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Cultivating responsibility

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By Mary Beth Breckenridge
Beacon Journal staff writer

STOW: Some people might call this a sentence of hard labor.

Digging. Hauling dirt. Moving mulch.

But to the men who were working in 90-degree heat on a recent afternoon, this was opportunity.

They’re participants in the Community Service Gardening Program operated by Stow Municipal Court. All are low-level offenders who were sentenced to community service and are working off those sentences by raising food for needy people on the courthouse grounds off Steels Corners Road.

Nineteen-year-old Cody Mertz’s gray shirt was damp with sweat and dirty with soil, but the Tallmadge resident wasn’t complaining.

The gardening program, he said, was teaching him responsibility and the value of a day’s work. ”If we were responsible in the first place, we wouldn’t be here,” he said.

The program was a brainchild of Stow Municipal Judge Kim Hoover and his bailiff, Beth Magelaner.

As Magelaner remembers it, the idea surfaced as the two looked out the windows of Hoover’s chambers at a plain expanse of grass and wondered what could be done with that underused land. Hoover is a gardener, and he’d already been leading community-service offenders in landscaping the grounds since the courthouse opened 21/2 years ago. So a vegetable gardening program seemed like a logical extension.

They applied for funding from the Summit County Master Gardeners and were awarded a $650 grant. Magelaner also got the Stow Lowe’s store to offer a 50 percent discount on supplies.

This spring, offenders in the program built eight raised beds on the south side of the building out of plastic lumber and 4-by-4s. They filled the beds with rich soil they dug elsewhere on the property, which once was a celery and asparagus farm. Then they planted the beds with tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and onions, plants that eventually will yield food for the Battered Women’s Shelter, the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank and possibly other organizations that aid the poor.

The Lowe’s store manager, Mike Herrera, admitted he was skeptical at first about the idea of a garden on the courthouse grounds. ”I had to come see it,” he said. ”When I did, I’m like, ‘Man, I’ve gotta be part of this.’ ”

The program is punishment with a purpose. It teaches skills the participants can eventually use to grow their own food, Hoover explained. It’s also intended to help them develop good work habits, responsibility and respect for authority.

But perhaps most importantly, it’s designed to instill a sense of confidence and self-worth, attributes many of the participants lack when they enter the program.

The participants, all nonviolent offenders, are mostly young men ages 18 to 25. Hoover said he accepts only those who are able to take direction and who admit their mistakes, and he won’t take anyone with a violent streak.

”I look ‘em in the eyeballs. . . . They have to say, ‘I want to do it,’ ” he said.

Many of the offenders have lacked positive role models, Hoover said. They’ve rarely been held to high expectations or experienced the satisfaction of meeting them.

Hoover is striving to change that.

He is a stern father figure, a taskmaster at once tough and caring. He’s as quick to offer praise or lay a hand on a shoulder as he is to take someone to task. He treats his charges with respect, he said, and he expects the same from them.

He won’t tolerate laziness or bad attitudes. ”When I want to call them a knucklehead, I call them a knucklehead,” he said.

Hoover also leads by doing. Both he and Magelaner have worked alongside the community-service workers on their time off, and he doesn’t shirk the hard jobs like digging.

His role is part teacher. On this afternoon he gathered five workers — Mertz; Thirajn Pittman, 20, of Akron; Frank Poole, 18, of Twinsburg; and Cuyahoga Falls residents Benjamin Lorenz, 29, and Ryan Cassidy, 20 — for a lesson on organic gardening.

Using the Socratic method, he prodded the young men to suggest reasons the crushed eggshells and used coffee grounds he’d brought along might be useful in a garden. He explained that the grounds supply nitrogen and the shells provide calcium while creating a jagged surface that slugs and other crawling pests don’t like to cross. He even used the Pythagorean theorem — the equation used to calculate the lengths of the sides of a right triangle — to explain how he figured out how much wire mesh to buy to create a tentlike trellis to support cucumber vines.

Then the men got to work. They carefully sprinkled eggshells around the bases of plants. They tossed coffee grounds on top of the shells and spread straw on the soil for mulch.

Hoover watched their progress. ”That’s a good job, Ben,” he said to Lorenz. ”That’s what I want.”

That kind of positive reinforcement is what the participants respond to best, the judge said. ”We praise them effusively, then when they leave we go back and correct what they’ve screwed up,” he said with a smile.

 

Most take pride in their accomplishments and in the idea of helping others, Hoover said. Often, they’ll bring family members or friends to the courthouse to show them the garden.

The workers also are involved with other landscaping projects around the courthouse, along with court employees who have volunteered time and equipment to the effort. The centerpiece of that project is Woody’s Walk, an area with plantings and a fountain dedicated to the memory of Magistrate Robert Woodside, who died in December 2009.

Hoover said he has no statistics to prove the program lowers the rate of repeat offenses. He has only anecdotal evidence, such as a former offender who came to visit with a picture of his young son. He’d given the child the middle name Kim to honor the judge.

”He says, ‘I owe everything to you, sir.’ I say, ‘Really? Why didn’t you give him the first name Kim?’ ” Hoover recalled with a laugh.

One of the current participants, Pittman, is similarly grateful.

Before his sentence, Pittman said, he’d been involved in fighting and stealing. Now he’s preparing to be baptized in his church and plans to study culinary arts at the University of Akron.

He probably wouldn’t have pursued those goals without the community service program, he said.

”He [Hoover] believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself,” he said. ” . . . I’ve got a good future because of Judge Hoover.”

 


Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook.

 


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