A new outreach program aimed at preventing violence is rolling out in some Rochester city schools this year.
The city of Rochester’s violence prevention program Pathways to Peace is expanding services to up to 135 high school and middle school students.
Mayor Malik Evans announced the new initiative on Tuesday, calling it a proactive way to improve school safety and students’ learning outcomes.
“One kid in the classroom can wreak havoc on the entire classroom for the rest of the students,” Evans said, adding that reaching one child “can make a huge, huge difference.”
Nine schools will be assigned one Pathways to Peace outreach worker each, who then will pair up with as many as 15 students the district identifies as high risk.
The outreach model involves mentoring students, monitoring their attendance, making house calls, and connecting with parents and school staff.
The nine Pathways to Peace school-based team members also will hold workshops to build students’ conflict resolution skills and leadership development.
“Traditionally in the past, Pathways to Peace has been more of a reactive sort of approach with our students in our community,” said Zequa Tookes, director of the city’s violence prevention office and manager of Pathways to Peace. “But this year, we will be moving to a caseload (model).”
The program is aimed at preventative measures that address underlying causes of disruptive and violent behavior, as well as chronic absenteeism. But it also seeks to respond to years of youth-involved crime, from car theft to gun violence.
“A lot of what we're seeing in our neighborhood are students that are crying out for help,” Tookes said. “We recognize that a lot of our students are experiencing trauma, and they're displaying that. They're displaying that by joining gangs, by doing certain activities that we that we hear and we read about. What we want to do is support those students.”
Evans said there wasn’t one case alone that lead to shaping this new approach to violence prevention, but a trend of criminal activity perpetuated by the same offenders over and over again.
"I'm thinking of one in particular that I won't say because he's a minor,” Evans said. “I saw this kid's name from when I first became mayor. I looked and I said, ‘What could we have done to intervene in this kid's life before he decided to make a bad decision that now he's going to spend the rest of his life in jail for, probably, or a large portion of his life incarcerated for?
“So the proactive approach is absolutely critical here,” the mayor said.
In July, the Rochester Board of Education narrowly approved a $700,000 contract with the city for the Pathways to Peace program “to provide the service and support of a school-based Pathways to Peace team to respond to emergency situations and assist in preventing and mitigating the risk of violence at various schools ... with the goal to strengthen and reinforce ongoing initiatives to lower student suspensions and improve attendance.”
