The Chicago Public School District has a problem. Last year, 258 students were shot on their way to or going from school. Of those shootings, 32 were fatal. That’s why the district has launched what national experts consider to be the most intensive safety intervention ever tried in big city schools.
After studying profiles of the last 500 student shooting victims the schools have identified the 250 students most at risk of being shot and assigned each of them an advocate who is available to them for caretaking and support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Whether it’s something as simple as homework help or a ride home from school or something as difficult as finding homeless students a safe place to stay or as heartbreaking as sitting with students in the hospital after they’ve been shot, these brave men and women are trying to provide the high risk children of Chicago with the kind of support they just can’t find at home.
“I don’t know of anything like this either in scope or scale or intensity,” Michael Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a research and advocacy group in Washington told the New York Times. “It is strikingly well-planned at the strategic level, backed with really unique data and followed all the way down to the kid level with 24/7 coverage. I don’t know anything in the country quite like it, that has the promise that this initiative does.”
The kids involved are also given jobs. This project, like another successful Chicago program – the charter school Urban Prep – acknowledges that fact that these troubled children are often without the kind of meaningful adult relationships, and the structure and expectations those relationships provide. By providing kids with an adult to trust, and expectations to live up to, they can help them build a future.
So far, although three students with advocates where shot this year, there were no deaths, and attendance is up and suspensions and misconduct among students with advocates is down. While the results are far from perfect, officials are so encouraged by the results that they recently announced that the program would be expanded next year to include 1,500 students.
