Ft. Gordon Youth Challenge Academy class cancelled

Military.com reports that on the third day of a youth academy  sponsiored by the Georgia Guard, things got a bit out of hand last October:

A massive brawl broke out on a parade ground at Fort Gordon in Augusta one afternoon last fall, when about 70 teenage recruits of the Georgia National Guard’s Youth Challenge Academy slugged it out. Some used homemade weapons, including metal shanks, crudely sharpened toothbrushes and tube socks filled with metal padlocks.

Tube socks? Really?

Within 24 hours of the brawl, a second melee involving more than two dozen teenagers broke out in one of the barracks and senior military leaders shut down the five-month boot camp in its first week, sending all 170 cadets home and barring them from Fort Gordon for a year.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution lays the blame on the program administrators (who, it should be noted, blame the out of control kids.)

Leaders rushing to meet a new enrollment quota last fall skipped their normal vetting process. That led to a failure to properly screen recruits for behavioral and mental health challenges, leaving the program’s small staff with the task of dealing with uncooperative and violent youths who were only later determined to be “high-risk” candidates, the AJC investigation found.

Problems with the Fort Gordon camp began immediately when large numbers of unscreened applicants showed up at a public park pavilion in Martinez for orientation on Oct. 10, creating confusion, long lines and delays.

Lines snaked out of the building as parents tried to fill out forms and students had their bags inspected for contraband.

“The word of the day describing the intake process was: chaos,” staffers wrote in an after-action review obtained via open records request.

Camp Director Jarvise Reid later said she had orders to increase the number of applicants, even if it meant not screening until they got on campus. In an Oct. 25 email to Wallace Steinbrecher, state director of the Youth Challenge Academy, Reid said that meant they let students in without reviewing “critical documents” about their backgrounds.

Now this is starting to sound like an old, old song. Maybe it should be entitled SSDD?

Fort Gordon’s YCA program has had its own history of trouble, the AJC has learned. Incident reports for the past two years detail massive fights, violent outbursts and serious mental health issues among cadets requiring the intervention of military police, ambulances or both, including:

• A fight in March 2021 involving approximately 38 cadets in two different platoons. Some of the teens arrived at the fight swinging socks with padlocks inside. Two cadets and two adults were injured, according to the report.
• A fight on Dec. 26, 2021 between a large group of male and female students required military police and ambulances. Eleven students were taken to the hospital.
• A fight in April 2022 between a half-dozen female cadets escalated into girls “flipping chairs, turning over ironing boards, grabbing irons and running out” of the barracks, according to the report. Staff again were forced to call the MPs to quell the fracas.
• A fight last September between two male cadets ended with one throwing a softball-sized rock at another, fracturing his jaw.

Bring ’em in. Increase numbers. Doesn’t matter what they have done, if they are willing to be there run ’em through the process. Sounds like the mid ’70s calling? I shared a room with a kid when we were both delayed by a day entering: me to the Army waiting for a college transcript, him for the court record of his conviction. You do not want to know what for. But I hope he made a magnificent Marine.

Kids now? Not sure the serious gang-bangers and fringe kids are salvageable, sad to say. Their parenting?  Let’s just say that while I support guns, some people should NOT  own them – and some parents should have their kids removed and undergo immediate sterilization.

Category: National Guard, Schools