Every life has a point of transformation. For Stephanie Hill, it happened the summer she was 25 years old.

She was headed to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville to start her doctoral program that fall. Her summer was open.

She was invited to help start the first Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School in a juvenile detention facility in Washington, D.C.

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“It transformed the students. It transformed the environment. It transformed me,” says Hill, deputy chief administrative officer at Memphis and Shelby County Juvenile Court and head of strategy & innovation.

Her job now, as the city recoils in horror at the number of children involved in carjackings and auto thefts, is to help build a Juvenile Court that systemically changes lives and reduces the national glare on Memphis.

Hill, 41, so thoroughly believes in the Children’s Defense Fund model that she has started two Freedom Schools, one in Knoxville and one here as a member of the board of Uplift Westwood CDC.

The Westwood program will host its third summer program this year at Mount Vernon Baptist Church.

“Freedom School is a summer initiative that’s literacy-based but it’s not quite school because of how it’s done,” Hill said during a January interview.

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“It’s full of joy and empowerment and has these themes of, ‘I can and must make a difference in myself, family, community, country and world. I can make a difference through hope and education.’”

But Hill is also an analyzer, with years of experience in using data to dig into systems’ results, most recently at Slingshot Memphis, the research firm that works with agencies and nonprofits to pinpoint the programs that reduce poverty and then advising how they could be scaled.

The court’s work

In a city where adolescent crime has magnified exponentially in a year, Juvenile Court, for most people, is where delinquent children are adjudicated, which is a fraction of its work.

Its largest population — 15,000-20,000 people a year — are parents working with a judge on child support issues, setting up payment plans or receiving orders to pay.

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Every year, the court also sees roughly 2,000 cases of child abuse or neglect and about an equal number of delinquent youth.

If they are accused of violent offenses, youth ages 12-19 are detained in the court. Generally, adolescents with nonviolent offenses, including car theft, receive a summons to appear in court.

The number of juveniles charged with serious violent crimes here dropped substantially during the pandemic. The 2021 tabulation, for instance, was down 35% from 2016.

And in 2022, the total was up by only eight cases from the previous year. But without context, the number of adolescents that police brought to Juvenile Court means little, Hill says.

“It doesn’t tell you how MPD engaged differently. Is the ‘why’ behind it something that was school-related? Is it because consumerism was down and stores were closing? That’s the exact answer we’re trying to get to across all things.”

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This winter, Juvenile Court Judge Tarik Sugarmon hired a director of research and data, also a former Slingshot employee, to scour the data Juvenile Court collects and better connect the dots.

For instance, it’s not clear, Hill says, how the court intervened in the past to help the abused and neglected children on its dockets head off criminal behavior later in their lives.

“One of the major goals of the new administration is to get to a place of really understanding,” Hill said. “It’s difficult to address a challenge that you don’t fully understand.”

Hill ran Sugarmon’s campaign last year. After he was elected in September, he made her second in command at Juvenile Court behind Stephen Bush, the longtime chief public defender here who retired in 2018 at the age of 53.

“She’s a driven woman and has a good way to cutting through a lot of the fluff and focusing on the stuff I would say moves the needle or matters most,” said Jared Barnett, CEO of Slingshot Memphis.

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Hill grew up in Delaware and moved here a decade ago. GRAD Academy quickly recruited her to be dean of students for its startup charter in the Achievement School District here. By that time, she had earned both a master’s degree and a doctorate, run a Boys and Girls Club in Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department headquarters and taught social studies for three years in the Washington, D.C., juvenile detention system.

“It was a brand-new facility. It had floor-to-ceiling windows, something that would be unheard of in a school. It was bright. It had an industrial art program where the youth were not only doing visual arts, but they were banging metals and doing tactile projects,” Hill said.

“We had a really robust science program, and we had a garden club.”

For years, District of Columbia Public Schools ran the school in the detention center. Hill came on board just as the city lost the contract and a charter school was taking over.

“Number one, from the day you arrived at the facility, you went to school. If you were brought in overnight, the next day you were in school,” she said.

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That is not necessarily the case with attendance in the program Memphis-Shelby County Schools runs in Juvenile Court, she said.

“You have to understand, they wanted to be in school. No one wanted to stay on the unit or in their room all day. There was nothing going on there,” she said.

Getting noticed

Several years ago, Hill popped repeatedly on the radar of the Uplift Westwood CDC, to the point that the leaders invited her to interview her for a board position, says Rev. Melvin Watkins, chairman and senior pastor at Mount Vernon.

“It was just unanimous that we needed someone like her on board with us.”

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As a board member, Hill quickly promoted the idea of a Freedom School for youth in Westwood.

“She implemented it and recruited all of the workers and navigated us through how to get students. … We’ve seen some very positive results,” he said.

The program is based on the 1964 Freedom Summer model. Marian Wright Edelman, who founded the Children’s Defense Fund, revitalized it in 1992. It has spread around the nation, including to court-ordered programs for juveniles.

In Westwood, the Freedom School is not part of Memphis Shelby County Schools summer school. It receives no funding from the school district.

It is free to children who participate.

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“Anything that will improve literacy, we want to be in the mix of helping solve that problem,” Watkins said.

“And secondly, we felt that our children needed access to capital – not financial capital in and of itself, but knowledge, social capital, encouragement and all those other wraparound things.”

He describes Hill as “brilliant” and “passionate.”

“She loves this neighborhood, loves the community and loves the city of Memphis. She is a fierce advocate for children and youth. She sees the best in them and also feels that it is our responsibility to do as much as we can to give them an opportunity to succeed.”

‘We are invested in this together’

Hill watched the Freedom School take root in Washington, D.C., as a staffer on the ground.

“Oh my gosh, I mean, when we started to do training, the correction officers were like, ‘This is never going to work’ because Freedom School is a joyous environment with singing and dancing in the morning,” Hill said.

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The first day, she was afraid they were right.

“But then, some of the corrections officers joined us, and the more they did it, the more the youth bought into it.”

The staff brought in a drum set and let youth get on the microphone.

“They turned all the cheers and chants into go-go songs (a genre of funk music African American people originated in Washington, D.C., in the 1960s-’70s).

“It took a couple of weeks to get to that point,” Hill says.

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After the morning gathering, the groups break off to read culturally appropriate books that may include “Monster” by Walter D. Myers and “Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry.

Reading includes acting out the dialogue.

“And the beautiful thing about it is the correction officer is reading and being characters; the youth are reading and being characters – I’m reading and being the characters. We are invested in this together,” Hill said.

It is not an all-encompassing fix, but it is an example of the kinds of programs Juvenile Court is looking at to help youth deal with estrangement and esteem issues.

“I love Freedom School and I can talk about it forever and ever because that is what got me into this work,” Hill said. “It’s me seeing for myself, I am doing something with young men that people said couldn’t be done.”

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Hill, who expects court data will show the need for a Freedom School, is not sure how it would ultimately look.

“Before I start to prescribe things and where they should go … I want to be sure that this is the gap,” Hill said. “This is where it needs to go, and this is who needs to be there. We’re trying to be thoughtful rather than just doing things because people are saying things need to be done.”