Not quite two months ago, Denver juvenile probation officer Deborah Garcia-Sandoval introduced herself to the fifth-graders of CMS Community School, a southwest Denver public school most people around here still call Schenck Elementary.
“I am here because our city loves you and cares about you,” she told them. She said she would be teaching them to stay out of gangs, stay safe and make good decisions.
“The idea is to get them to understand if they get involved with gangs and violence, they may never accomplish their goals,” Sandoval tells me.
She’s teaching a long-established, continually evolving program called Gang Resistance Education and Training. It’s demonstrated short-term positive results for its students and a more in-depth longitudinal study concludes next year. It also gives Sandoval the opportunity to say repeatedly and with unflagging enthusiasm: “Hello GREAT students in a GREAT school in a GREAT community.”
Sandoval has been a probation officer for 20 years. Once a week, for six weeks, she spent 45 minutes teaching gang prevention to fifth-graders during school hours.
You might want to read that last sentence again. It contains two revelatory notions.
The first is a probation officer working with kids before they get in trouble. The second is a school giving up precious instructional time to allow that work to happen.
“The idea of a probation officer doing this is unique to Colorado,” says Paul Callanan, probation supervisor with the Denver Juvenile Probation Department. “We’re doing it now because it fits into a bigger, larger picture.”
That would be the Gang Reduction Initiative of Denver, which is being rolled out in southwest and northeast Denver. Four years of groundwork have gone into GRID. The initiative has brought together and begun to coordinate and eliminate redundancies among at least 40 government agencies, faith-based services and nonprofits that might have impact upon youth and gang violence.
No wonder it took four years. You have your silos, your turf battles, your budget cuts. You have your differing philosophies, policies, protocols that say, as probation first did, “that’s not what we do.”
“The last year and a half we’ve just been working one-on-one with agencies,” says Pat Hedrick, head of Denver’s Safe City Office, which is coordinating GRID. “Say, Community Planning. The first reaction might be, ‘We don’t have any impact on gangs.’ Well, yeah, you do. You design parks. You design traffic ways. Do the parks have adequate lighting?”
GRID is not just this one probation officer talking to kids about staying out of gangs. That alone is of limited value. It’s this one probation officer, who will soon be joined by a second probation officer, who will be joined by six outreach workers to identify families where there has been generational gang membership. It is this team working with the youngest siblings of these families to divert them from the path established by their elders.
It’s the emergency room doctors at Denver Health Medical Center who have joined the effort and now call outreach workers every time they treat a young person with gunshot or knife wounds. Those outreach workers meet with friends and family immediately, hoping to talk them out of retaliatory violence. Doctors and mental health workers also have teamed with five schools in southwest and northeast Denver to help students traumatized by violence.
“We’re trying to create a balance between prevention and suppression,” Hedrick says. “We have a very ambitious project here. We’re reminded daily how complex it is, but at the same time, we have to elevate gang violence, youth violence, to a public health issue because that’s what it really is.”
The 75 fifth-graders of CMS Community School celebrated the completion of the GREAT program Monday. Each signed a pledge to avoid gangs and violence, to be GREAT citizens. Officer Sandoval has encouraged as many as she can to join the Boys and Girls Club where she’ll be working with GRID families this summer.
“You made a pledge,” she tells the students, “and I’m going to hold you to it.”
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
