of 50, and there are seven ARISE certified instructors who have undergone training through the program to become more personal with the individuals they work with to foster interaction.

The program deals with issues such as anger management; conflict; resolution; getting a job and keeping it; the importance of education; self esteem; and, teen health. There are over 260 life-skills that have been identified by ARISE. These skills are expected by societal norms.

According to the ARISE website, at-risk youth must consciously be provided with the skills necessary to become productive members of society. By providing pro-social skills that cannot be learned on the streets, ARISE helps lay the foundation for disadvantaged youth to develop positive social and emotional skills.

The Benson’s have created this curriculum written specifically below grade level in order to allow students to gain self-esteem and still receive the necessary information from the lessons. This allows individuals who do not have adequate reading skills to gain confidence and learn life-skills to try to prevent them from recidivism, which is the tendency to relapse into a previous undesirable type of behavior.

ARISE is being used in over 30 facilities in the Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) system in Florida, in over 17 congressional districts. For the past 10 years, ARISE has trained and certified over 5,000 DJJ staff as ARISE Life-Skills Instructors. ARISE provides all the curriculum materials and training to teach life skills.

This funding, which will go before the House for a vote in the next few weeks, is essential for this program to continue to operate.

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