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Appendix D (Chief Kevin Bethel’s Testimony) ...................................... 1
Cure Violence, on the other hand, attempts to address violence before it happens by deploying people with past involvement in violence as credible messengers in a norm-changing campaign. The premise is that violence is “transmitted” from one individual to another through violent acts. The goal is to identify conflicts in the community and deescalate before anyone picks up a gun. Similarly, these “violence interrupters” arrive at crime scenes after shootings to attempt to prevent any retaliatory behavior by gathering information that might not be available to police.
The Editorial Board. “The forgotten public health program that cut homicides by 30% in Philadelphia.” The Philadelphia Inquirer. September 1, 2019. Accessed on January 12, 2021. https://fusion.inquirer.com/opinion/editorials/philadelphia-gun-violence-homicide-cure-violence-ceasefire-20190901.html.
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The Cure Violence model takes a proactive approach, using mental health professionals and trained violence interventionists, not police officers, to help those who would otherwise handle conflict violently. The program helps them learn to better resolve conflicts and cope with trauma to prevent further violence. Currently, the Community Crisis Intervention Program uses similar methods to prevent gun violence in Philadelphia.
Gun violence, and the trauma that stems from it, is not isolated to specific neighborhoods or schools, but rather trauma spreads across all areas of the City like “an infectious disease.”6 Evidence, from our own city, shows gun violence drops when children are provided tools to resolve conflict and manage trauma. All children, then, need to learn these skills.
All children must have access to resources and programs implemented by professionals. The District presented information about their approach to trauma-informed care (slide below). Led by experienced professionals, SDP has started implementing “Healing Together,” a collaboration developed in partnership with teachers, counselors, principals, and local and national experts to offer mental health resources and social emotional learning to students and staff.
All Philadelphia students will benefit from social emotional learning and trauma-informed care.
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While the District clearly understands the importance of trauma-informed care and social-emotional learning, all schools are not receiving the same level of resources. SDP teachers are asking for more from the District, and the evidence supports them.
Students at every level of school should receive conflict resolution education, and they should receive so in the form of a robust program developed in collaboration with the educators charged with implementing it. Further, it will be important that a conflict resolution program has the proper training and resources necessary for an effective implementation. This program must be accompanied by extra resources for educators and students.
Jerry Jordan: Written Testimony p. 1.
SDP has been working to implement an effective base level of social emotional, wellness, and trauma-informed support programming for all students, but conflict resolution is not currently included in that curriculum. The District considers conflict resolution a more intensive service that is provided only to schools or communities most in need.
Metrics can be used to allocate more resources to address these issues, but they should not be used to determine if resources are allocated at all.
Councilwoman Gilmore Richardson: My Question is centering around how do we use those new models and all of the work that you all are implementing. You talked about the social-emotional learning, the harm and healing mediation, and all of those other models. How do we put them all together, which you have done obviously that we’ve seen in this presentation, and ensure that we make that available to every student from grade K through 12 so that all of our young people are receiving some type of conflict resolution training throughout their entire academic career? How do we do that? Because you talked about some of the programs were just expanded from ten schools to now 104 schools, but how do we ensure that every student in the District has an opportunity, no matter what grade they’re in, to have conflict resolution training?
Dr. Gray: Yes. That’s a great question, and it has sort of two levels of answers. The first level is that for some of these services that I’ve described, we are currently providing them to all students. The social-emotional learning initiative, the community meeting, the integration of social-emotional learning in academics, that is a District-wide initiative. So all students now have an opportunity for daily community meeting in their schedule, and we’re hearing really great results and a lot of enthusiasm from schools and students and teachers about how that is going. So that is a District-wide initiative for all students.
Some of our more intensive services, we determine where those go based on data. So we identified the schools where the greatest need are and we concentrate the services there. We do this all in alignment with the school’s comprehensive planning process that they do in coordination with the state. So we understand, for example, we have preparation time to sit with the schools, members of my team, members of other teams in the District, and to help schools make really thoughtful, data-driven decisions about what kind of interventions, training, and supports they need.
Dr. Abigail Gray: Transcript pgs. 151-153.
SDP officials see value in conflict resolution, but not currently as a preventive, district-wide initiative to develop students’ social and leadership skills.
Councilwoman Gilmore Richardson: …I think really what I’m trying to get to is how we implement citywide conflict resolution training for our young people. Do you know how much you all spend on just conflict resolution programming and its availability to our young people now and is it a funding issue or what would prevent us or preclude us from implementing a citywide conflict resolution model for all of our student?
Dr. Gray: I think the biggest barrier that – well, there are a couple of barriers. One is more that we have tremendous diversity within our District, as you know. We have many different contexts. We have many different populations that are school served. We have many different school sizes. And so part of what we offer now is a flexibility for schools to choose approaches and models that make sense for them. So having that sort of diversity of options I believe is extremely important. I think trying to shoehorn kind of a one-size-fits-all approach into all schools would lead to a lot of inconsistent implementation.
Dr. Abigail Gray: Transcript pgs. 153-154.
It is important that SDP is using evidence to target the most at-risk students for more resources and working with school staff to create programs that will work for their students, but by providing a base level of conflict resolution training to all students, the District would be taking a prevention measure as opposed to crisis response.
SDP has already started using evidence-based models to develop these programs, but there is more work to be done. The District must use a public health model. This would mean operating from a baseline understanding that all of its students deserve support from mental health professionals who can teach them how to non-violently manage conflict, and that by implementing that program, they will be investing in the overall safety of Philadelphia’s communities.
