I’ve been volunteering with youth-related projects on Vashon for nine years now, and I was surprised that the Vashon Island School District leadership apparently still doesn’t know how to communicate with youth. According to news reports in The Beachcomber and The Riptide, the district’s opening salvo in a recent “dialogue” was to pronounce that grinding was history at Vashon High School.

For me, communication starts with listening.

Development of Island Teens (DOIT) listened in 2003, when, after a 17-year-old girl was strangled to death by her father, the Vashon Youth Council (VYC) asked for help in improving youth-adult communications on the Island.

I had heard about the Youth-Adult Dialogues organized by the extraordinary youth-empowerment organization Power of Hope, so Yve Susskind and I took three Island teens to witness a dialogue on Whidbey Island that fall. We participated in powerful “fishbowl” discussions where adults listened while youth talked. Then, youth listened while adults talked. Then, the whole group explored solutions to challenges that had surfaced in the fishbowls.

We all agreed this format would be worth trying on Vashon. In January 2004, more than 100 people showed up for the first dialogue, hosted by the Youth Council and the Vashon Island Prevention and Intervention Team (VIPIT) at The Hardware Store space while Melinda Sontegrath was waiting for her permit to run a restaurant.

Since then, we’ve held three youth-adult dialogues each year. Some have been on specific topics, such as drugs, sex, rock ‘n’ roll and gender. Others have invited whoever comes to “ask any question you’ve always wanted to ask the other generation.” (Examples: Question from adults: What’s with the piercings? Question from youth: Why don’t you trust us?) Both youth and adults have said the community dialogues opened doors to ease conversations about previously difficult or even taboo conversations.

Our 18th dialogue — coming up on Feb. 7 — will be on “Why doesn’t Vashon have a Bill of Rights for citizens?” It’s the first one we’ve held on a Sunday, which might work better than weeknights for some people. The dialogues begin with dinner — often yummy chili cooked by Maryam Steffen and Felicia Saathoff, with breads and other goodies contributed by other Islanders.

Questions are the order of the day. Good questions are often more important than answers. “Faciliwaiters” deliver questions to the dinner tables, while the evening’s agreements of listening, brevity, acceptance, curiosity, sincerity and diversity are discussed.

Then, there’s some kind of opening and a one-on-one communication exercise to prove that adults and youths can communicate successfully. We always begin with the youth fishbowl because, frankly, young people are better at modeling open communication than adults, who tend to lecture instead of converse.

At the end, there’s usually an invitation to consider in silence what each of us has heard and learned and an opportunity to say what we’re going to do about it.

We nearly always leave with a sense that we’ve learned something new. For example, at November’s dialogue on “What if…,” the youth of Vashon painted a bleak picture of a future where there were no ferries and Islanders were forced to resort to eating each other, while adults painted a rosy picture of happy artists and musicians celebrating and collaborating.

The dialogue ended with a desire to create an organization to facilitate “intergenerational dreaming.” And as several youth pointed out, that entity already exists. It’s called the Vashon Youth Council, and it offers great opportunities for youth and adults to create “dream projects” together.

In fact, the Youth Council and Development of Island Teens can both use new board members — both youth and adults.

The school district should pay attention to the fact that Island youth and adults do know how to communicate — and are doing it in creative ways.

— Stephen Silha is a writer, communications consultant and filmmaker.