Juvenile facility would take away feel of community
By Kayla Oberstadt
The township of Hortonia is home. It is a community of multiple generations known by first names. What it is not is home to a juvenile detention facility for serious offenders.
As a child, summer days were spent in a treehouse; summer nights were shared around a bonfire. During planting season, passersby could find my family sowing pumpkin seeds, and in autumn, my brother and I would spend the last moments of daylight picking pumpkins. State Highway 15 provided us with a roadside pumpkin stand, supplying our community with homegrown harvest.
I consider what my adult life might look like if I did not grow up as a proud farm kid. I recognize the protective factors, nurturing environment and natural resources I had in my youth. The building of a juvenile detention facility will diminish these factors for New London families.
Image created using Google Maps
Wisconsin Department of Corrections claims that Hortonia is the ideal location for a Type 1 juvenile detention center. The proposed building site is on State 15, just south of the Highway 45 intersection, between Frick Ford and R&L Electric.
On April 30 at a Hortonia meeting, the projected building’s site map was made public with minimal community input.
Instead of a cattle farm with a locally owned business, surrounded by crop-filled fields, picture concrete infrastructure narrowly close to a backyard where children could no longer play. The treehouse built by a loving father now overlooks a parking lot for buses and visitors to detainees.
Consider the light pollution of security posts that offer necessary lighting for a detention center, drowning out the starry sky that once shined so bright.
The embers of a bonfire on an evening spent with friends would no longer echo the joyful conversation once found, because these gatherings wouldn’t exist — not within 500 feet of a maximum-security detention center.
What about the pumpkin patch that, for more than a decade, taught kids the value of hard work? That empty field is now the site housing juvenile offenders. In this setting, the pumpkin patch would never become a reality. Future generations wouldn’t experience the awe of a sprout spreading vines nor learn the love of the land.
Image courtesy of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections
It is my turn to protect the future of our community and secure for the next generation the opportunity to learn in a natural classroom. When farmland is built upon, it cannot be returned to its natural state. It is gone forever.
Hortonia is not the place for a juvenile detention facility. This is a place for neighbors to thrive and be committed to stewardship of farmlands and wetlands. This is a place for friends to gather. This is a place for families to grow up together and to grow old together.
This is our home.
Hortonia, New London, and Hortonville neighbors must contact local representatives. Share your thoughts on the proposed youth detention facility. Consider how your family’s story could be rewritten with this profoundly negative change in our community.
Kayla Oberstadt, a 2008 New London High School graduate, lived in the town of Hortonia for more than 20 years. She now lives and works in Ohio.