Marin therapist helps teens after overcoming troubled youth

Marin clergyman Jerry Buckner remembers crying 16 years ago when a Redwood High School administrator told him the school would have to expel his son Benjamin for getting into fights and missing classes.

“They said, no, we’re not going to give him another chance,” said Buckner, senior pastor of Tiburon Christian Fellowship.

At the time, his son was a sophomore. After being expelled, the 16-year-old was sent to Marin County Juvenile Hall for violating a restraining order in connection with one of the fights. He was there for about a week.

“I had worked at Juvenile Hall,” Jerry Buckner said with a touch of sadness. “I’m a counselor too.”

Now 32, Benjamin Buckner has not only overcome his rocky start in high school, he has flipped his life around 180 degrees to academic and career success, gratitude and self-acceptance — and a desire to give back.

Three weeks ago, the Tiburon resident resurfaced at Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley to help kids who are hurting to cope and thrive.

“High school can be a hard time,” Buckner said Thursday near his new office at Tam High, where he is a full-time mental health therapist on contract through the nonprofit agency Bay Area Community Resources Inc. “I can relate.”

He says he is offering students the hope, reassurance, understanding and guidance he wishes he had 16 years ago. He is seeing about nine students weekly, both as walk-ins and by appointment.

He said his message to his teen clients is that “it does get better.”

“You just have to do the work, use the tools,” he said.

Buckner said he is thrilled to be at Tam High, where he often used to escape, headphones on, listening to music and climbing over the hills, when he ditched classes at Redwood to hang out with friends. Returning to his earlier sanctuary is the best kind of deja vu, he said.

“It’s always been my dream to go to Tam,” he said. “Now I’m here as an adult.”

Buckner, who is 6-foot-3 with green eyes, is a part-time professional model and actor who once had a photo shoot as a stand-in for Golden State Warriors point guard Steph Curry. He said he understands now that his mixed-race heritage was what led to him being bullied and alienated throughout his early school career. His father is Black and his mother, Nancy Buckner — a retired nurse who worked at what is now MarinHealth Medical Center — is White.

“It was really difficult for me to find a way to fit in,” he said.

He didn’t feel a sense of belonging with the mostly White students at elementary and middle school in the Reed Union School District, nor did he have an affinity with any of the Black students he met at Redwood, he said.

The middle school gave him an IEP, or individualized education plan, without explanation, he said.

“The teachers at Del Mar tried to hold me back, categorize me,” he said. “I just wasn’t motivated to do the work.”

By the time he got to high school, Buckner said, he “didn’t really want to be in class.”

“I didn’t push myself to do well in school,” he said. “I didn’t have anyone other than my parents to talk to. I ended up getting into fights.”

But a series of education and career mentors managed to lift Buckner up after he was released from Juvenile Hall and sent to an independent study program to catch up on his high school credits.

The first was Lars Christensen, then the principal at Terra Linda High School, who said he saw something in Buckner that was worthy of redemption.

“You could just tell that he had the inner strength,” said Christensen, who retired in 2021 as an assistant superintendent at the Tamalpais Union High School District. “It was easy to recognize. He was very likable.”

Christensen enrolled Buckner at Terra Linda, where he started getting B’s instead of the D’s and F’s he got at Redwood. He didn’t get into a lot of fights like before.

“He fit in well with our school community,” Christensen said. “He was mature beyond his years.”

Buckner said he also found support and friendship from Al Clethen, who was a campus supervisor at Terra Linda. Clethen, now retired and working as a standup comedian in Marin, said the young man “stood out” to him at the time as being “well adjusted.”

The two men have remained in touch over the years.

“He always had his head on straight,” Clethen said. “I’m so proud of him.”

In 2009, about six months before Buckner would graduate from Terra Linda, he had another fortunate intervention. While working at a part-time job at a Safeway store in Mill Valley, he struck up a friendship with a social worker who was helping another student who worked at the store.

Buckner said a light went off in his brain as he spoke to the social worker. He had the strong feeling that this was the work he also wanted to pursue.

“He told me about social work and I was really interested,” he said. “I can’t even remember his name.” After that, he was, for the first time in his life, inspired to apply himself at school, he said.

After graduating from Terra Linda, he studied psychology at College of Marin, earning straight A’s and an associate’s degree. He transferred to Sonoma State University and earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology, also with straight A’s.

Then he earned a master’s degree in social work from California State University, East Bay, in Hayward, again graduating with honors.

“I realized I was actually really good at school,” he said. “And, I was motivating myself to go.”

Studying psychology helped him “rewire his brain” and “get over the identity crisis” he had felt earlier, he said.

“Now I feel really secure in myself, and pride in my biracial identity,” he said.

After graduate school, Buckner was hired on contract with Bay Area Community Resources as a mental health therapist at Richmond High School in the East Bay.  After finding success in that position, he switched to the Marin branch of the nonprofit and applied for the opening at Tam High. He was selected from a field of eight applicants, according to his father.

“I’m so proud of him,” Buckner said of his son’s upward trajectory.

“So many kids are struggling and they think there’s no hope,” he said. “Then you look at Ben’s story, and you look at what’s happened to him. Ben will be able to touch so many kids and instill a means of hope.”