They’re Just Kids

Life, for youth in Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice (IDJJ) custody, is not the sentence issued by a judge. But incarceration is their truth, as is the stigma that follows them afterward. For some held at facilities where NIU’s Project FLEX operates, however, the perspectives are more of optimism— and of transformation.

Jenn Jacobs and Zach Wahl-Alexander, faculty in the Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education, launched Project FLEX (Fitness Leadership Experience) in 2018 to provide exercise while imparting personal and social responsibility through sport. They were officemates in Anderson Hall when Wahl-Alexander told Jacobs about teaching P.E. in a female juvenile detention center in Alabama as a graduate student; his story lit a fuse.

Project FLEX began in St. Charles as the nation’s only sport-focused partnership between a university and a state juvenile justice agency. The project now includes Chicago and Warrenville.

Its initial function of delivering 90 minutes of structured physical activity three days a week while also positioning the young men toward productive lives upon release has grown.

IDJJ showed its support and confidence in 2023 via a five-year, $2.55 million grant supporting:

• Supervised visits to NIU for the youth to envision becoming college students.
• Personal training and opportunities to become personal trainers. Seven have passed the certification exam.
• EmpowerMENt: A Black male mentoring club providing a safe space to talk about issues relevant to them, including politics, hygiene and sexuality.
• PEACEful Warriors: A mixed martial arts program teaching MMA culture infused with life skills.
• Girls Club: Art therapy for females.
• Hiring Jeremy Butler, whose resume includes law enforcement and the Department of Exercise and Sport Science faculty, as associate director.
• Research conducted by faculty and students, who then presented nationally and internationally.

Jacobs hopes those who hear of Project FLEX will be touched by its success.

“We want people to be less scared about juvenile detention facilities,” said Jacobs, who teaches sport psychology. “These are just kids who made a bad choice. They like to play games. They like to play sports. They play ‘Go Fish.’ They talk about what’s for dinner. Prison isn’t this elusive, foreign and scary place. It’s just a place where kids are getting a chance to start their lives over.”

Jacobs reflects on her interactions, stating they are “shifting my perspective on a ‘troubled kid’ and helping me to see that they are a product of their environment and their circumstances.”

NIU graduate students involved in Project FLEX use this perspective as a foundation for building professional toolkits.

“For so many of our preservice teachers, one of the reasons they go into education is to work with kids and to have a positive impact,” said Wahl-Alexander, of the Physical Education Teacher Education faculty. “But it’s not just something that happens because you’re a teacher. Having those types of interactions with kids is a skill that’s learned. It’s not something that just materializes because you’re in a position of power. Kids need to have that positive role model.”

Hannah DiSilverio grew up near Los Angeles. She came to Illinois to play soccer and major in psychology at Dominican University. After applying to NIU to pursue a master’s in sport psychology, she received an invitation from Jacobs to join the FLEX team.

“I want to get into psychology for the sole reason of helping others,” DiSilverio said, “and this was an extension of that in a unique way that I probably wasn’t going to get to experience at any other point in my life. I knew I would value later on in my career when I’m working with a sport population.”

Although “there isn’t a ton of overlap between collegiate athletes and the youth we work with, when you’re looking at statistics, a lot of Division I players come from some really difficult backgrounds,” she added, “so I know there is going to be overlap at least in the kinds of shared experiences.”

Going behind the walls has allowed DiSilverio and her counterparts to make a difference. She remembered when a youth told of how he’d heard her words on self-control.

“Fights happen all the time,” she said. “We had a kid come in and tell us he had an opportunity to jump into a fight, but he thought back to the skills we had discussed.”

Her own growth? That’s clear.

“I lived a very privileged life growing up, and I don’t think I fully understood the magnitude of what some people experience. FLEX has allowed me to be a much more understanding person and a much more insightful person when it comes to the fact that everyone leads a different life,” DiSilverio said.

“My patience has gone up. My tolerance has gone up,” she added. “We work with kids who have been in communities where their education hasn’t been great, or has been stunted, but they really are still kids at the very core. They’re just kids.”

NIU alumnus Javon Davis, who earned his master’s in sport and exercise psychology in May 2002, is now a Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia.

From Bloomington, Illinois, Davis saw “poor people in the streets” as well as “high-class people” who shared his book smarts. Occupying the in-between—raised in a middle-class home that valued education—he found through FLEX that he could relate to, and assist, an unfamiliar population.

“I didn’t know if I could dominate in a room of people who have done crime,” he said, “or how they would consider me. I feel that I speak well, I dress in a specific way and, within the Black community, there’s a lot of tension between people with different socioeconomic statuses.”

He succeeded quickly, and not how he expected.

While shooting hoops with the St. Charles youth, Davis lifted his T-shirt to his forehead, simply to mop sweat. That’s when they saw it. Couldn’t miss it. The scar across his stomach.

Davis could explain. He’d had gall bladder surgery a few years back.

But to his competitors on the court, that long-healed wound suggested something else. Was that where a doctor removed a bullet? Some had matching scars, and bullets were the reason. Not Davis, of course, but his scar? A connection.

“You can teach all day in terms of life skills—being respectful, telling the truth—but FLEX was really able to help by bringing in the right people who command respect and have that respect,” he said. “That’s when you get kids actually wanting to listen to what you have to say.”

Proof, from a youth in the system: “I’m grateful for Project FLEX because it has really expanded my horizons. A lot of people just look at us as we’re nothing—we’ll amount to nothing—because we screwed up. You guys made me realize there’s more to life than the ’hood.”