Chicago Public Schools chief Ron Huberman says he thinks he has found the 200 students most likely to end up shot and wants to connect them with full-time mentors and part-time jobs to push back a persistent tide of youth violence in city neighborhoods.
A number-crunching approach to a complex social problem marks one of the first major new programs by Huberman since Mayor Richard Daley appointed his top fix-it man to deal with a school system where shootings outside the classroom remain a vexing problem.
No one knows yet whether the $30 million effort can make a difference in a city that has seen its student death toll become a national embarrassment. But Huberman said he thinks his plan — which also includes more money for training security guards — can change the trajectory of teen violence in city neighborhoods.
“These kids have lots of sticks in their lives, and we want to work on the carrot approach,” Huberman said Thursday during a presentation before the Tribune editorial board. “If we don’t offer enough of a carrot to alter their lifestyle, they won’t bite.”
Last school year, 34 students were killed and another 290 shot on the streets of Chicago, the district said, despite a panoply of programs to decrease the violence. The previous school year, 23 students were killed and 211 shot, according to district totals. None was killed inside the schoolhouse walls, but Huberman said schools must take the lead in addressing the problem.
Huberman’s trademark wonky approach — he freely tosses out statistical terms like “regression analysis” — relies on a thorough examination of key data points in children’s lives: How often are they absent? Are they on track to graduate? And how many violent incidents are on their permanent record?
Huberman’s plan, which includes creating safer environments inside schools and guaranteeing students safe passage to and from school, was met with cautious enthusiasm from researchers, criminologists, public health advocates and students.
Jens Ludwig, a University of Chicago professor who heads the Chicago Crime Lab, applauded the efforts but also cautioned that research on violence prevention efforts is slim and the field riddled with programs that have yet to be measured for effectiveness.
“There is a suggestive glimmer in the research that suggests that getting ‘softer’ might do some good,” said Ludwig, who teaches crime policy courses. “At the same time, we have some data from the ‘get tough’ approach that suggests it is very far from a perfect system and might need to be changed.”
Mark Lipsey, director of the Peabody Center at Vanderbilt University, which does research on youth violence interventions, offered a warning.
“If it fails, it’s most likely to be implementation issues, not the ideas,” he said. “The real issue is if they can pull it off on the ground in any kind of sustainable way.”
The specter of the city’s youngsters getting killed has understandably prompted emotional responses from school and city officials. Former Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan, who is now U.S. education secretary, was known to choke back tears when he spoke about the issue.
But Huberman seems to have taken a more data-driven and less emotion-driven approach to solving the problem.
He spent months poring over reams of numbers from the last five years and found some intriguing patterns: About 80 percent of the shootings involved students at 38 of the district’s 89 high schools. And schools with the lowest number of victims spent more money on social workers, counselors and training for security officers. These schools also were far less likely to call police when students fought or brought drugs and alcohol to campus.
“Some of this surprised us,” he said. “It’s not necessarily what we expected to find.”
Huberman, a former Chicago police officer, found the common traits among high school students who have been shot during the last five years.
These students skipped school about 40 percent of the time, compared with the average student who missed 16 percent of mandatory school days. They also were far more likely to misbehave in school and were nearly five times more likely to be off track to graduate.
From this data, Huberman developed a profile of at-risk students and identified about 1,200 high schoolers who fit the pattern.
Huberman said based on the district analysis, 200 of these teenagers have a greater than 20 percent chance of getting shot. Another 1,000 have a 7.5 percent to 20 percent chance of ending up on the other side of a gun.
This is where Huberman intends to focus his efforts.
“Violence is a big problem, and we had to make the problem smaller so we could tackle it,” he said.
Huberman plans to use a large chunk of the $30 million in federal stimulus money to hire an outside group that will provide intensive mentoring to the most-at-risk students. Huberman declined to name the group Thursday. Through the program, one mentor will be assigned to four students and will act as part role model, part counselor and part truant officer.
The district also will provide part-time school jobs to these students in an effort to keep them off the streets, Huberman said.
The plan also calls for creating safer school environments by training security officers to better deal with disruptive students. Huberman called it creating a “culture of calm.” Schools that had the lowest numbers of victims spent about $500 per student on safety efforts, compared with $328 at schools with the highest numbers.
The district also plans to increase the number of social workers and counselors at the 38 schools, as well as overhaul the expulsion and discipline process. Huberman said model schools tend to expel students less often and instead work with students to get to the root of the disruptive behavior.
The district will also provide safe passage to and from school for students who have to cross gang boundaries to get to school. This would include bus service as well as boosting community and police involvement in those areas.
Selling the new program to students could present a challenge.
Jeffrey Johnson, 16, a junior at Manley High School on the city’s West Side, is skeptical of the approach.
He said he isn’t sure anything can pull a kid back into school if he’s “deep in the streets.”
The prospect of a part-time job, though, could help.
“They’ll come to school every day if they give them money,” Johnson said. “They’ll be like, ‘I got something to go to school for.'”
As for the intensive mentoring, Johnson said he thinks the toughest kids will balk.
“They might think that’s boring,” he said. “If they don’t want to sit up with a teacher, they ain’t going to be trying to sit with a mentor.”
————-
aahmed@tribune.com
sbanchero@tribune.com
