Editor’s note: Between August and December 2019, New Times Staff Writer Karen Garcia profiled several cadets in the Grizzly Youth Academy, including Stephanie Recio-Soltero from Lompoc. Recio-Soltero’s story is compiled here, from her admission to graduation.
The last of the fog is melting away from the hills that surround Camp San Luis Obispo on this August day. The California National Guard lives here, as do the facilities to train and give logistical support to various civilian and military agencies at the federal, state, and local levels.
The Grizzly Youth Academy, a partnership between the California National Guard and the Grizzly Challenge Charter School, also lives here. It was the first of its kind in the state. Now, there are 39 similar programs like it across the nation.
Francisco Flores, Grizzly Academy’s lieutenant colonel and director, is sitting at his desk with the windows wide open to let in as much natural light and breeze in as he can. He speaks passionately about Grizzly’s class No. 43, which commenced almost two weeks ago, on July 21, 2019. If you ask him what the Grizzly Youth Academy is all about, he simply says that it’s a machine.
“We never stop. We’re constantly in support of the kids, and we look at any and every aspect of how to reach the kids to help them change for the better,” he says.
Grizzly is a youth program with a military-style structure in which students make up lost school credits as well as learn the skills they need to be positive and successful individuals in society. The program for youth between the ages of 16 and 18 is tailored for students who have dropped out of high school or are at risk of dropping out. Although the goal is to get students back on track academically, Grizzly’s also rooted in promoting leadership, cooperation, and academic skills—all while building self-esteem, pride, and confidence.
Flores says he and his staff do this by getting rid of all the “static” in their lives.
“It’s my term, ‘static.’ It’s like the static you hear on the radio. There’s so much static and noise out there in society: social media, drugs, gangs, and truancy itself,” he says. “It’s that social noise of hearing, ‘You’re never going to achieve; you can’t achieve.’”
He tells the kids who attend Grizzly that they’ll always face that kind of input from their peers, adults, and society at large.
“You’re going to have to learn to strengthen your guard, so when negativity comes your way, you know how to deflect it and you can then leave yourself open to the good stuff,” Flores says.
Funded primarily through the federal government, the state of California, grants, and donations, the cadets’ tuition, room, board, books, and food are covered in the program. Parents only need to provide their kids with underwear, shoes, gray sweats, toiletries, a black hat, and other personal needs.
What makes the program unique aside from its military structure is that it’s all voluntary—incoming cadets decide whether the 22-week residential program and 12-month post-residential phase (Grizzly checks on each individual after they complete the program) is the right choice for them.
Flores says almost all cadets join because they’ve realized they’re ready for a change in their life. A few students do quit the program because they aren’t ready, but that’s an exception. He says almost all of them come back when they are ready.
The lieutenant colonel has been the director of the program for about a year, and when he arrived in the area, he was surprised to hear the community’s misconceptions about who attends Grizzly. He heard people call the cadets “those troubled kids” or “those probation kids.” Flores hates the phrase, “those kids.”
“The reality of it is, it’s not ‘those kids,’ it’s our kids, our community kids, and our family kids. The beautiful thing about our kids is that they recognize that they need help, they have the opportunity, and have made themselves available to the opportunity,” Flores says. “Every kid here has volunteered to be a part of this program, and we do work hard and encourage them to stay right.”
It’s the second week of the academy, and classes haven’t started yet, but the exercises, activities, and transition to the program’s rigor has.
The kids all say pretty much the same things. Getting out of bed so early has been rough, some of the exercises or drills are tiring, and they miss their families. However, not one cadet complained about being at Grizzly. They all talk about their past as if it’s already leaving them as they take steps into their future.
•••
Eighteen-year-old mom from Lompoc Stephanie Recio-Soltero is one of class No. 43’s 222 cadets. Even though she’s wearing gray sweats, she’s bursting with color and energy as she talks. Recio-Soltero was born in Santa Barbara but spent a good chunk of her childhood living with her aunt in Utah and then Lompoc.
She says she was raised by her aunt when her single mother was going through a rough patch. What she remembers most is how different Utah is from Santa Barbara County, mostly because of the snow.
