Author: bluecoats1_ycufoo

Covid-19 and Gun Violence

On March 1, 2023

Erie Blue Coats explain Erie youth gun violence and call for action

Erie Times-News Sunday, August 28, 2022, Lisa Thompson Sayers

Members of the Erie Blue Coats, from left to right, Dave Garren, Roscoe Carroll, Daryl Craig and Craig Heidelberg (Aug. 3, 2022, Greg Wohlford/Erie Times-News

Q: Can you set the stage for the escalating violence we have seen?

CRAIG: Before the pandemic, after the Erie high school mergers, the city had been enjoying relative peace. Unified Erie had come in with a strategic three-pronged perspective: enforcement, reentry, and prevention. And we were already having, as Blue Coats, a measure of success at the schools, specifically Vincent and East, where there had been fights every day.

Shortly after the first Unified Erie call-in, we saw shots fired decreasing. We saw shootings decrease. You’d go through the neighborhood, you couldn’t pay one of these kids to say they belong to these little networks. If you approached one of these kids, or law enforcement approached these kids, and said, “You belong to Four Nation or 1800?” They would argue, “No, I don’t.” They were through with that.

COVID-19 and gun violence

CRAIG: Then the pandemic hit and unleashed so many things. Consider the kids who were in middle school when the pandemic hit. They’re 12 years old, 11 years old, and they’re turned out into the streets because a lot of these kids come from unstable, dysfunctional conditions. Now they’re totally immersed in that.

HEIDELBERG: There’s nothing in place. If you have two kids in elementary, one in middle, one in high school, and now they’re all in a house together, that’s a heck of an influence. Say the high schooler is involved in gang activity and then you have a fifth grader who is a sponge and a middle schooler who is a sponge who are in the same household for 24 hours a day. And then there is social media. And what (are the younger ones) doing? Soaking all that up.

CRAIG: You have 10-year-olds hanging on the block with kids much older than them who normally would be in school. They’re witnessing things that they normally might not witness. And so now this kid comes back (to school). He’s 14 or 15. And he’s been in this environment for two or three years, not for six hours a day like he would in school, but for 24 hours a day. .…And they create their own new social groups.

On Seventh and Wallace streets, there was a social network…They called it the “Pooh Block” after DaQuan Crosby, who was shot by his friend in a robbery attempt. Now you have these kids “claiming” this territory, and they didn’t even know DaQuan…And that’s their structure. You have 11-year-olds and 10-year-olds trying to emulate these things.

Then something else happened. There was an influx of money into the community. And believe it or not, these kids found a way to access that money because they are some of the most intelligent beings on the planet. People are selling dope. Everybody’s immersed into this culture. And with the social media thing, taking shots at each other, there’s so many dynamics involved. You have girls who are inciting situations between boys.

But when they come back to school, we didn’t assess who came back — meaning these aren’t the same kids who left. We had two years’ worth of freshmen come into the schools at one time.

Some of these kids went through pure hell. Some of them lost family members to COVID-19. Some of them experienced COVID themselves. Most of them experienced no structure. Because a lot of people that we know had to work through the pandemic like us. Most of us didn’t get unemployment. We worked around the clock… And so those parents who worked, their kids are home alone now. And guess who’s coming by? The kids who don’t have any structure at all.

…These children don’t have bridles when it comes to those impulses, so they’re going to seek out each other and then it gets competitive and next thing you know, our violence rises back. Nobody’s doing the call-ins during a pandemic… And you have this fight and that fight, and once shots are fired, it’s on. It takes so much to heal. And then in a lot of cases, you have kids involved who don’t want to be involved, but they don’t know how to stop either.

…That is one of the biggest and fastest growing dynamics in that whole equation. You have so-called good kids who are carrying guns. Not because they want to be gangsters. Not because they want to be killers, but because if you don’t have one, you are a victim. You have kids who are just trying to level the playing field. How many times I’ve been to court with somebody who had never been arrested…but then you see these little groups get formed out of necessity.

