Wythe High reports drop in violence, thanks to partnership

'Violence doesn't have to be the way' Program helps build an atmosphere of success at Wythe

George Wythe High School is not what it once was.

That's a good thing.

The atmosphere of fights and shootings that landed the Richmond school in the news in recent years has been replaced by relative calm. Nearly every non-academic indicator of school failure -- truancy, dropouts, suspensions, physical encounters, thefts on and near campus -- is down this year, according to the school system and city police.

It's still not perfect, but life is better at the school just off Midlothian Turnpike.

"Kids are fundamentally good," said Albert B. Stokes, a police employee who serves as liaison between the department, a violence-prevention program at Wythe and the school system. "We as adults corrupt them. We need to get at the inner core of a child and bring out the goodness."

That's happening this year at Wythe.

"It's about rituals and routines," said Willie J. Bell Jr., who is the fourth principal to oversee this year's senior class. He was hired last summer.

"You have to give kids things they can identify with everyday. We try to provide that structure."

For 150 of the school's toughest, hardest-to-reach students, structure has come in a program called the Violence Free Zone. The national school-based violence-prevention program is a creation of the Washington-based Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, a grass-roots group formed in 1981 that focuses on improving inner cities. Its school programs have been used in Washington, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Dallas and other cities.

It is run here by the Richmond Outreach Center, a sprawling, multicampus religious outreach group that focuses on urban lifestyle issues such as education and housing -- through a partnership that includes the school system and city police, who pushed for the program and whose foundation came up with the funding.

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The ROC, as the group is known in town, sends 10 staff members daily to Wythe. Each youth adviser is responsible for 12 to 20 students, though they work with any student who asks for help.

The requests run from help with homework to more complex mediation programs such as fight prevention and in-home visits to check on students.

"I wish we had something like this when I was in high school," said adviser Kelly Williams, who spent part of her Thursday morning last week working with freshman Daniel Hudson.

"It's a good program," Hudson said. "[She's] helping me talk about my plan for life."

Hudson said his dreams of playing football are giving way to reality of life. He is thinking about pursuing classes in technology.

The give-and-take between Williams and Hudson is exactly how the program should work, said Dawn Barnett, the associate director of the Running Rebels, a community group that provides Violence Free Zone staffing for four Milwaukee high schools.

"It's about forging relationships," she said. The advisers are "like confidants to the students. They develop that trust because they're in the schools, but they're not of the schools.

"It allows them to tap into the buzz. They know what's happening, so they can prevent fights."

Geronimo Aguilar, the ROC's pastor, said the students are "not bad kids, and they need to hear that. But a lot of kids don't grasp that.

"There are a lot of temptations out there. And some of these kids come in with maybe a heart that's hardened a little."

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Site supervisor Sonny Hoge and his staff of advisers have seen the hard hearts, but they also have seen the happy faces. No day is the same, he said, though some are just plain tough. But it's always worth the challenge, he said.

"Some days you take two or three steps forward, but then it's like the next day you take three or four steps back," he said. "We're trying to show them life experiences. They don't have to be of the environment where they live. Violence doesn't have to be the way."

And no matter the environment, excuses aren't going to work with Principal Bell or Pastor G, as Aguilar is known.

"I tell them to concentrate on everybody but really concentrate on the ninth-graders," Aguilar said of the advisers. "It can take four years to build a good relationship. But you just wait. In four years, they're going to graduate more seniors than they have here in a long time."

Bell's not patient enough to wait that long. Like a proud parent, he can quickly reel off a list of awards, scholarships and college destinations for his students.

"The kids here at George Wythe are some good kids," he said. "There are some intelligent kids here, some very, very talented kids."

Getting the 150 students in the Violence Free Zone more in line with the 850 or so other students, though, remains the goal.

"It's a little challenging at times," Bell said. "Kids make some bad decisions, but we're not going to throw them away."

Contact Zachary Reid at (804) 775-8179 or zreid@timesdispatch.com.