Maryland Parkway was once the center of Las Vegas' art and music scene.

A new film documents its time as the heart of Las Vegas' cultural life.

Plus, Southern Nevada's teens and young adults have been through a lot the past couple of years.

What issues are they facing, and what resources are available to help?

♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week is provided by Senator William H. Hearnstadt and additional supporting sponsors.

Welcome to Nevada Week; I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

We'll get to the new documentary about Maryland Parkway of the 1990s a little later, but first a look at the state of Las Vegas' youth.

The pandemic made some of the serious challenges young people can face even more difficult.

Joining us to talk about those difficulties and efforts to help are Rene Cantu, executive director of Jobs for Nevada Graduates; Debbie Palacios, executive director for Communities in Schools of Southern Nevada, and Arash Ghafoori, executive director for the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth.

Thank you all for joining us on this important topic.

Last week we covered some of the violence that we are seeing in some of the local schools.

Let's get an overview now of what each of you is seeing in regards to youth in your respective fields.

Mr. Cantu, I'll start with you.

(Rene Cantu) Okay, what are we seeing?

So we are seeing an increased sense of isolation from young people, a great sense of disengagement.

So Jobs for Nevada Graduates works in the high schools, and what we're seeing is exactly that, where young people are just-- you know, you're seeing high absenteeism, you're seeing low grades, you're seeing credit deficiency.

Our staff are trained in trauma-informed care and other things so we can assist them through that.

But kids are in trouble right now, and there's still a great aftermath after COVID.

-Absenteeism, the disengagement, how does that connect back to COVID?

(Debbie Palacios) Absolutely, I think we are really seeing all of those after effects.

We can describe it as a ripple.

COVID might be the rock and we're really seeing all those ripple effects coming afterwards.

So we see the challenges in students and children who had every, you know, access and could navigate the system, so it really has been amplified for our populations who already were facing some barriers, and really it's just been amplified as the pandemic has continued, and we're really seeing those after effects.

-Any extra issues you want to add in?

Because you're dealing with graduation rates as well with Communities in Schools.

The biggest issues that you see you're facing.

-Absolutely.

Absenteeism is one of them of course, that disengagement, but really the need for wraparound services, so those basic needs that need to be met in order for students to be successful at school.

We know students can't learn if they're hungry, if they have unstable housing, if they don't have shoes, if they don't have school uniforms, if we don't have all of those basic needs met, and especially around mental health as well.

So we want to be there as Communities in Schools.

We really strive to remove those barriers so students can be engaged in their learning and be able to be successful.

-Mr. Ghafoori, what are you seeing among homeless youth?

I imagine the basic needs being met is just one of many issues.

(Arash Ghafoori) Absolutely and I think that's an issue for any youth whether they're homeless or not that's experiencing any sort of struggle or marginalization.

At Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth, we serve young people from 12 to 24, and what we're seeing is really a sandwich effect.

For young people who are newer to the experience of homelessness, it's a very daunting world right now.

There's still a lot of things shut down.

It's really confusing and disorienting how to access basic needs and services like food, shelter and other critical-need items.

So for us and others, we've been scrambling to figure out new communication techniques, new outreach techniques and new ways to reach populations because homelessness among young people happens suddenly and unpredictably, so they're not in control of things.

It could happen anytime, and right now it's a very difficult time because it's really hard for them to find the services and resources that maybe before were easier to navigate and access.

So that's one side and on the other side, for young people that are exiting homelessness, it's a really challenging time as well.

We're dealing with a labor market that is putting a lot of downward pressure on entry-level jobs, the type of jobs that our young people are trying to seek, and the affordable housing crisis that we have in Nevada is significant and for first-time renters, this is daunting that in two years, rental rates conservatively have gone up 20% year over year.

This is hard for any family, but especially for families with young children or young people that are on their own.

And then I think another huge factor-- I'm sorry, and some of those effects, some of those impacts I think that young people are seeing right now, mental health issues are through the roof and that is resulting in things like substance abuse and suicide rates, and all the struggles that families and young people are going through result in a lot of domestic violence that's exacerbated and other things that trickle down into schools, into seeking jobs and into homeless young people.

