Fast Times at Westwind junior high

"You never know what feelings a kid's gonna bring with them to school," he says. "They can come into class in a great mood, and then you may be talking about amoebas, and that will strike a chord somehow. They'll come out with a big incident that they want to talk about, that may even reveal a CPS issue that you need to call on. There's just so many more extremes."

"Most of the kids who come to us really want help," she says. "The problem is that we have kids who feel the only way to get treatment is to get locked up. So they will go on a crime spree, not to feed their drug habit -- 'cause they can all get drugs for free -- but to get caught, so that they can get help."

The trouble with that, Perhamus says, is that most first-time juveniles are only sentenced to a year's probation with a probation officer. If they violate probation, they're sent to Durango, a county jail for juveniles, where there's no substance-abuse treatment, and then released with a mandate that they receive treatment from a provider like ValueOptions -- which can have a long waiting period for an initial intake evaluation -- to be funded by private insurance.

"What happens is they fall into this black hole, where they can never hold on long enough to get treatment," she says. "Our student that we expelled -- highly intelligent, gifted student. Family history of mental illness.

"Every time he got released from Durango, his mother would set up an appointment with ValueOptions. But he could never hold on long enough to get to that initial intake. They would always schedule it 30 days out. By then, he was locked up again. So five times later, he still is untreated for his drug addiction, and today, he is what we would consider a hardened criminal."

He's now at Adobe Mountain, one of the state's juvenile detention centers, Perhamus says, where he might finally get drug treatment -- but at a cost of what could have been a bright future.

"The absolute hardest part is when you have to look a kid in the face, and you know you can't help them, and CPS can't help them, and the police can't help them," she says, choking back tears.

"There are not many kids that I have to do that with," she adds. "I won't give up on any kid. But sometimes you just know they're gone, and you'll never get them back. That's when this job is really hard."

With her small size, soft voice and deceptively young appearance, Amy Perhamus hardly looks the part of a street-smart homie.

But as she details the exploits of the WSP (West Side Phoenix) 87th Avenue gangs, speaks fluent Spanish on the phone to a young kid calling in to tell her about a friend he worries may be doing meth, and decodes the latest graffiti tagged on the neighborhood walls ("That's actually where we get some of our information"), it's evident Perhamus has spent a lot of time getting to know her surroundings.

"The drug scene here is very ingrained with the gangs," she says. "And the most difficult part in this specific neighborhood is that nobody will ever snitch anyone out. Anybody who is even trying to help themselves [by seeking treatment] will never give up enough information to get rid of the source."

Perhamus is guardedly protective of her own snitches, but for entirely different reasons.

"If anything ever gets tied back to a kid telling me anything," she says firmly, speaking in slow, measured tones, "somebody will go kill one of my kids. And they'll do it for real. I've been to kids' funerals, and I don't ever want to go to another one."

She's not scared of the gang-bangers herself, she says. "I'm just scared for them."

That may account for why Perhamus ultimately did not put New Times in touch with any students to speak, even anonymously, about their experiences, despite numerous attempts to line up interviews. "Don't get your hopes up," Peter Newberg warned at one point. "These kids can be very private -- for good reason. They may have seen their uncle shoot someone the night before, and now they've got this secret that they have to hold onto for fear of their own lives."

As chilling as it sounds, Perhamus clearly loves working in this environment. Formerly a teacher at an upscale prep school in New York, Perhamus says she couldn't identify with all the "spoiled brats driving to school in their Beamers," and practically gave up on teaching.