LA Youth: Exploring Teen Issues for 20 Years

A story in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend praises the work of MTF grantee LA Youth (www.layouth.com), a city-wide teen paper that has celebrated youth perspectives for 20 years. Founded by teacher and mother of three Donna Myrow after the U.S. Supreme Court gave principals the right to censor school papers, LA Youth is described as a ‘confessional of sorts’ and even something of an ‘emotional repository’ for teens. But for grown-ups, the piece says, LA Youth ‘is a peek into a parallel universe – a display of unflinching adolescent honesty and our region’s dizzying diversity.” The teen reporting in LA Youth over the years has raised a number of issues dealing with teen mental health and also included investigative pieces on kids wrongly confined in mental hospitals and manhandled by local police.