Youth summits held at local schools to discuss problems, provide solutions

SHARON McINTOSH, far right, with students from Woodland Hills High School.

by Rob Taylor Jr., Courier Staff Writer

High schoolers all across the area are headed back to school soon—for Penn Hills students, it’s Aug. 26. For Pittsburgh Public Schools students, it’s Aug. 26 for freshmen and seniors, Aug. 27 for sophomores and juniors. And for Woodland Hills students, your first day is Aug. 22.

Also headed back to school is Sharon McIntosh, youth summit coordinator for the Greater Pittsburgh Coalition Against Violence. She’s at high schools all across the county—Penn Hills, Woodland Hills, Sto-Rox, Central Catholic, U-Prep, among them—spreading the following message to the students: “Know that you are valuable, know that you have a special purpose in this life that will change this world for the better. It’s inside of you.”

Most Black youth in the Pittsburgh area know another Black youth who has died or was wounded via gun violence.

Already in 2019, at least six African Americans aged 18 and under have been shot and killed in this area, including the first homicide of 2019, when 16-year-old Jonathan Freeman was killed in Homewood on Jan. 10.

18-year-old Morgan Dunston was a week away from graduating from McKeesport High School when she was shot and killed in the South Side Flats in the early morning hours of May 24.

Two people were killed after a shooting occurred during a party at an Airbnb rental property in the Hill District, June 12. The victims were 20-year-old Tyrese Smith, and 17-year-old Alexus N. Chester, a Pittsburgh Public Schools student who was celebrating her 17th birthday.

While gun violence affects people and ethnicities of all ages, Black teens in Pittsburgh are more impacted by gun violence than other races. It’s in their neighborhoods, their schools. It may, at times, seem all-encompassing.

Oftentimes, those responsible for teenage-involved shootings are young people themselves. In the non-fatal shooting incident on the Fourth of July in Downtown Pittsburgh, 18-year-old Camerin Caldwell was arrested by police as the prime suspect in shooting a 16-year-old and 18-year-old in Katz Plaza, Downtown.

Last summer, a 17-year-old teenage lifeguard was shot at a Clairton swimming pool. A 15-year-old suspect was arrested.

McIntosh and her team spend the school year at local high schools, speaking to students, listening to their concerns and frustrations, and providing positive solutions and advice. McIntosh, a former principal in the Duquesne City School District and former acting assistant principal at Pittsburgh Weil, told the Courier she understands why many Black youth have various feelings of anger, frustration, and how that could lead to violence.

SHARON McINTOSH is the youth summit coordinator for the Greater Pittsburgh Coalition Against Violence. (Photo by Courier photographer Gail Manker)

“Basically, they feel disenfranchised, they feel a sense of hopelessness,” McIntosh said during an exclusive interview, July 17. “It basically comes down to economics, because what they see on television that makes a person seem important is big cars, money, and all of those things, and so their aspiration is to achieve that rather than to know their own self-worth.”

McIntosh added: “So when you feel that the only way you’re going to be important is if you can flash money and have all the girls and the big cars, then that’s what you aspire to, but you aspire to it in a way that’s incorrect, with the selling of drugs, with the robbing of one another in the streets. What we’re trying to teach our young people is that they are valuable—in what has been given to them by God, to do in this world things that will help change the world.”

McIntosh, in her role as GPCAV youth summit coordinator, approaches administrators in various high schools and asks them to create a youth team that’s representative of the school, “and that can be the spokesperson for those young people,” she said. The youth groups, which number anywhere from 10 to 20 individuals, then meet with McIntosh and discuss the pressing topics youth want to discuss—teen dating, gang-related violence, domestic violence, peer pressure, family problems, etc.

Then, dozens more students join the group at a later date at what’s billed as a “Youth Summit” at the school, where those issues are discussed to a larger student audience.

In the past few years, the youth summits have been well-received at Woodland Hills High School, Sto-Rox Junior Senior High School, Perry Traditional Academy, and U-Prep (Pittsburgh Milliones). More youth summits will be held in area high schools this upcoming school year.

McIntosh told the Courier that in today’s age of smartphones and social media, young people barely talk “face-to-face.” That’s why it’s important to have the youth summits at area schools so the problems can be discussed in an open environment—no smartphones needed.

“We’re trying to get our young people to dialogue with one another, to come up with resolutions on how to deal with aggressive behavior or how to deal with feelings of rejection, how to deal with bullying and those types of things,” McIntosh said.

Some students, McIntosh said, encounter peer pressure to get money fast because, as an example, “when you walk into the school building and they call your shoes Bobos and they have $300 Jordans on, that makes a child feel very different. They’re belittled by their own peers in the school system, and they’re told (in effect) that they’re not important because of how they look or how they dress.”

Then there’s the problem of guns being so accessible in many Black communities, said Jada Pannell, a therapist at Center for Victims. “It’s so easy to get a gun and (the youth) are posting pictures of themselves with guns on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. A lot of it is to feel famous, being the cool guy,” she told the Courier.

Posting pictures of oneself with guns? That’s famous? That’s cool?

Pannell doesn’t think it is. But oftentimes, she said if a youth is growing up without the benefit of both parents, sometimes the second parent could be, in effect, the streets.

“Some of these kids, the streets is all they know,” Pannell, 25, who grew up in Wilkinsburg, said. “Just being raised by a single mom, dad’s dead or in jail, that’s just the norm. The streets is their only resort, the streets are their family, so they’re going to do what they need to do to protect their family at the end of the day, just like any of us would do to protect our own families in our home. It just happens to be the streets are their family, and that’s their only option. There’s no other options laid out on the table for them.”

“There is no value for human life,” McIntosh added. “Years ago it used to be the saying, ‘no love,’ and so, they were devaluing life, and if you feel devalued, then certainly when you’re looking at someone else you don’t see the value in that individual, either.”

But McIntosh’s goal, whether it’s at the schools, or in the neighborhoods, is to let young people know that there is a value to human life. And materialistic things that are portrayed on television, videos and the media don’t define a person.

“People think that ‘I’m better than you’ because ‘I have this’ or ‘I have that’ and ‘you don’t,” McIntosh told the Courier, “not realizing that the ‘better’ is inside of you. It’s not what you’re wearing, it’s not what you have, it’s what’s inside you. Until someone can work from the inside out, and deal with that type of trauma with our young people, then we will constantly see this type of (violent) behavior.”

 

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