After-school murders of Chicago teens rev up the call against gun violence

Last year, there were at least 136 incidents involving gunfire on school grounds across the country, leaving 41 people dead and 93 others wounded, according to Everytown for Gun Safety.

This year, there have already been five such incidents, resulting in three fatalities and seven people injured.

There’s an abundance of studies and statistics on school shootings. But there is very little research or data available on children killed en route to classes or as they are making their way home after the final bell rings, as happened to four Chicago teens in the past two weeks.

On Thursday, a vigil was held in Edgewater on the North Side for 16-year-old Daveon Gibson and two other teens who were shot Wednesday by a gunman after an apparent “dispute” inside Senn High School, a police report said. Gibson was killed; the two other teens were wounded.

On Jan. 26, Robert Boston, 16, and 17-year-old Monterio Williams were gunned down outside Innovations High School, their charter school in the Loop.

On Jan. 22, a “disturbance” inside the school preceded 18-year-old Maurice Clay’s murder outside Chicago International Charter Schools’ Loomis-Longwood campus. Police had been called to the South Side school and apparently gained “control of the situation” and escorted the teen outside. It didn’t matter. Minutes later, bullets were sprayed from a black car, striking both Clay and his older brother, who held his younger sibling in his arms until he took his last breath.

No one has been arrested in any of the murders. And Chicago is left searching for ways to keep teens safe.

Having uniformed police officers stationed inside schools is no guarantee of student safety, of course, especially once students are outside schools. Mayor Brandon Johnson supports ending the Chicago Board of Education’s $10.3 million contract with the Chicago Police Department. But if it gives school staff and parents a greater sense of safety, it should remain up to local school councils, at high schools that still have officers, to decide whether or not to keep them.

Another idea worth careful consideration was floated last week by Arne Duncan, a former CEO of Chicago Public Schools and U.S. Secretary of Education. Duncan has proposed bringing violence prevention workers from the community into the schools.

Some anti-violence prevention programs have proven to be highly effective, and if “beefs” between young people, like the ones allegedly tied to the murders of Clay and Gibson, can be properly de-escalated by someone who has been there, it might be worth it.

The problem is this: Most of the “life coaches” Duncan spoke of have criminal backgrounds, and state law bars people convicted of certain crimes, including drug dealing, from working in schools, as WBEZ’s Sarah Karp reported.

Having ex-offenders in schools isn’t likely to sit well with many parents, and their concerns are legitimate. All it would take is one small incident or miscommunication, and the experiment might blow up.

But high-risk students could benefit from such a resource. If they are unwilling to find help outside school, perhaps they’d be more willing to listen to someone at school, a space where they are five days a week.

“The kids that need the most help are being denied the people who could be the most helpful. So the best resource for them, they are locked away from,” said Duncan, the managing partner of Chicago CRED, an organization that works toward reducing gun violence.

Elected leaders, with the help of violence reduction experts and activists, should at least look into whether it is worth amending the law, with some strict exceptions that would perhaps allow those with less serious criminal records to work with young people at schools, solely for violence intervention work.

Safeguards, such as the presence of a school official at any sort of violence prevention sessions and a ban on interactions with students outside the school without faculty present, would likely have to be in place.

But if lives can be saved and more children will be spared the trauma of losing a classmate, it doesn’t hurt to explore the possibility of allowing students who need help to safely engage with those who, despite their criminal record, know better than most what young people are experiencing in their communities.

Given the prevalence of guns, neither children nor adults are guaranteed safety anywhere in America. No one has found the magic bullet to stop the bullets, especially when there are too many right-wing lawmakers unwilling to enact common-sense gun legislation.

But innovative solutions to stop the bloodshed have to be part of the solution.

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