A Perspective on Growth: A boy forges path to adulthood with help from family, organizations

By Nicholas Boke

Life now seems to be coming together for 18-year-old Ashton Briere, unlike just a few years ago when he could barely read or write, living in Claremont, N.H., with little adult supervision and almost never attending school.

“I had behavioral problems,” Briere says today. “And I found it hard to go to school. I basically quit in second or third grade.” Along the way, a New Hampshire truant officer determined that his lack of attendance at the local schools was in part because they weren’t able to provide the kind of support he needed.

Then, at age 15, his life began to change. He moved to Chester to live with his father and stepmother, who encouraged him to get in touch with the Springfield Vermont Adult Learning, which connected him to the Southern Vermont Area Health Education Center. All is not perfect yet, but this young man is well on his way to figuring out what his future might hold and offering a path to achieve it.

VAL instructors and administrators, he says, were willing to listen and address his questions about school, about life, about learning. In short, this bright young man is no longer living on the edge of life, but in it fully.

While getting in touch with Springfield VAL was easy, as a 15-year-old, he had to wait for his 16th birthday to take advantage of what the organization had to offer.

“The day after his 16th birthday,” VAL instructor and advisor Kyra Swain says, Briere “called us and said ‘Hello, can I enroll now?’ ”

He immediately got involved in the adult basic education program that would prepare him to take the General Educational Development – GED — test, as he took classes to strengthen his skills. Over the past two years, he has taken classes ranging from Expressive Writing to Sociology to Forensic Science, some face-to-face, some online. 

Briere takes responsibility for some of his earlier problems.

“I was nervous about meeting new places and people,” he says, “but VAL is a small, safe place, and it didn’t take long for me to get to know my fellow students, too. All the teachers were willing to help, to share about what they knew and who they were.”
Kyra Swain watched him change.

“He came in quiet,” she says, “keeping to himself. Over time we saw his personality come out. It turned out he was very curious, wanting to know about how the world works, about politics, about race. Just about everything.”

Last spring, another opportunity came his way. Southern Vermont AHEC Director of Programs Alysia Straw — who had worked with VAL a number of times — got in touch with Swain to say that they’d be offering a MedQuest program for youth at Mount Ascutney Hospital and Health Center in late July.

AHEC is a nation-wide organization created in the 1970s to deal with the dearth of primary health-care specialists by introducing youth to medical institutions and training.  In early July, such a program was run for a few dozen middle and high-school youth at the Southwestern Medical Center in Bennington.

Straw said that the three-day session with hospital staff and second-year UVM medical students would include everything from dealing with deer ticks to nurses’ responsibilities to using ultrasound-based imaging tests that show what goes on inside the body using high-intensity sound waves.

The 21 southern Vermont students in the program would engage in team-work projects as well as job-shadowing with hospital staff.

The goal, Straw explains, “is to enrich the students’ understanding so they can see what a career in all fields of medicine would be like … They work with experienced medical staff as well as people near their age who are studying for a medical career in a variety of aspects of health careers.”

Straw asked Swain if VAL had anyone who might benefit from an experience like this. A month, Briere and a group of middle and high school students from other southern Vermont towns showed up for three days at Mount Ascutney Hospital.

Briere now says he enjoyed the medical side of the experience as well as exploring other fields during conversations.  Whether he’ll one day apply to medical school is still unanswered, but Briere says he’s pretty sure he’s not cut out to be a nurse even though he loved working in teams, and learning about the various uses of the ultrasound machines.

He remains sure, though, that he’ll continue to work with VAL and to take classes at the Community College of Vermont, which will more than likely be followed by a bachelor’s degree.

And he learned some broader lessons. Summarizing his three medical-centered days, he says, “All this made me realize that a lot of people don’t know what they want to do. But it’s important to explore and not get stuck.”