Mars Area hosts online safety, personal responsibility assembly
ADAMS TWP — Probation officer Chris Monaco explained to a crowd of Mars Area Middle School students Tuesday, Sept. 26, that nearly 70% of juvenile cases he deals with involve online offenses.
“Two out of every three kids that are on probation supervision, their cases involve some sort of social media,” Monaco said. “They’re all internet related.”
Working with the county’s Juvenile Court Services, Monaco helped lead the district’s assembly on social media and cyberabuse for health classes at the high school alongside local members of the justice system.
“We see a bad trend with people using social media platforms incorrectly,” he said. “And what we want to make everybody aware of is: There are consequences to what you put on social media.”
Monaco was joined by officers Mike Bordt and Mandy Mudrick of the Adams Township Police Department as well as — for the first time in the program’s two years — District Judge Amy Marcinkiewicz.
“I feel that it’s hugely beneficial having her here to kind of show what happens in the courtroom after they’d get done dealing with myself,” Bordt said.
Marcinkiewicz emphasized that the program was not meant to merely “scare” students straight.
“At the same time we’re telling them we’re here for them,” she said. “I’m not the mean judge that throws the hammer down all the time; we’re here to educate them and hopefully they’ll know the system and what they could face as a juvenile.”
As part of Marcinkiewicz’s contribution to the program, she walked students through a “little civics class” on the local and state judicial system.
“And then we go into what I see in my courtroom, which is truancy, vaping, retail theft,” she said. “All those things are affecting the young kids right now, and hopefully they make better choices after they learn what could happen.”
Marcinkiewicz said the youngest person she has seen in her courtroom was 13 years old.
“My heart is with the kids, and I am seeing this in my courtroom,” she said. “I mean, young kids in my courtroom making these mistakes that bring them to me, and they don’t know what kind of trouble they can get into.”
While Tuesday’s assembly focused heavily on online responsibility, the program made a comprehensive effort to address everything from vaping to underage drinking.
“The social media and the vaping thing is getting especially out of control,” Bordt said. “We’re just trying to minimize some of the stuff that we deal with on a daily basis.”
And it really is something they deal with on a daily basis, according to Mudrick, with officers often having to contend with “the unknowns of what the vapes contain” when students illegally purchase them.
“We’ve seen a lot of people either acting completely out of their minds or getting extremely ill,” she said. “We’re just trying to educate them as far as not even taking that first hit.”
Bordt agreed, referencing an incident at Mars Area High School in 2022 when a student experienced seizures after vaping.
“He may have had an underlying medical condition also, but the effect from the vape he was smoking sent him into a grand mal seizure,” he said. “This was at the high school, and I thought he was dead when he left our office, but he pulled through.”
Bordt said the program will continue throughout the week — and year — in the district.
“Thursday, we’re going to be in the high school and the Centennial school, and then Friday we’ll be at the high school with all the health classes,” he said. “And then in the spring, we’ll be back at the high school with all the health classes there.”
Bordt said many students often do not realize their actions could be a crime until they participate in the program.
“We usually walk away with a bunch of kids saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize I could get in trouble for that,’” he said.
Marcinkiewicz said she hoped families and the community keep educating students outside of the weeklong program — and that the effort would keep juveniles out of her courtroom.
“It doesn’t have to come to that if we can talk to them, educate them,” she said. “And if they hear it from different people, maybe they won’t tune it out.”