-I want to bounce that off of you, Mr. Cantu, the specific aspect of youth pursuing jobs.

And I forget how you specifically stated it, a downward push on our lower-level entry... -I think it's a pressure on entry-level jobs.

So others in the market that are older, have more experience, are seeking those entry-level jobs as they either switch careers or lose their own jobs.

So competing versus someone with no experience, they're getting-- the ones with more experience are getting those entry-level jobs which creates pressure for young people.

-Are you finding that, and then are you trying to get your youth into lower level or entry-level jobs or something a little bit higher?

-Well, that's a great question.

Thank you so much.

So Jobs for Nevada Graduates focuses on helping young people graduate and to find a career pathway.

So our focus isn't simply to help a young person find an entry-level job at minimum wage.

That would never, you know, help them build a future on that.

They couldn't even get their own apartment.

So our focus is we use the language of career pathways and there are multiple ways to enter our career pathways for young people.

So what we do first during high school is to build their skills.

You know, we have 87 competencies that focus on workplace readiness, on personal development, on social-emotional intelligence so when they graduate, they're able to show up to work on time, they have a good work ethic, they have resumes and cover letters and can present themselves well in an interview.

Some people, some young people who are very shy are able to present in front of people for the first time.

So the multitude of entry points for career pathways, you know, include two-year and four-year college, right, so we do emphasize and focus on young people entering that, but you also have many other entry points, and our focus is to try to get, you know, a young person into a key industry earning a living wage with upward mobility.

So we have partnerships with Tesla and MGM, with the culinary training academy so we can get young people their foot in the door, you know, and begin their upward motion.

So apprenticeships are huge, short-term and mid-term training is huge because most jobs in Nevada are what they call "middle skill jobs."

So they don't require a baccalaureate, but they do require some training after high school.

So that is our whole focus.

-Back to education.

CCSD's graduation rates have been going down.

Class of 2021, for example, nearly 81% of the class graduated.

That's about 2% less than the year before and 5% less than the year before that.

How significant is that decline do you think, and academically, how far behind are youth right now because of COVID?

-Absolutely, that's a great question and, you know, unfortunately not a trend that we would like to see continue in graduation rates.

But again I think it highlights the issue of those needs for wraparound services and for those basic skills that students might not have been getting during the pandemic because they were isolated or they were, you know, in virtual learning and not really practicing those skills they could within the classroom.

So Communities in Schools as a dropout prevention program is really there to be more adult presence on campus.

We're in 57 Clark County School District schools right now, Title One schools, schools that are typically underserved and certainly have the need there, and we have seen that the model works, right?

More caring adults to really be looking at kids and having eyes on kids and connecting them to services.

So we're so fortunate that we have so many partnerships within the community, and we really think of ourselves as kind of that broker, right?

It's in the name, Communities in Schools.

We're bringing the community to the school, connecting them with Jobs for Nevada, connecting them with housing resources and really having that there.

And what we're seeing for instance with our case-managed students is a graduation rate of 92% across the state, right?

So a significant difference from the statewide average and what that's really showing us is these students, these children just need an adult to really be there and help them navigate and access and have that opportunity to reach their full potential.

We are so fortunate to partner with CCSD, and we know that those caring adults are at our schools, but I think we've constantly had the conversation that there can certainly be more, right?

So I think that's why we talk a lot about complementary and definitely not duplication because their need is so great.

We talked about we could quadruple and quintuple all of our staffs and there would still be unmet need, so how do we really leverage what's out in the community to really get students to the first finish line, which is graduation, and then, you know, success beyond?

-Let's talk about funding for your programs.

This question is for all of you.

There is money coming into the state through the American Rescue Plan Act, and it's being passed out to a lot of different nonprofits in the state.

How would it best serve you, for example, Mr. Ghafoori?

-So that's a really great question, and for Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth, I think the advice and suggestions that we're giving regarding the expenditure of ARPA money is to find a fine balance between not just funding things that will disappear when the money disappears.

So this is a really golden opportunity for us to invest in infrastructure and other permanent tools that will stay in our community long past the ARPA funding stream.

