TOLEDO, Ohio — Toledo is looking into new ways of fighting teen violence. The city received more than a million dollars from the state through its Save Our Communities program to use inside local schools.
Waite, Woodward and Scott high schools, along with the Maritime Academy of Toledo, will soon get a city violence interrupter to help reach kids this coming school year.
It comes as seven of Toledo's 12 homicide victims this year are under the age of 18. City of Toledo leaders say that fixing the problem starts inside the classroom.
"We have a lot of teenagers unfortunately involved in these shootings, and we have to figure out how to get to these kids, and one way is to expand our Save Our Communities team into the schools," Toledo's Safety Director Brian Byrd said.
Byrd said decades of discrimination and neighborhood disinvestment have reshaped the relationship between Toledo's youth and violence.
"If you overlay things like redlining maps with where these shootings are occurring, you will see a direct correlation," Byrd said.
But some of the very people who have struggled on the streets have now become violence interrupters, mediating problems and helping people find peaceful solutions. Byrd said some of their biggest successes have been in Toledo's classrooms.
"We have gotten letters from the schools stating how important their presence has been just visiting," Byrd said. "So by extending this program full time into the schools for an academic year, it increases that presence in the schools and that impact on the kids."
Byrd said providing the kids with someone that has faced the same challenges as them - things like gang pressure, drugs and neighborhood issues - but chose to overcome them, will give the kids a role model to look up to and reflect on when they make their own choices.
The Maritime Academy of Toledo's superintendent, Aaron Lush, said that with students from all parts of town, fighting has become common over petty rivalries.
But already after one visit, the interrupters have made a connection with all of the students.
"They take to them (the violence interrupters) so much because they look similar, act similar, those types of things. That's why the program is so beneficial," Lush said. "The long-term effects are giving these teenagers the ability to look up to people, learn, build relationships and have a longer, more happy life."
The program's seven-figure price tag is only for this upcoming school year, but Byrd said the city intends to continue this program every year.