3+ Sunday, May 19, 1985 - North Shore News Business..........32 Entertainment ..... 33 lifestyles .........41 Mailbox...........7 Open Sundoy......24 Sports............28 | | ey] What’s Going On. . .34 eee ~ OPEN SUNDAY: 24 Sunday’s a great day to get in shape. ee eee LIFESTYLES: 4 Children learn from farming firsthand. TRAVEL: 46 Bo‘s and don’ts for your vacation. Li WEATHER: Sunday and Monday, suney with cloudy periods. Highs near 21C Tuesday, cloudy with a few showers. aes LYN meee VALLEY YOUTH NED: PROBLEMS LYNN VALLEY HAS got problems. It is a com- munity with a voice too small, and that voice is get- ting terribly hoarse from yelling alone. Mounting area youth pro- blems have backed a small group of Lynn Valley parents into a corner from which ex- asperation has forced them to revive the original Lynn Valley Community Associa- tion (LVCA), dead since 1979, , “We came together over the Ross Road pub issue,’’ says LVCA_ second vice- president, Michael Edwards, ‘‘what came out of that issue was the depth of Lynn Valley’s youth and vandalism problems." Since that November 1, 1984 gathering of some 200 area parents, mobilized to oppose the pub application, aud the subsequent reforma- tion or the LVCA, active membership of the associa- tion has dwindled to a dozen residents, while area pro- blems have largely continued unabated. “We desperately need some public participation here,’’ says Edwards, ‘‘we need more people, because we are getting very tired. But parents around here seem to be reluctant to get involved, they don’t seem to care. They don’t give a damn."” First and foremost, says Joanne Bland, LVCA first vice-president, Lynn Valley needs a community centre, a place for its youth to go, a focal point for the communi- ty, because, “there is nothing in Lynn Valley for them, there is no where to go."" From their own initiative, the LVCA has made moves to knock down the blank wall facing Lynn Valley teenagers. It has formed two youth clubs: the Lynn Vatley Youth and the Teen Coffeehouse Club, to invest responsibility in area youth and help them to organize events such as dances. From a $33,000 federal employment grant applied for by the LVCA in January 1985, the association has been able to hire two full- time social workers to work with problem Lynn Valley teenagers. Edwards, who lives near the Lynn Valley Centre mall, which has long been a place for aimless area youth to hang around, says the original purpose of the LYCA was to approach the younger 13 to 17 year-old kids, get them off the street and away from a hardcore criminal element of between 20 and 25 older teenagers. Instead, these kids, hound- ed by mall security and blacklisted from mall restaurants, approached the LVCA, Heather Preston, a grade 8 Argyle student and member of the Teen Coffeehouse Club, says ‘we had no where to go and nothing to get into but mischief.’ The LVCA_ subsequently arranged with the North Van- couver Recreation Commis- ston (NVRC) to rent space in the old Lynn Valley Com- munity Hall, 3590 Mountain Hwy, Wednesday and Friday afternoons as a place for these younger teenagers to go. “We realized that the only real solution was to bring these kids in, to get them off the street, give them something to do,"’ explains Edwards. ‘These are not average teenagers we're deal- ing with here, these are aimless kids who, for one reason or another, cannot go home, We're not going to save them, we just want to get them off the street.”* Cost of the hall is $7.50 per hour, money that must be raised by the LVCA. Available hall space for the Lon : sh pa earie ba tras BE hove NEWS photo Stuart Davis Parents backed into co teenagers competes with other hall commitments such as dog obedience lessons. ' But Lynn Valley youth problems, which Bland and Edwards say the LVCA is slowly beginning to make a dent in, will not easily go away, they point out, and,with the approach of summer, are sure to intensify. i “We are inheriting pro- blems from other areas, because this is where the ac- tion is,’” says Bland. North Vancouver RCMP Const, Alison rons says that the short time the LVCA’s youth worker and drop-in programs have been in effect (both began in April) makes it difficult to properly gauge their effectivenesss, but ‘relations between the youth workers and the kids seem to be good and from residents comments at our mall police week display indications are that there has been improve- ment over the short period of TEEN COFFEE CLUB members Debbie Morin (right) and Lynn Corbin (left) surrounded by the emptiness of the Lynn Valley Community Hall. Since April 1, the hall has been serving as a drop-in centre for Lynn Valley teenagers. The centre runs Wednesday and Fri- day afternoons and is desperately in need of volunteer supervisors and equipment such as pool tables. rner time the programs have been in effect. At a regular LVCA meeting, held the third Wednesday of every month in Boundary Community School, 750 East 26th, Ed- wards and Bland pointed out that Lynn Valley’s youth pro- blem is only one of the com- munity’s many problems that can and must be solved by community involvement. Attending the meeting, which attracted a dozen peo- ple, District of North Van- couver Alderman, @rnie Crist said, ‘‘Lynn Vatey has lost out, politically and socially, because it has no community voice. It has no focal point, and its lack of identification has resulted in a lot of pro- blems that are costing us millions."” Lynn Valley resident, Steve Davis, says everyone in the community ‘likes to squawk about the problems here, but nobody does anything, nobody gets involved.’’