“The snow is not fun, it’s kind of a hassle sometimes because you can slip and fall, and you have to shovel out the driveway,” Recio-Soltero says between laughs.
The transition to Grizzly life has been tough for her because of the strict programming, but she doesn’t mind it. If anything, she says it’s making her a stronger person. The most difficult piece for her is being away from her soon-to-be 10-month-old daughter.
“The first couple of days I cried because I think the hardest thing was leaving my baby. But being away from home, well, it’s not that hard because I’ve been in and out of houses so I’m pretty comfortable anywhere I go,” she says.
At Grizzly, Recio-Soltero says, she’s guaranteed to have a bed, three meals a day, and two snacks—so she’s not complaining.
Recio-Soltero was the type of student who got good grades and really enjoyed school. She was even on the honor roll. But when her brother went to jail for attempted murder, it changed things. Her brother was Recio-Soltero’s guide. He gave her advice, told her right from wrong, and pushed her to excel in school. When he went away, she lost that guidance, and her mom lost their home, so she went to live with a friend who did drugs.
When Recio-Soltero found out about her pregnancy, she stopped doing drugs because she wanted to better herself and keep her baby out of harm’s way. But once Yulema Rose was born, Recio-Soltero said she experienced “baby blues”—a form of postpartum depression—and she started smoking weed and doing meth.
“I think every mom gets baby blues no matter how long you’ve been a mom. You’re always going to question if you’re doing the right thing, if you’re parenting right, or is this right or wrong?” she says.
Recio-Soltero cares too much about the future of her daughter to keep dipping back into substance abuse, so she learned about Grizzly and believes this is how she’ll learn to stay off drugs for good.
“I feel very positive about this,” she says with a smile.
•••
Just past 10 a.m. on Sept. 19, 2019, the sun is already beating down on the pavement. Paul Piette, the academy’s Grizzly Challenge Charter School principal, is showing the Sun around the “wagon wheel,” a group of classroom buildings arranged in the shape of a circle. Platoons march to the middle of the wheel, and line by line the cadets are dismissed to their respective classrooms. At this time, one or two cadets run inside the wheel from one room to another.
Cadets must run in a clockwise direction, similar to a wheel in motion, to get to their classroom or to take a bathroom break.
It’s part of the structure they’re taught through the program—cadets told the Sun that running to their destination isn’t their favorite thing to do. In their life before Grizzly, for some school wasn’t their favorite thing to participate in every day either, but that sentiment has changed.
In order to qualify for the Grizzly Challenge Charter School, a prospective cadet must be at risk of dropping out of high school or have already dropped out, according to their credit deficiency and truancy. Their academic standing is an indicator, Piette said, of what’s really going on in their life. It could be a symptom of family issues, such as divorce, death or loss, or substance abuse—either in a family member or in the cadet—family or neighborhood dysfunction, such as abuse or neglect; social economic issues of poverty; or gang issues.
Ultimately, through circumstances outside of their hands or circumstances they’ve created, Piette said, the cadets have developed a set of habits, behaviors, and beliefs that at one time perhaps helped them cope with their life. Those behaviors, he said, have now put them at risk and on a limiting path.
“They come to us with lots of challenges, and we’re here to work with every single issue that they might have; we really don’t have a limit to that. We’re happy and willing to address anything that can affect their habits and their beliefs about themselves in the world, so they can be successful outside of here,” he said.
•••
Family Day was an emotional day for Recio-Soltero because she was able to hold her 10-month-old daughter again. After weeks without seeing their families, cadets got together with their siblings for a day of activities and lunch.
Recio-Soltero described that day—Sept. 14, 2019—as a dream from the minute she ran up to her family to the moment she parted with them at the end of the event. The one thing that stuck with her was how her daughter reacted to her after nearly two months of separation.
“I grabbed her and hugged her, but I noticed she was making a pouting face. She wanted to go back with the people that are taking care of her right now, my mom and my tia [tia means aunt in Spanish],” she said.
