Kathryn enrolled at Gladstone Park Secondary College mid-year and has flourished in a new environment.

Her mother Janene remembers the warning signs during her daughter’s tough time.

Sitting at a cafe in Moonee Ponds while Kathryn nurses a hot chocolate, Janene takes a second to reflect on the turnaround.

‘‘You sort of know something’s going on but you don’t really know full on at the beginning,’’ she says about the bullying.

‘‘But of course as it unravels and you discover what’s going on. It was shocking in the sense that you weren’t expecting things to get to that level and then of course you’re dealing with it on a day-to-day basis which gets very stressful, so it wasn’t only a stressful thing for Kathryn, it became a stressful thing for the whole family to deal with.’’

Anna Lemcke works out of Footscray and is the program’s multicultural youth worker, dealing specifically with young people from a refugee background, typically from the ages of 16-19.

Unlike Muir, Lemcke’s priority isn’t necessarily to get her list of clients back into school.

Many have stopped going to school for several months and faced integration barriers that require a different set of goals.

‘‘Most of the young people I’m working with are not interested in going back into mainstream education because they’ve had a negative experience,’’ Lemcke explains.

‘‘The advantage with Youth Connections is that when we work with disengaged youth we have the opportunity to work with them for two years, which is really unique.

‘‘It gives us time to build that trust. In my role it takes much longer to build that trust with young people and it can sometimes take up to six or seven months.’’

One of Lemcke’s recent success stories is Mabinty Sillah, a 17-year-old single mother with a 10-month-old son, Winston.

Mabinty came to Australia on May 5, 2009, as an unaccompanied minor.

She was born in Liberia but both her parents died when she was young, so she was raised by her aunt as they sought protection from civil war.

In Australia Mabinty had been living with her aunt and four siblings in Geelong until she and her aunt became estranged.

At the time she attended North Geelong Secondary College but stopped when she became pregnant.

Lemcke and Mabinty met after she was referred to Youth Connections from Human Services Department’s refugee minor program.

‘‘Mabinty was very keen on doing her VCE,’’ Lemcke says. ‘‘She’s a very determined young woman who wants to achieve something in education but I think pregnancy got in the way.’’

Lemcke says the first priority for Mabinty was getting a roof over her head and making sure she could handle being a mum and raising her son.

The next step was exploring options that would lead towards her realising her dream of becoming a nurse.

For Mabinty, that meant building up qualifications of a year 12 equivalent so she could qualify to undertake a diploma of nursing at TAFE.

It’s still in the process but if she’s successful she will start her nursing course in March.

Lemcke says Mabinty is typical of the clients she sees.

‘‘Most of them are very drastic [situations]. I’m working with a few young mums. Most of my clients are homeless or have housing issues.

‘‘In my situation it takes a really long time to build that trust because a lot of the young people I’m working with have met so many different service providers ... they’re handed over from one service to the other. You have to really prove yourself as a youth worker.’’

At a young mums group in Braybrook which she attends weekly, Mabinty tends to Winston with love and care.

When it is suggested that her determination to pursue an education and a career is due to her young son, Mabinty disagrees.

‘‘This is not the end of the war. I just want to do something better for myself.’’

At Bayside College in Altona, youth worker Vicki Mea meets year 10 student Katie Avram once a fortnight.

Mea has a caseload of 31 clients across Hobsons Bay, most of them teenagers who dislike school and want to leave.

Her job is to encourage young people to finish year 12 or seek alternatives.

‘‘There’s some that just don’t attend and therefore we’ll try and get them attending again,’’ Mea says. ‘‘And there’s some that have stopped and so we’ll look at other pathways for them, maybe thinking that high school is just not suitable.’’

Mea has key contacts at schools across Hobsons Bay that refer students at risk of disengaging from education.

Katie was one of those flagged.

‘‘I wouldn’t come to school many days because school bores me and the students at school bore me. Schooling bores me, work bores me, so it got boring,’’ Katie says candidly as only a teenager can. ‘‘Sometimes I’d go to school a day a week or just not even go.’’

Mea, with the permission of the school, created a modified program for Katie that involves her helping out in the junior school and the library after she expressed an interest in pursuing a career in childcare.

Two periods a day she skips normal classes and helps with the primary school children.

Katie also undertook a 12-week childcare course on weekends last year.

‘‘The school realised that the only way to keep her engaged was to do a modified program,’’ Mea says, praising those involved for their willingness to try a different approach.

‘‘We do get a lot of students saying I hate school ... school’s not for me. It generally comes from that younger age group that you really can’t do anything with in terms of looking at possible solutions in terms of courses just to keep them re-engaged. In that instance I’d suggest the school help them look for work experience one or two days a week.’’

Mea and Katie have developed a friendship, a part of Youth Connections which comes with the territory and both parties seem to enjoy.

‘‘I think it also helps in that I don’t actually work for the school,’’ Mea points out.

‘‘I’m an outsider and I just come into the school to see certain students. It’s open slather where they can be themselves and express themselves freely, whereas I guess if you’re talking to a teacher it’s harder.’’

Katie now attends school every day and is even liking school. She says the program has changed her for the better.

‘‘I want to stay in school now where I wanted to drop out before,’’ she says.

‘‘I think I would have been in the same place I was at the start [without Youth Connections], not coming to school every day and doing whatever I could to get out of school. Doing whatever I could to get into trouble.’’