…Look at this weekend (where hundreds of shots were fired in three locations), probably one of the worst we’ve had in the city of Erie. There were so many bullets in the atmosphere…We know a lot of people had guns and so now what happens? Whoever the intended target was has to return fire eventually. And every time these scenarios play out, everybody in the vicinity is in danger. These bullets go through walls and they travel great distances and people unknowingly are exposed.

Watch Video Interview and Read More here: Blue Coats: No one is exempt when it comes to Erie’s youth gun violence; by Lisa Thompson Sayers

Information from: Erie Times-News, https://www.goerie.com

Celebrating Black History Month

By bluecoats1_ycufoo

On February 28, 2023

In Events

Erie’s Public Schools webpage praises Daryl Craig for his celebration of black history and dedication to making a difference.

Daryl Craig

Daryl Craig, or “Brother D” as he is known to all he helps, is the leader of the Blue Coats, a group of volunteer peacekeepers who have been working since 2004 to defuse violence and promote safety among students and in the neighborhoods surrounding our schools. The men and women in now-familiar blue vests have become trusted friends and mentors, touchstones for the students as they arrive and depart school each day.

In a 2015 interview, Craig remembered how a woman who took care of him as a teenager told him that the whole world was responsible for children.

“I believe that,” Craig said. “We either pick them up or let them down. Either way, we are responsible. They operate in a world we create. The mission of the Blue Coats is to create heaven wherever we go – to create a positive world for the children. You do that by telling them how great they are and how great they can become.”

Blue Coats act as Peacekeepers in Erie Schools

By bluecoats1_ycufoo

On March 21, 2014

In Events

The Washington Times Wednesday, May 21st 2014

By LISA THOMPSON

ERIE, Pa. (AP) – Rain pelted the ice and slush piled outside Wayne School. Divone Jones, 20, stood smiling in his bright blue vest and dripping stocking cap, undeterred. He greeted the throngs of students who streamed out of the building at the end of the school day.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

Some stopped to talk, despite the weather. One girl let him know she got in some trouble for a fight.

“Now why did you do that?” he asked. Jones is one of the youngest members of Erie’s Blue Coats, peacekeepers who are most visible when they stand sentry in Erie’s schoolyards. He works for the Blue Coats because of what they did for him. If not for the Blue Coats, Jones said, he would be on the streets.

“I was fighting. I was getting into trouble,” Jones, a Strong Vincent High School graduate, said. “I would not listen.”

The Blue Coats working at his school – Daryl “Brother D” Craig, Andre Horton and Curtis Jones – changed him.

“They were good to me. They helped me get through,” he said. “They always told me, ‘You have a good heart. You have a good soul.’”

Now Jones does the same for others, even when he is not on duty.

The Blue Coats grew out of an anti-violence initiative launched a decade ago by Craig, a former Buffalo gang member, and Erie County Councilman Horton, with the support and spiritual guidance of the late Pastor Robert L. Gaines Jr. of Abundant Life Ministries on Parade Street.

The group started with a handful of volunteers in blue coats keeping the peace in Erie schoolyards amid the emergence of youth violence six years ago. It is now poised, with the help of a $300,000 Erie Community Foundation grant, to become a key fixture in community efforts to shepherd Erie children who face sometimes lethal obstacles – poverty and violence – through the most elemental of childhood experiences: school.

A woman who took Craig in and off the streets when he was a homeless teen told him the whole world was responsible for children.

“I believe that,” Craig, 58, said. “We either pick them up or let them down. Either way, we are responsible. They operate in a world we create.

“The mission of the Blue Coats is to create heaven wherever we go – to create a positive world for the children. You do that by telling them how great they are and how great they can become.”

The three-year funding package was awarded by the Erie Community Foundation in October based on a grant application submitted by the Partnership for Erie’s Public Schools on behalf of the Erie School District.