It hurt, Recio-Soltero said, because she felt like maybe her daughter was feeling abandoned after she had come to the academy.
“I just held her the whole time though; I didn’t care. It was good to see her,” she said.
Having to leave her daughter behind has made Recio-Soltero think about how to continue her education without leaving her daughter again.
Through the Grizzly Charter Challenge School, she’ll be earning her high school diploma, so post Grizzly she plans to attend a community college. This way she can balance raising her daughter and receiving higher education in order to get a job.
This aspect of her future is one of the things she talks about with her counselor, who has been very helpful.
“She’s very easy to talk to, and she listens to what I have to say. I’m really close to her,” Recio-Soltero said.
Her counselor has also been working on filling out a baby book with Recio-Soltero, something that Recio-Soltero and her daughter can reflect on in the future.
She also talks to her counselor about her fears of life after Grizzly. When her family came to visit and were filling her in on life back home—Lompoc—she realized something.
“It sucks knowing that I’m going to go back to the same reality. But the only thing that’s different is me,” she said. “I thought, I don’t know, for some reason I thought coming here was going to change everything.”
She said she worries about the old friends who might be waiting for her back home or the temptations of doing drugs again.
“I feel really good right now, and I don’t think about drugs or anything like that. But I feel like I might end up meeting up with [old friends] to say hi because friends are friends to me,” Recio-Soltero said.
She quickly corrected herself though, and said some of her old friends wrote to her, but she hasn’t written back because they shouldn’t be part of her future. She constantly reminds herself that.
Recio-Soltero brightened up when she reported that she’s a guidon for her platoon, which means she holds the flag that signifies her unit designation. Because cadres—role models or guides assigned to each platoon—choose the cadet for the position, she feels proud of the recognition.
•••
Gray clouds took over the sky on Dec. 3, 2019. Scattered raindrops hit the caps and hoods of cadets lined up in the center of the wagon wheel as they chose snacks from a plastic crate.
It’s around 3:30 p.m., and classes just ended for the day.
The 22-week program is nearing its end, and while finals might be at the forefront for some of the cadets, it’s really the next phase of the program that’s on everyone’s mind.
Similar to previous classes, the cadets are going through a program that’s divided into three phases: acclimation, residential, and post-residential.
A majority of Class No. 43 is finished with acclimation (the first two weeks and an adjustment period) and are about to complete the residential phase with a graduation. While the first two phases might have felt like the most challenging for some cadets (some of Class No. 43’s cadets have dropped out of the program), the daunting aspect for others is the post-residential phase.
Life after Grizzly.
In the post-residential phase, cadets continue to work with their mentors (the individuals who encouraged them to apply to Grizzly) and case managers to finish high school (vocational school, a continuation school, or college), enlist in the military, or find employment.
This step is in the hands of the cadet with the help of weekly mentor meetings, reporting to case managers, and having access to their former cadres.
“I would say [the cadres] are relentless positive male or female role models. They just do not give up on these kids,” Sgt. First Class Angel Salcido says.
Salcido is the cadre supervisor and training coordinator for the academy. His background includes serving in the Marine Corps from 2001 to 2008, a position in the Bureau of Prisons and Corrections, and the California State Guard.
He says he’s always enjoyed serving others, but working with at-risk youth is his calling.
When he transitioned from the Marine Corps to corrections, Salcido says he quickly learned that he wanted to help steer youth in a positive direction in order to prevent them from becoming inmates.
“I felt that those individuals were stuck in an environment in which change was not necessarily far-fetched but they didn’t have the opportunity,” he says.
Salcido learned about the academy when he became the mentor for his nephew—a cadet of Class No. 22.
When Salcido arrived at Camp San Luis Obispo for Family Day that year, he says it reminded him of his time at Camp Pendleton.
“It had the same smells of wet dirt, the older buildings, and hearing the soldiers calling cadence. I thought they were soldiers and then I realized they were youth, the students. They were motivated,” he says.
Through his mentor experience and training, Salcido fell in love with the program and made it a point to introduce himself to the commander at the time and inform him of his interest in working with the academy.