So what we don't want to see is buying a whole bunch of food or other things at the sacrifice of getting people in the right place to help people navigate or infrastructure like housing or critical tools that young people and other homeless populations are going to need.

So this is a golden opportunity for our communities to be thinking about infrastructure deficits that we have and how to fill them to help our populations.

But as a direct service provider, I'd be remiss if I did not mention that some of that money also should be going to fund deficits that our organizations have experienced due to COVID.

We're experiencing staffing headaches, we're experiencing operational stuff that's happened just like we're seeing in the news in other industries, and these things could impact service delivery down the line.

So I think even though we want to invest in infrastructure, not entirely at the sacrifice of making sure the organizations that need to be strong to serve the populations that are struggling are exactly that, strong and have that full capacity because I will say that I think that anytime there's a big major crisis, whether it's a pandemic or a war or whatever, there's the initial shock but then there is a lag indicator that shows that in terms of homelessness and other issues, the worst of it we haven't even seen yet.

It's going to be down the line and coming up, and we need to be prepared.

-All right.

And Mr. Cantu, in a commentary piece you said, Unless the American Rescue Plan dollars flooding Nevada are leveraged strategically and transparently, our students in our state will continue to incur the cost of a lost generation of learners.

So academically you think our students are behind.

Where do you want that money to go?

-Oh, absolutely, it needs to go to our students, just like you're saying.

So what does that mean?

I think Arash talked about infrastructure, and I think that's absolutely critical.

What you don't want to do is-- -What does infrastructure look like for you?

-I think classrooms, human capital development, you know, things like that.

Things that will remain after the money dries up, because the money will go away and we need to continue working and serving.

And when you think about our three organizations and the many other educational nonprofits in the community that are doing this work, we comprise the student safety net that helps to capture them before they fall.

And in many ways, there needs to be greater capacity there as well, you know, for that safety net to capture young people.

You know, you talked about a caring adult in young people's lives.

This is not rocket science.

This is really about having caring adults in the lives of young people, and there just aren't enough in the building.

-We're running out of time, so I want to make sure you get to answer that question.

-Absolutely.

I think to my colleagues' points over here, it really is about sustainability and capacity building, right, that we don't want to hit that cliff and then that funding goes away and then, you know, we could be worse off than even where we thought we were.

So I really think it's a lot about partnerships because what we're seeing is the need is greater but it's also more acute, right?

So the students that we work with now each individually have greater needs, but also there's more students that we need to reach.

So how do we scale in a way that's really intelligent and really thoughtful and intentional so that in a few years, we really can continue to provide this safety net for our students.

-Thank you all so much for joining us.

(All) Thank you so much.

-Thank you.

One could argue that right now the heart of Las Vegas' music, arts and culture scene is Downtown Las Vegas; however, three decades ago that distinction seemed to belong to Maryland Parkway.

Businesses catering to the city's alternative side called the stretch of the parkway from the Boulevard Mall to about Tropicana Avenue home.

A film documenting that moment in time called Parkway of Broken Dreams airs right here on Vegas PBS, and joining us to talk about it is the filmmaker himself, Pj Perez.

Thank you so much for making the time to come in because you're based in L.A., but you've spent plenty of time in Las Vegas.

What's your experience here, and what inspired this documentary?

(Pj Perez) I pretty much grew up here.

I spent my formative years here.

I moved here when I was 15, and I spent 25 years here.

So my teenage years, I discovered-- even though I lived on the west side of town, I discovered Maryland Parkway pretty early on.

My best friend took me to the underground record store, which was at the time off of Twain and Maryland, and it was this weird little punk rock record store and I was just getting into that kind of music, and from there it was like oh, then he introduced me to this coffee shop, and then it was another record store, it was Tower Records then it was Benway Bop, and it was all these places that really helped form sort of my identity, and I think the identity of a lot of people that I had met through that.

Everyone was just creating this kind of cultural thing and no one really had a definition for it, but it was like artists, poets and musicians and people just kind of coming together in these coffee shops and these record stores.

And years later I was working as a journalist, a freelance journalist, I was mostly writing for the Las Vegas Weekly, and UNLV announced plans for Midtown UNLV, which was going to revitalize the area because it had kind of become a little less vibrant over the years.

