High school students give their takes on roots of neighborhood violence
May 16—The first answer Saturday to the question of what youth are seeing and experiencing when it comes to gun violence came heartbreakingly fast.
"Friends dying," Isaiah Roy-Burt, 14, said.
The Bowsher High School student spoke up in a break-out discussion with about a dozen youth and young adults during a town hall event for Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz's Initiative to Reduce Gun Violence at Woodward High School. The community discussion was the second of three such events aimed at gathering public input for a city-led effort to combat the ongoing surge in gun violence.
JoJuan Armour, commissioner of the initiative, told the audience of about 75 that there will never be a one-size-fits-all solution. While there are sure to be many common threads, what one neighborhood needs is going to differ from another area of the city. The point of the town halls is to hear directly from the people what problems they see and where they think resources should be invested to address them.
"These town halls are not just for conversation," Mr. Armour said. "It's not just to appease the people. They are to identify tangible solutions to create action items."
The initiative is targeting three neighborhoods selected based on crime data: the Junction neighborhood in central Toledo, the Lagrange corridor in North Toledo, and the Garfield-Starr area in East Toledo.
Mr. Armour showed citywide figures that shootings more than doubled in 2020 over 2019. Toledo had a record 61 homicides last year, and the city is so far on track to surpass that mark in 2021 with 20 homicides already tallied.
And as town hall speakers arrived at the high school for the event, they noted receiving a news alert for a shooting in the 1200 block of Collingwood Boulevard in which a man was shot in the leg.
Ayden Balister, 12, pointed out in the breakout discussion that part of the problem from his view is a lack of coping and conflict-resolution skills as well as a lack of good family role models.
"A lot of kids like to pick up what their parents do," he said. "And if their parents are, like, doing drugs, alcohol, then the kids could pick up that. And then they could also get, like, anger issues and stuff like that, and that could also affect the amount of killings."
Numerous participants in the group said youth need more accessible opportunities for positive activities outside the home, including employment and safe places to socialize. And while it's important to talk about issues, there's another side of the equation that's frequently left out.
"It's not just talking to your kids," 19-year-old Shuaib Baksh said. "We're in an age where it's about time we start listening and understanding. Once you give them that, you can go through it with them. They'll feel a sense of responsibility, that you're in a position with them instead of just coaching them to go through it."
Dawn Thomas, a prevention systems manager for the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, outlined the general process the city is using for the initiative, called a strategic prevention framework. The city is working on the first step — assessment — and will work to build capacity by mobilizing the community before planning, implementing, and continuously evaluating the initiative.
"The one thing I know is we cannot do this, any of this, without you," she told event attendees. "The [strategic prevention framework] requires community."
The third and final town hall event is slated for Saturday at Waite High School, 301 Morrison Drive.
First Published May 15, 2021, 7:22pm
