Oconto community provides rays of hope for at-risk teens

OCONTO – While many people hunker down in the bitter cold and don’t venture out, Farnsworth Public Library in the City of Oconto becomes a destination for those with limited resources.

“We see more homelessness in the summer, but we do have – you can tell – people using us for warming in the winter,” Farnsworth Library Director Amy Peterson said at the February City of Oconto Committee of the Whole meeting. That includes teens and young adults, she said.

“There’s a way to talk to people properly about that without embarrassing them. We’ve got information on where all the food pantries in Oconto County are,” she said.

The library, located at 715 Main St., is a safe place for teens and young adults for a few hours, but it closes. For at-risk teens, the library provides information on RAYS Youth Services, a nonprofit program providing youth with education, coping skills and connections within the community to prevent homelessness.

Just a couple of blocks from the library, The Good Place bowling alley, 1128 Main St., is working with RAYS to provide a safe place for services, said Michelle Good, owner. Ryan Good, Michelle’s husband, is chief executive officer at Foundations Health and Wholeness in Green Bay, which has adopted the RAYS program.

While the program started at Lutheran Social Services’ centers, the structure didn’t work in more rural areas because youth couldn’t get to the locations, said Jackie Baumgart, RAYS Youth Services director and a licensed clinical social worker. “When I took over, I changed the structure,” she said. “We can meet people where they’re at, such as at school or the bowling alley.”

RAYS Youth Services works with 10 to 15 teens and young adults at any given time in the Green Bay area, Baumgart said. In Oconto, it primarily serves middle-school and high-school age students, she said. The program’s services are offered free of charge.

Over the past six months in Oconto, RAYS has served five longer-term clients and participated in 121 meetings to help diffuse situations and improve communications, Baumgart said. It has held 25 community meetings to provide information about the program.

The program, funded by foundations and donations, is open to school-aged youth and young adults to age 21 on a voluntary basis. It involves case workers going into the schools to talk to students about trafficking and what it means to be at risk, she said, but the program isn’t based at the schools. She defines at-risk as “when you might need to reach out if you’re having struggles at home.”

The program works with the teens on goals. Some don’t have enough to eat, she said. “We’ll ask them, do you need some food for right now? Do you want to work on getting a job? If they said, ‘I’m good,’ we say, ‘Do you have a safe place to stay?’”

Baumgart said an informal network brought the program to Oconto about a year ago. “Michelle from the bowling alley is connected with the school board. She helped us connect with the library. They had kids stopping in who were in need of something or feeling unsafe when they go home.”

The library sees a lot of residents throughout the year. Library use in 2024 included about 23,745 patron visitors and about 31,000 library check-outs, Peterson said. A first-floor renovation, funded with donations from two estates and an insurance claim related to a sewer-pipe issue from 2023, included new carpeting, shelving and walls. The first floor has reopened and the library is featuring an exhibit of student art in March, she said.

Notices at Farnsworth Library include a QR Code for RAYS that links to a website, where students put in their contact information. “We try to make it easy so anybody can refer a friend,” Baumgart said. “We reach out and ask, How can we help?”

Teens contact RAYS after they’ve had a run-in with family or a friend, she said. “Or they might be house hopping, where they stay at various places,” Baumgart said. In some cases, the parents are using drugs, and the teens are trying to get away from it.

The youth often are victims, Baumgart said. “Parents are maybe using or addicted. They don’t understand how to parent,” she said. “They don’t know how to ask for help.”

Some at-risk youth might skip school, she said. “They maybe aren’t attending because they don’t have a backpack or decent clothes,” she said, noting the organization accepts donations of new or gently used clothing for teenagers and backpacks. “We help them get the things they need to be productive members of society.”

While meeting with a RAYS case worker at school might be intimidating for some students, Good said the bowling alley is a safe place for teens to meet a case worker. “We’re still at the starting point,” she said about the partnership with RAYS. “The eventual goal is to meet kids here, do some bowling, some fun activities, help them along, help them get comfortable opening up,” she said.

“At RAYS, they’re trained to give them life skills and support and a place to live if they need to,” she said.

Good, who was seriously injured in an accident involving the bowling equipment last year, said she bought the bowling alley “for the community.”

“When my kids were teenagers, there wasn’t a lot to do. There were a lot of bars,” she said. The Good Place offers a bowling league for teens. It has some scholarships available for those who want to bowl but can’t afford it, she said. Good sets expectations. “We’ve had some rough kids come and go here. I’m not one for enabling and giving free food and stuff. I will do it once or twice.”

Good said she has helped a young man with a troubled past. He was “one of the rougher kids who has been in and out of jail. He had burned a lot of bridges,” she said. “Now he is in his twenties and starting to turn the corner.

That’s my hope, that we can continue to empower kids and help them feel their self-worth.”

Good encourages anybody aware of an at-risk youth or teen to reach out. “Now they have a place to point those kids to,” she said.

While Good said she thinks boys often are more at-risk than teenage girls, Baumgart said young women also are. “Young females are being trafficked. They’re having sex to be able to stay on the couch,” she said. When teens are too old for foster care, they might slip through the cracks, she said. “Their parents don’t give them mental health services when maybe they need them,” she said.