“I want to say six months later I was on the line, working with at-risk youth and that’s where my journey began, 10 years ago,” he says with a laugh.
Currently, he oversees 24 cadres and four platoon sergeants who wear multiple hats in order to guide more than 200 cadets throughout the 22-week program and beyond.
Cadres introduce and enforce structure, instill discipline, assist the teaching faculty, facilitate physical fitness, informally counsel students, teach the cadets coping mechanisms, de-escalate situations, and help cadets coexist with their peers.
The overarching concept that the cadres work through with the cadets is that Grizzly isn’t an obstacle in their life. Salcido says that although the academy is a challenge, challenges present opportunity.
“The question is, what is the student going to do with that opportunity?” he says. “Are they going to capitalize or are they going to fall asleep?”
Cadres are vital to the program, Salcido says, because, along with the rest of the academy’s academic and military team, they try to understand each cadet’s personal life in order to help them be successful. Which, he says, can be difficult because that cadet might not be used to a daily schedule or being told what to do.
“But we are relentless. We don’t give up on ourselves and more importantly, we don’t give up on them,” Salcido says.
Above all else, cadres need to be passionate about what they do.
That passion drives each cadre to connect and build professional relationships with the students in the program. These relationships carry on in the post-residential phase because when the students graduate, they know they can still contact their cadre for guidance or advice.
“It’s a never-ending resource, so it doesn’t stop after graduation,” he says.
When Salcido was a cadre and watched his first platoon graduate, he says he felt like a proud dad.
“These kids work hard and we guide them, but their success is theirs, I don’t want to take any of that from them,” he says. “But it’s nice to know that we were part of their process.”
•••
Over Thanksgiving break, Recio-Soltero says, she visited with an old friend who she used to smoke weed with. Only this time, she wasn’t tempted to smoke and she realized how ridiculous her friends looked and acted while they were high.
It made her think.
She says she’s not worried about going back to the same environment, but she’s slightly worried about the choices she’ll make.
“It’s not my environment, you know, it’s something I noticed this homepass,” Recio-Soltero, who’s now 19 years old, says. “It’s not where I’m around or who I’m with, it’s what I choose to do.”
She says a sergeant told her platoon that six months (the duration of the program) isn’t going to necessarily change them.
“He had a point. Six months of me being here, it was easy to be sober because you don’t have access to [meth] and I wasn’t around it,” Recio-Soltero says.
Going home is the real deal, she says, to put her Grizzly knowledge to the test. She has to be strong for her daughter, continue her education, and work to provide for her small family.
She’s one of about 50 cadets chosen for an internship opportunity through the program—internships could be at Camp San Luis Obispo or through a business in the city of SLO.
Recio-Soltero’s internship is with The Center for Health and Prevention as a receptionist. She’s the first person patients see, assissting them as they arrive, answering phones, and filing paperwork. The experience has inspired her to enroll in an eight-month certification course to become a medical assistant.
In a little more than two weeks, on Dec. 20, 2019, Recio-Soltero will graduate from the Grizzly Youth Academy, earning enough credits to receive her high school diploma.
“I never thought I was going to do it. I never thought I would be done with school,” she says, smiling. “I’m doing it two years later, but I’m doing it.”
She says she gets this warm fuzzy feeling inside when she thinks about this accomplishment, which has a lot to do with the program. It was the push she needed.
Before Grizzly, Recio-Soltero says, she was in a dark place. She describes that time as being in a deep hole, losing hope for everything, and believing that she was going to be a drug addict for the rest of her life.
“I want people to know it’s OK to ask for help. If you want the help you have to take it. I needed it, I needed a push, and I did it,” she says.
The program, asking for help, and holding onto hope is what got her to this point.
“You have to struggle to be on top. That’s another thing I learned at Grizzly, if you think you’re not going to fail, you’re setting yourself up for failure. No matter what, you have to fail to succeed,” she says.
New Times Staff Writer Karen Garcia followed Grizzly Academy’s Class No. 43 from start to finish. Send comments to kgarcia@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jan 30 – Feb 6, 2020.