Boys Town Careers Video

Simone: "Boys Town Family-Teaching Couples are married couples hired to live and teach within one of the residential homes here at Boys Town. Each home has up to 8 youth between 11 and 18 living in it. Under the guidance of these couples, the youth learn not only to develop healthy personal relationship but begin to understand how to make good decisions and how to manage whatever problems first brought them here to Boys Town. Some of these children have serious behavioral, emotional and cognitive problems so they need the support of not only the Family-Teaching couple but also the other resources here at Boys Town. That's what makes Boys Town so different. These children have access to whatever care they need while learning to gain trust in a safe, nurturing environment. My name is Simone and there is no other job like being a Family-Teacher here at Boys Town. That is why my husband Tony and I have been Family-Teachers for more than 15 year."

Joining Boys Town.

Becky: "Boys Town is just an amazing place. They have developed this program that works. If kids want to change, if kids want to get better, then they will."

Family-Teaching Couple: "It's an organization that looks to the health of our clients, which are our kids, but also to the employees especially the Family-Teachers. That has always been an ongoing concern for them. How can we make it better, what can we do to change, how can we improve our support system?

Simone: "Every Family-Teaching couple has an Assistant Family-Teacher to give them a hand. Every new couple has a mentor couple to help show them the ropes."

Becky: "It's one of the safest places in the world for kids and we hold ourselves to an incredibly high standard. We have to go through a very rigorous yearly certification process. You know those circles on the poles, that is how long the Family-Teaching couples have been here and they evaluate all the Boys Town programs. Not just here on campus but the ones across the country."

The Youth

Becky, Boys Town Family Teacher: "They have been in gangs, you know, they have committed crimes so for all intensive purposes they seem like grown men. You know, and yet, when they come here and they are in a place where they don't have to act like that, or we don't allow them to act like that, they get to be kids."

Tony, Boys Town Family-Teacher: "You look at a kid that has never been apart of a community that is productive. We have seen kids up there when they do the swearing in start crying because they can't believe that they are apart of Boys Town. I am a citizen of Boys Town. I am apart of something now. The more that you are able to buy them into things like that, the more you are able to help that child change his life."

Family-Teaching Couple: "The end goal again is let's get him a diploma, let's get him a job, and let's get him to keep a job. Teach him how to deal with those frustrations and deal with those things."

The Boys Town Family.

Family-Teaching Couple: "This is a mission it's just not a job. It's a lifestyle."

Becky: "When our children were, now all three are in school. But when our children were small, I think it was Jessie, she's the oldest, and she said 'we have a rainbow family'. And I said 'yeah we do.' And our kids know absolutely that it doesn't matter what color you are or what you look like."

Family-Teaching Couple: "Our children have always loved it here. It has always been fun for them to have older sisters. It has gone quite smoothly for us, you just have to get used to working together every day every hour of every day. There are a lot of ways I think it has worked well, as all married couples who have been together for a long time, you start to take on parts of the each other's personality. It's been good."

Becky's husband: "Boys Town is a small town. Our neighbors are just similar to what we are. It's nice that our kids run up and down the street and we know that all the kids they play with we know they have good parents and we know they have good homes. So that's a benefit since a lot of time in America you don't know who our neighbor is. We have developed some pretty deep and close relationships with some of the girls over the years."

Youth: "We are not their youth, we are like their family. That's a big deal."

Simone, Boys Town Family-Teacher: "We create memories for our kids and those memories create possibilities because you know sometimes our kids can't see the possibilities in their lives. They don't know they could be nothing something different than selling drugs. They don't know that. They don't know the difference. To live it makes it real for them."

Tony: "We find fun in what we do. If you can find something that something as a profession that you enjoy doing. And if someone were to say we aren't going to attach a salary to this, would you still do it? I would do it. I would still be a family-teacher."

Boys Town, saving children and healing families.