They were like oh, you know, we're picturing coffee shops and record stores, and I'm like that sounds familiar.

So I was like maybe there's a story here about, you know, kind of contrasting what had been and what could be, and it was my editor at the Las Vegas Weekly at the time, Scott Dickensheets, who suggested hey, this is s good idea but what if you take it a step further?

He's like maybe do an oral history of the period, and I was like, okay.

So 12 or 15 interviews later and 6,000 words later, we had a pretty great cover story that came out in 2000-- I think early 2006 that got so much feedback.

They literally in the letter columns-- they used to run letter columns back then-- for weeks just people being like oh, I remember all this stuff.

This is great, this is great.

And I'm like oh, I think I touched something here.

Yes, it never sort of went away after that.

-Well, those people are going to be excited to see this.

And it's one thing to write something, another to show video from that time period, which you were able to do.

It's very special.

Let's show a clip from the documentary.

In the early '90s, the center of the cultural scene of Las Vegas was really university focused.

It really was coffee houses and bars, and that's where the energy was.

That's where all the music venues were.

-Anything cultural was on Maryland Parkway for a long time I think because of its proximity to the UNLV campus.

But back then it was pretty much the center of town.

-Maryland Parkway was the center of commerce.

It's city planning 101.

This is where you put your hospital, this is where there's the big movie theater, this is where there's the university, this is where the airport is located and all the restaurants and businesses in between.

-Maryland Parkway was the backbone for the whole incipient art scene.

-You had some great record stores, the best in the city.

You had the radio station and the culture surrounding that, and then the anchor to all of it were the cafes.

It's hard to get old footage.

How did you go about doing that?

-It is hard, especially in a time period where people didn't have cameras in their pockets everywhere, right?

I was very lucky because there were people running around with cameras back then with, you know, bulky VHS video cameras.

Doug Javelin, Jeff Carter, Gregory Crosby, all people who were very involved in the scene at the time and some people who are still very prominent in Vegas now, they shot a lot of video.

It was mostly of the events that were going on, the poetry readings and the weird sort of like video art shows and all sorts of stuff like that.

So I got lucky, and I got lucky in just knowing that these people had that footage.

Now the tricky thing was finding the-- filling in the gaps, right?

You're like I would like an exterior of this coffee house or an exterior of UNLV, and those things don't necessarily exist because no one would think to do that unless you're shooting, you know, a script, right?

So I did have to do some, you know, tracking down.

UNLV was very helpful.

I got stuff from UNLV TV's archives, and I just put calls out on Facebook.

There's a Facebook group that I created years ago called the "1990s Alternative Scene in Las Vegas," but it's got thousands of members, so like people turned up.

Some woman who lives in Texas or something was like hey, I have video of Benway Bop from when I was a college student for a film class; I was like, cool.

So it was hard but also surprisingly easy.

-We're going to get to a clip about Benway Bop in a bit but first, we're going to do one about Cafe Roma.

Before though, I want to ask you, this is about Maryland Parkway in its prime.

Parkway of Broken Dreams, why that title then?

-I mean, first obviously, it's a play on "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," right, because I think at the time everyone-- not that we were talking about it or conscious of it because many of us were very young, people in their late teens and 20s.

It felt like we were really doing something, right, that we were building something, something unique, especially to Vegas.

And by the end of the '90s that all sort of melted away, and now most of that energy shifted to Downtown Las Vegas, but for a lot of people, they couldn't wait it out and a lot of people ended up moving to places like Seattle or Portland or L.A. or New York because Vegas just wasn't ready for that kind of thing yet.

So it's a celebration of an era, but it's also sort of a reminiscence of what could have been.

-All right.

The cornerstone or the anchor of Maryland Parkway, the many cafes, let's talk about the clip, or look at that clip of Cafe Roma first.

I went to Roma and I really didn't know what-- I didn't know where I was headed.

I didn't know what I was walking into.

And so I walk in, and I really was sort of overwhelmed by the stimulus.

