On Saturday, the Marshall Heights Bison youth football team completed its march through the Pee Wee division of the Pop Warner Super Bowl tournament with an imposing display of aggressive running and nearly impenetrable defense. more ›

Would eliminating the need to monitor people over the age of 18 improve the performance of the city's chronically troubled Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services? Councilmember Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) thinks so. more ›

The family of Neil Michael Godleski -- the 31-year-old Catholic University student who was shot and killed in a robbery attempt as he rode his bike through Sherman Circle last August -- is now suing the city, claiming that the city's Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services failed to keep the teen responsible under its watch. more ›

The 9:30 Club was packed on Saturday morning for the fourth annual Girls Rock! DC Camper Showcase. Eleven bands and two DJ teams showed off their new musical skills and rocked the stage for well over two hours. more ›

Imagine a season of Project Runway where almost none of the designers has ever used a sewing machine, one of the models becomes a winning designer, all the contestants are nice to each other -- and they're all in their teens. more ›

Thomas Nelson, a 54-year-old SYEP supervisor, pled guilty today on charges that he sexually abused a 17-year-old girl working in the program. more ›

A quick update to our item this morning about Brandon Sparrow, the DYRS ward who escaped from custody on Sunday morning at BWI: U.S. Marshals located Sparrow this morning in the District. more ›

D.C. officials just cannot keep their grip on Brandon Sparrow -- the 18-year-old ward of the District has now escaped from city custody for the third time. more ›

The fight for D.C. voting rights, self-determination and statehood isn't a young one, and neither are many of the selfless people that have been pushing to end the city's second-class status for decades on end. But two local activists are hoping to change that. more ›

This morning, Metropolitan Police Department Chief Cathy Lanier announced that the department has made an arrest for the murder of 15-year-old Isaiah Harris. 26-year-old Eugene Kelly, a District resident, was taken into custody by a task force on Wednesday night and will possibly appear in court as early as today. more ›

The front page of yesterday's D.C. Examiner was as loud as it was shocking: "Violent crimes by teens soar in D.C.: Homicide, rape, assault up 10 percent." Agggh! You afraid yet? If not, maybe you should be -- summer break is but a few weeks away, meaning that we're in for a violent, bloody few months, right? Well, maybe not. more ›

D.C. and Maryland police are searching for a youth that escaped from the New Beginnings Youth Correctional Facility in Laurel late last night. Around midnight, WUSA9 reports, a teenager assaulted a corrections officer, stole his security card and car keys, then used a ladder to scale a fence and drove off in the officer's vehicle. (A second teenager that was part of the escape plot was caught.) more ›

Yes, representatives from the National Organization for Marriage were present, and other anti-same-sex marriage viewpoints were aired during yesterday's public hearing on the Maryland Senate's same-sex marriage legislation. But it was young people whose voices rang the loudest. more ›

Keely Thompson, a former professional boxer who had established an anti-gang and anti-drug youth boxing center in Columbia Heights, was arrested on Thursday and charged with stealing more than half a million dollars from the center's coffers. Thompson, the executive director of Keely's District Boxing and Youth Center which, at one point, was located at 1459 Columbia Road NW, had accepted more than $1.4 million in District funds since 2004 on behalf of the center. In addition to taking an increasing salary each year, Thompson is alleged to have used hundreds of thousands of those dollars to go on gambling trips to Atlantic City and other non-business purposes. more ›

In some incredibly depressing news, The Washington Times -- who just did a long investigative piece on the deaths of youths in D.C. custody -- reports that both the victim and the suspect in a murder last weekend were both wards of the District. Kwan Kearney was taken into police custody on Tuesday on murder charges related to the killing of 19-year-old Jamal Wilson -- Kearney stands accused of shooting Wilson on the unit block of P Street NW shortly after midnight on Sunday, November 14. The Times reports that both were under the custody of the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services at the time of the crime -- Kearney had been arrested in 2009 for assaulting a police officer, while information on why Wilson was in DYRS custody was not available. Interim DYRS Director Robert Hildum described the incident as "yet another tragedy" for the troubled agency. more ›

As someone who benefited immensely from numerous people encouraging me to write as a young man, I will shamelessly plug this: 826 -- author Dave Eggers' youth writing program -- will finally be opening a D.C. branch at 3233 14th Street NW in Columbia Heights this fall, and are looking for volunteers for writing workshops and drop-in tutoring sessions. Those familiar with 826 know that each local branch has a themed storefront to help support the work being done. D.C.'s does not disappoint: the "Museum of Unnatural History" will sell "Confused Wood and Existentially Distraught Wood (from the makers of Petrified Wood), a selection of tools for budding unnaturalists, and evolutionary supplements for those who want to develop bipedalism or opposable thumbs." Awesome. 826DC has already been working in D.C. schools (continuing the good work that our friends at Capitol Letters had been doing in this town for some time), but the new building will allow them to serve even more young people. If you like the idea of helping, you can volunteer here. more ›

Virginia Railway Express is thinking about no longer selling its discounted youth tickets because they believe more and more adults are abusing the system by pretending to be younger than they really are, the Examiner reports today. Currently, anyone under 21 can get VRE tickets for half-price, so it's not too hard to imagine a number of 20-somethings are getting away with paying less than they should. There will have to be a public hearing before anything more happens, but VRE is proposing raising the age of children who ride for free when accompanied by an adult to 10, up from 6, in order to make up for the change. The commuter rail agency estimates eliminating the youth discount could generate $300,000 per year. more ›

Here's a story we missed last night from WJLA: as of January, bars in D.C. that are caught selling alcohol to minors for the first time now get a warning instead of a $1,000 fine and a two-day liquor license suspension. In a surprise twist, the change in the law pits Jim "Shut 'Em Down" Graham against the D.C./Va. chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), with MADD expressing concern over becoming too lenient on liquor sales violations, and Graham insisting the new law is more fair. Repeat offenders are actually penalized more now than they were before, Graham notes. more ›

We had been mulling over yesterday's Washington Post story about an apparent increase in teens and kids even younger committing crimes like robbery and assault in groups, and then last night's FOX 5 report on violent crime in Adams Morgan really crystallized it: we have to come up with some better words for describing this phenomenon, if it is one. About a third of the way through the FOX 5 video, reporter Roby Chavez has a member of the Guardian Angels, who have recently starting patrolling Adams Morgan, describe groups of kids who are purposefully engaged in criminal activity together as "wolf packs." The Post similarly goes with "pack robberies," describing how these groups of juveniles are "roaming" the city streets looking for opportunities to assault and rob unsuspecting citizens. more ›

Civic-minded young Washingtonians have a chance to be a part of something bigger than just D.C., while at the same time helping their neighbors. Thousands of young people will give back this weekend as part of Global Youth Service Day (each individual project is one day, but the event runs from April 25-27). more ›