Featured Safety & Security Staff Member
Employee of the Month
The Employee of the Month Committee is honoring: Safety and Security’s, Mrs. Bridgette Humphrey-Morris, Incident Analyst. For the month of April. Congratulations Bridgette!
The CMSD Gang Unit
Jackie Bivins, Teresa Keating, Mitchell Stewart, Frank Hewitt and Dan Marzan
The problem:
Small and large communities across our country have found that efforts to merely suppress gang activity or “arrest their way out of the problem” are unsuccessful. In fact, many in the law enforcement community now recognize that they alone cannot solve the problem. Gang problems must be approached with a focus mix of services to students that can help promote their transition from adolescence to productive members of society. In the Cleveland Metropolitan School District we have developed a strategy called the Humanware/Hardware approach to assist our students to succeed. At CMSD you can see how important it is for our gang unit members to become far more than crime suppressors and actually cross boundaries - not just doing suppression activity anymore, but actually helping out with the intervention by the early identification of at risk students and directing them to appropriate programming and most importantly in the prevention areas before students do get into trouble to make sure that our students have an opportunity to reach premier.
Although there is no universal definition of a youth gang, the term is typically used to refer to a neighborhood or street-based group of individuals under the age of 22 who are engaged in or at risk of committing serious or violent gang crimes.
The CMSD gang unit lives this mission everyday and has deployed a number of successful intervention initiatives including the gang mediation program, in school safety presentations, intelligence gathering and partnering with STANCE, MY Com and the City of Cleveland Department of Community Relations to address the needs of our students. The gang unit stresses the importance of direct daily involvement to reduce the number of serious incidents to ensure safe teaching and learning environments for our students and staff.
The CMSD gang unit can often be found in the middle of the incident diffusing the situation or providing support to a member of our school community. The response below is just one such incident.
Ms. Shaleem (parent) called to say THANK YOU! She had a problem at Mary B. Martin and Mr. Stewart assisted her with her problem. She wanted to let his "boss" know what a wonderful person he is. She said that he took the time to listen and he cared. She stated that she was at East High a few years back and Stewart was an officer there and he was good then and he's the best now. She was really happy and wanted everyone know.”
Congratulations team on a job well done!