Later this month, Cleveland students will set out, on foot or by bus, for their first day of school. Some will take routes they’ve become accustomed to. Others will navigate through unfamiliar neighborhoods to new schools created through district mergers and closures.
In the wake of those changes, parents and community members pushed the district for a plan and resources to make sure that kids get to school safely.
The Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) announced at a meeting on July 27 that it – with help from the city – is making good on a promise to revive the “safe passages” program, which had been dormant due to a lack of funding.
In the past, the program stationed violence interrupters to watch out for kids, and defuse any conflicts, as they waited at the bus stop or walked to school.
This year, CMSD CEO Warren Morgan said, the program will expand and its workers would fan out across the city to “hot spots” identified in district data. A presentation from the meeting noted 16 people would staff the safe passages program. But it’s not clear who will hire the staff or if existing community organizations will manage them, as in the past.
Morgan did shout out the Cleveland Foundation for providing support. A city spokesperson said in an email that the Neighborhood Safety Fund, which Cleveland seeded with pandemic aid money, would fund the work, at least for this school year.
A CMSD spokesperson said district officials were meeting this week with the city and the Cleveland Foundation to hash out more details. The goal, the spokesperson said, is to get people in place by the first day of school, but no agreements have been inked.
Local organizations that previously worked with safe passages told Signal Cleveland they won’t be returning—and some longtime violence interrupters said they worry the reboot could rely too heavily on younger, less experienced workers.
Safe passage fizzled out due to lack of funding
Safe Passage is a national model that’s been successfully used in cities around the country. In Cleveland, different versions of the program have been around for over a decade.
Starting in 2023, CMSD began working with the nonprofit MyCom to expand safe passages. They trained residents and recruited violence interrupters from two local organizations, Cleveland Peacemakers Alliance and Change Seekers, to focus on dismissal and arrival at a handful of district high schools.
That iteration of the program fizzled at the end of the 2024-2025 school year when funding dried up.
Some of the staff for the new program could be drawn from “various organizations,” including recruiting from a recent six-week training designed to teach 18- to 24-year-olds violence interruption skills like deescalation and trauma-informed care, Joseph Postwaite, a spokesperson for the city, wrote to Signal Cleveland in an email.
That program was run by the Institute of Research for Social Justice in Action (IRSJA), a nonprofit that does not appear to have a previous history of working in Cleveland but has done violence prevention work in cities like Birmingham, Newark and Atlantic City. It was funded with a grant from the anti-violence initiative the city is calling Cleveland Thrive.
Another change from previous versions of the program is where safe passage workers will be deployed. In the past, they focused on CMSD high schools, but this year, Morgan said, they will focus on the “hot spots” for safety issues, which could include K-8 as well as high schools.
Seasoned violence interrupters are “a bit older”
Past anti-violence leaders who have worked as violence interrupters or with the safe passage program are wary of the idea that the bulk of the staff could be on the younger side, recruited from the six-week summer program.
In past versions of safe passages, the program relied on violence interrupters who were older than the youth they were working with.
Hank Davis was part of the 2023 expansion of safe passage, as one of the founding members of the Cleveland Peacemakers alliance. He and his wife, Gwen Davis, have been involved with mentoring and violence interruption for nearly 20 years. For the past couple of years, ICONS has provided mentoring and violence interrupters at a number of East Side elementary schools.
ICONS team members who work in CMSD schools are typically in their 30s and 40s.
“The only reason our team knows how to handle it is because our team is a bit older,” Hank Davis said. He also pointed out that knowing how to react in a violent crisis is a skill their team has honed with years of experience.
Gwen Davis said they’re not knocking other models but, in the past, she has seen dangerous situations crop up when younger people try to intervene, by themselves, in conflicts without the maturity and authority that comes with age.
She added that she believes the work ICONS does has been successful in reducing violence and chronic absenteeism because of its long history working in CSMD schools to provide mentoring in addition to safe passage and violence interruption. That means the violence interrupters stationed outside schools by ICONS are known to the students attending the school, and they have a chance to build genuine relationships.
“Our safe passage is our mentoring program,” Hank Davis said. “We don’t just try to ensure the safe passage to and from school. We try to provide life coaching.”
