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Brother, Life Coach, Friend

Wyatt Posig (CAS’07) is making a difference in the lives of Boston’s teens

By Katie Koch (CAS’09, COM’09)

On a spring morning at a Boston high school, Wyatt Posig, a caseworker in the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services, has some good news for Chris, an affable seventeen-year-old with a sleepy smile and an armed robbery conviction. Posig thinks he may have found Chris an office job for the summer.

 

There’s only one problem — the internship calls for business attire. Posig has been trying to get clothing vouchers for Chris, whose wardrobe runs to the type of oversized checked shirts and baggy pants he’s wearing today. “I might have some ties for you,” Posig says. Chris shrugs indifferently at the dilemma. (Some names and details have been changed.)

 

It wasn’t too long ago that Posig (CAS’07) was an intern himself. Now, just a year out of college, he is one of a handful of caseworkers assigned to a pilot program designed to give Boston’s juvenile offenders some much-needed support as they leave detention centers and reenter their communities. In search of a better way to cut recidivism, the state introduced the program last year, tweaking a model developed by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Each of Boston’s neighborhood community centers now has a dedicated caseworker to act as a consistent presence in these troubled kids’ lives: an amalgam of older brother, life coach, negotiator, and friend. For Dorchester’s teens, that person is Posig.

 

He started prepping for the role years ago, studying sociology at BU and coordinating the Big Siblings program. He worked summer internships at the Department for Children and Families in his hometown of Burlington, Vermont. “I’ve always known I wanted to work with young people in this situation,” Posig says. “I really thrive on being able to help them out. And for whatever reason, I’ve been able to connect with kids really easily my entire life.”

 

It helps that he could almost pass for a teenager. Tall and lanky, with a smattering of freckles and a dark red beard, he sticks to a uniform of T-shirts and jeans. He spends most of his day checking up on his clients, taking them to dental appointments, or letting the kids vent to him in his office. For the ten boys in his caseload, none of whom have fathers living at home, Posig is a role model, but not in the traditional sense.

 

“The other caseworkers are the parent figures,” he says. “I’m more of a brother. The difficult part is that you want to be the kids’ friend, but you also want to get that respect” — a hard thing to earn as the youngest guy in the office. But Posig brings a youthful energy to the Dorchester Community Re-entry Center: he leads the daily staff meeting, chats up his coworkers, and — perhaps a first for world-weary social workers — does it all without caffeine. (He’s never had a cup of coffee, he says.)

 

“I turned twenty-three yesterday,” Posig says. “But none of the kids knows that.”

 

Curtis, one of the center’s charges, just celebrated a birthday as well. There were no parties, as Posig and coworker Sheila Cooper learn when they visit him that afternoon at Casa Isla, a lockup in Quincy for twenty boys ages eleven to seventeen.

 

Curtis arrives in the visitors’ room, and Cooper and Posig quickly assume their roles: Cooper, the tough-love veteran caseworker, and Posig, the tentative, encouraging upstart. “It’s good to see you,” Posig says. “It’s not good to see you locked up, but it’s good to see you.”

 

Cooper starts to grill him: why did he call them down for a meeting?

 

“I miss y’all,” Curtis finally confesses. Just seven days away from his release, the fifteen-year-old is tense. “Don’t tell the other kids you’re waiting to get out,” Posig advises, “or they’ll test you.” He later explains that it’s not uncommon for an offender to slip up near the end of a sentence or to be sent back for a new crime just weeks after being let out. When Curtis is released, Posig’s task will be to help him navigate the everyday challenges of school, family, and work that can make life on the inside seem relatively easy — even desirable.

 

Still, Posig is optimistic about Curtis’s chances, perhaps more so than Curtis himself. In the year he’s been on the job, he’s witnessed success stories: one of his kids has never missed a day of work, and another recently made the honor roll. His attitude, he hopes, is contagious.