Long before Brooklyn community boards started to smell like teen spirit, a 16-year-old Scott Stringer — now the city’s top financial guru — was shaking things up in his Manhattan home district as one of the city’s first-ever teen board members.
The year was 1977, and the future comptroller was sick of hearing grown-ups gab about the problem with the kids today — teen crime was plaguing the city and adults were wringing their hands over how to stifle it — with no input from the kids themselves, he says.
“There was a lack of understanding of the issues teenagers cared about, and I thought, ‘Wow, that would be pretty intense if a teenager was in the room when decisions about communities were being discussed,’ ” said Stringer, who was appointed to the outer borough’s Community Board 12.
The local-government wunderkind and the city’s lone other teen member used the platform to rally around youth programs they felt could make a difference in the crime crisis — and found adults actually cared about what they had to say.
The experience really ignited his passion for civic engagement, Stringer said, and informed his eventual stint as borough president of the distant island of Manhattan, where he found himself better informed on issues that mattered to locals and more inspired to make good appointments to community boards.
The comptroller hopes Williamsburg middle-schoolers now getting a taste for board life will be just as intoxicated by the heady thrill of civic participation as he was as a precocious young politician.
“If we get these kids as early as possible, they are more likely to be voters who will follow the political process, they will play a role in shaping their communities as they get older,” he said. “You never know who the next borough president of comptroller or mayor will be.”