There's paintings on the walls from, you know, local artists, and there's flyers from the floor to the ceiling for all of these shows at all of these venues with all of these bands that I'd never heard of, and 'zines, just racks and racks of 'zines for free.

You know, people expressing themselves, artwork and goofy drawings and who knows what and, you know, kids riding skateboards outside on the brick railing.

It was really just this moment of like oh, here's where everybody's hanging out.

This is where this is all happening.

-Everybody went to Cafe Roma.

Even though there were a lot of other cafes in existence by then, that was really the nerve center of everything and it just exploded from there.

-Has anything like Cafe Roma existed since, and what led to this change in Maryland Parkway?

I don't want to say demise, I think that's too strong, but it's not what it once was.

-No, it's not.

I mean, there's a lot of factors that go into that though, right, and the film explores some of those.

You know, the late '90s, you see the internet going from being sort of a niche thing to becoming more commercial and mainstream.

You have music going digital instead of people having to go to record stores.

You know, Napster comes around and people can now download stuff and then eventually that leads of course to, you know, pay options like iTunes or whatnot.

You know, people are connecting in chat rooms and things like that online, and then eventually that leads to social media and there's less need to connect at a place like a coffee shop.

Like there's a lot of societal factors that were going on but in Las Vegas, you know, the '90s was obviously a huge boom era for Las Vegas, right?

Population grew what, by a million or something like that at the time, but that just meant more sprawl.

So you also had a lot of people moving away from the center of town, and Maryland Parkway, you know, was always sort of like the main thoroughfare on the east side of town, you know, just east of the Strip.

But at the same time, you also had things starting to happen in Downtown Las Vegas, and the thing is there weren't enough people to sustain all of those things.

So as other things start sprouting up around town that was great, but it meant that there weren't enough bodies to necessarily help pay the bills at the coffee shops and record stores that were just barely holding on on Maryland Parkway.

-I want to get to that clip about the record store, and we'll talk about that after we watch it.

-Benway was slightly more than a record store.

I mean, it had to be because all we had coming in from the outside world in terms of, you know, independent music was Benway Bop and Rock Avenue, KUNV.

So if you had a question about something, if there was a band you needed, Ron was the hookup.

-So a big part of why we set up was because KUNV was across the street.

We knew there was records, we knew there were people interested in music.

-Rock Avenue led to, you know, me going to Benway Bop.

You know, I'd hear something on Rock Avenue and I'd go oh, this is good, and I'd actually write it down and go to Benway Bop and find it.

-Benway Bop and then the student-run radio station, there is still a student-run radio station at UNLV but it's different now.

What made that so special?

-Yes, Mike put it perfectly, like it was basically a cycle that you would go in.

You know, there weren't a lot of options for discovering new music at the time and especially in Las Vegas.

It was a little more isolated from the world than it is now.

Now any sort of cultural entertainment that you could dream of comes here or is born here.

At the time, you know, bands would skip over Vegas entirely, right, because there either weren't the venues or they thought well, why would we do Vegas?

We're going to go from Phoenix to L.A., right?

We're going to skip it altogether.

So the only way to find out about these things was either you listened to the radio station, and there were very few cool radio stations at the time, and KUNV was the coolest because they would play all sorts of weird stuff.

Rock Avenue was more than just a rock show.

They played, you know, reggae and punk and electronica and all sorts of different things.

So you would hear something on the radio, you know, you'd go to the record store to find out about it or you'd go to the record store and the guy behind the counter would turn you on to whatever weird thing they were listening to like Ween or something.

Then you'd find out oh, from KUNV, their concert calendar says Ween's coming to the Huntridge.

You go to the Huntridge Theater and all these places are on Maryland Parkway, so you kind of never needed to leave one street, but everything, sort of the culture emanated from that because even though KUNV was a radio station, it was also a physical presence on Maryland Parkway.

-So much has changed since then, and you explore in Parkway of Broken Dreams whether that could ever return or whether we even want it to return.

Pj Perez, thank you so much for your time.

-Thank you.

Thanks for joining us for Nevada Week.

For any of the resources discussed on this show, go to vegaspbs.org/nevadaweek, and you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter at @nevadaweek.

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