The application frankly framed the challenge: The district must educate its children and has resources to do so, the application stated. But it must also acknowledge another truth – that 85 percent of its 12,000 students are economically disadvantaged. The district has a duty, it said, not only to educate but to “mitigate the extreme socio-economic conditions that stem from the poverty in which many of them live.”

“We must be honest about the level of instability in the lives of our students and understand that poverty has a significant impact on their ability to learn and thrive,” the application stated.

The application said racial and cultural differences create barriers between district staff and the children and their families that can prevent students from fully accessing the community resources they need to succeed.

The Blue Coats, men and women with deep ties to the neighborhoods and families from which the children come, have helped the district bridge that barrier, it said.

“The district is committed to providing safe and supportive schools where students can succeed and thrive, but we also recognize that the ‘walls’ of our schools are permeable,” Erie School District spokesman Matthew Cummings said. “Our students and staff are impacted significantly by the poverty, crime, violence, social disorganization and other issues that exist in many of the neighborhoods we serve.”

“The Blue Coats help our staff understand what students and families are dealing with at home or in their neighborhoods, how to communicate more effectively with families and how to better challenge and motivate students.”

The district credits the Blue Coats’ presence with a sharp decline in violence in and around the schools.

“The Blue Coats have helped to increase school safety at the nine buildings by reducing behavior infractions and incidents,” Cummings said. In the past three years, violent incidents dropped by 57.9 percent at East High School, Cummings said.

“At Strong Vincent, the decrease is 65.9 percent over that same time period,” he said.

Jhani Curlett, a 10-year-old fourth-grader at Wayne who stopped to talk with Divone Jones on a recent day, has heard their message loud and clear.

The Blue Coats’ lesson? “We don’t have the right to put our hands on each other,” she said.

In the first phase of the grant funding, which is now underway, Blue Coat coverage will be expanded at nine district buildings: Wayne, Pfeiffer-Burleigh School, Emerson-Gridley Elementary School, McKinley Elementary School, Woodrow Wilson Middle School, Roosevelt Middle School, East, Strong Vincent High School, and Central Career and Technical High School.

Blue Coats, who receive a stipend based on the hours they work, will undergo training and be stationed at the schools at all key points in the academic day and at after-school activities to help squelch conflicts and promote safety.

The second funding phase aims to equip the Blue Coats and their sponsor organization, Creative Community Connectors Inc., a 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt organization, with the training, technology and data needed to become self-sustaining.

In phase three, the Blue Coats will be used as part of an intervention program aimed at sixth-graders who are at high risk of dropping out. The goal is to raise Pennsylvania System of School Assessment test scores and graduation rates for sixth-graders at Woodrow Wilson, Pfeiffer-Burleigh and Wayne schools.

Blue Coats will meet one-on-one with students and families to help them connect with resources that could improve their chances at success, according to the grant application.

The work supported by the grant is just one piece of the overall work done by the Blue Coats, which are organized and managed by Creative Community Connectors, a nonprofit organization directed by Craig and Horton. The group, formerly housed at the Parade Street Community Center, is looking for a new centrally located office and for opportunities to act beyond the schoolyard, such as at local YMCAs. It is working with UPMC Hamot to bring to Erie a program that educates young people about the impact of violence. It is also viewed as a key element of Unified Erie, an anti-crime initiative that has been working for three years to coordinate activities among law enforcement and social-service agencies.

Erie County District Attorney Jack Daneri, a Unified Erie leader, said the Blue Coats have reduced violence by mentoring students and resolving conflicts before they erupt.

“They know who these kids are,” he said.

“The Blue Coats have become much more than a community-based violence prevention initiative. These men and women have become integral parts of our schools’ support system for students and families,” Cummings said.

“The relationships are just growing,” Craig said. “It is a very exciting time. There is a lot of potential in Erie. The community has all the elements to be a model for other communities. Right now, I have a lot of hope.”

Read More at: The Washing Times, Blue Coats as Peacekeepers