Baltimore teacher: Gun violence scars generations of kids

Seven years ago, a student lingered in my classroom after school. Seventeen and already shouldering an adult’s burdens — buying food for younger siblings, paying the electric bill — he’d made a choice he regretted. A crew of hustlers near his block had talked him into working as a lookout. They were neighborhood guys, and he was cool with them. He could’ve declined.

So I said the obvious thing: “You won’t be able to help anyone if you’re locked up or worse.”

“I’m good,” he responded.

Beside him, a girl quietly annotating a passage of text, chimed in like a grim oracle: “In Baltimore, you’re never good.”

The girl’s admonition — especially as it applies to teens living in Baltimore’s Black Butterfly — felt true then, and it feels true still.

In the last decade Baltimore has recorded over 3,000 murders and many more nonfatal shootings. Already this year, at least 23 teenagers under 17 have been shot in Baltimore, and five have died.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call community violence a critical public health problem. Researcher Thomas Abt says it “literally traps poor kids in poverty” because it impacts their ability to learn. But you don’t need to read the latest research to see that gun violence in Baltimore can create an undertow of grief and trauma among teens.

In kids, it comes out variously as fear, vigilance, anxiety, sadness, neediness, forgetfulness, withdrawal, inertia, survivor’s guilt and sometimes fatalism. Sink deep enough into some of these emotions, and school can become an afterthought.

One student, Ray, started off the school year strong. In class he was productive and engaged. He asked questions and answered them — sometimes sharing valuable insights about texts we read. Then in December something changed. His focus grew shaky, and his attendance suffered.

When the unit assessment asked students to write about a contemporary issue that needs a solution, Ray chose to write about gun violence. And that’s when I understood where Ray’s apathy was coming from.

A close friend had been killed. They’d been classmates at their previous school, and they’d grown so tight, Ray thought of her as his sister. “We looked out for each other,” he wrote. “She made sure I was in school every day, and I did the same for her. She always kept it a hundred with me. She didn’t sugarcoat anything, and she didn’t judge me. Just having that connection calmed me down.

“I always relive it, questioning myself: if I’d been there could I have helped? I still talk to her and apologize for what happened. I promised her I would get my diploma, and I will.”

In a separate conversation with me, Ray explained Baltimore’s gun violence like this: “There is so much retaliation. No one wants to let anything go. That’s why it never stops. Then people get hurt who had nothing to do with it. Catching the bus, going to the store, you gotta always worry about getting killed. There’s so much to survive. Baltimore is a place you gotta survive.”

Ray wasn’t alone in choosing this topic to write about. Sincere, whose father was murdered in 2017, described the trauma that follows gun violence. “I lost a lot of men out my life, and it makes me feel like nothing will ever be right,” she wrote in her essay.

Another student had lost a sibling, still another an uncle who was like a father.

These are hard stories to hear, told by students who live with grief, loss and the specter of more violence.

Still, in June these students will graduate, and you can’t help but admire their perseverance. They’ve overcome a lot to reach this milestone.

During the 24 years I’ve been teaching in Baltimore, the same brutal pressures and perils have been grinding away at kids, unabated, year after year, one decade into the next. Teens in Baltimore can be amazingly resilient. But kids shouldn’t have to fight this hard to scratch out a hopeful future.

Good programs exist, including City Schools’ focus on “student wholeness,”

New Visions Youth Services, Healing City Baltimore, Fight Blight Bmore, ROCA, Safe Streets, focused deterrence and others.

But these are not enough. They are a patchwork of half measures.

If we’re going to stem the violence and treat the trauma of those exposed to it, we need more. More outreach, mentoring, coaching, counseling, interventions, wrap around services, community reinvestment, violence interrupters.

It’s long past time policymakers expand programs that will provide all kids in Baltimore with a legit shot at living stable, productive lives.

Adam Schwartz’s debut collection of stories, “The Rest of the World,” won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House 2020 prize for fiction. For 24 years, he has taught high school in Baltimore (adamschwartzwriter.org).