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HARRISVILLE -- A yogurt shop near Ogden is helping adolescent boys with troubled pasts reenter society.
Spoon Me on 420 N. 325 East in Harrisville is a franchise, but it was opened to employ boys in treatment at Crossroads Academy--a residential treatment center for teenage boys. The job helps them gain confidence and learn responsibility.
For the past two months Nate Jackson has been serving frozen yogurt. He says, "I cut up fruit and help the customers."
It's a big deal because not long ago Jackson was in trouble with the law, doing drugs and having serious family issues.
Now he's in treatment at Crossroads Academy. His job is part of his therapy.
He says, "It gives me a chance to be more responsible for my life and save my money for a car or whatever I want."
"So many times treatment centers want to isolate them and take them away from the normal life," says Derek Bowles, the co-founder and co-owner of the yogurt franchise. "We want to do the opposite. We want to get them out of the bubble and expose them to real life stressers."
He and his partners opened it when they noticed their students needed jobs.
He says, "We found a lot of them could not get jobs. It was difficult, whether they did have the confidence, or history or their own insecurities."
Benjamin Miller is another student of Crossroads who struggled with drugs and is happy to be working there.
He says, "I went to juvi [juvenile detention], then my options were to stay there or go to jail cause I'd be turning 18."
Miller says the treatment at Crossroads and the responsibilities of this job will help him once he's graduated.
He explains, "In other programs, I wouldn't have been exposed to the day-to-day life. Here I'm exposed to everyday stuff, so when I go back home it's going to be easy to cause I'm still doing normal stuff."
Another perk: They get all-you-can-eat frozen yogurt.
Miller says, "Put some strawberries and granola on that, best thing in the world!"
Crossroads also opened a skate shop and skate park where the boys can work, that's just around the corner from Spoon Me.
E-mail: abutterfield@ksl.com
