Discover the work being done in Philadelphia schools between the Office of School Safety (OSS) and its students, particularly young black males, through its Leaders Encouraging Achievement and Development, or LEAD, mentoring program. On this episode of Keystone Education Radio, host Annette Stevenson speaks with OSS chief safety officer Kevin Bethel on the merits of this program and the benefits the district, the mentors and the mentees are gaining.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

  • The innovative approach Philadelphia School District is taking to pairing school safety officers with young mentees
  • How and why the district and the Office of School Safety have plans to expand this program and find methods to capture its effectiveness
  • How mentoring can develop empathy in both the mentee and the mentor

Skip to: 01:11 What objectives were initially identified in the development and evolution of the program since it was launched?

“And so how can we kind of build beyond, as has historically been in the space, strictly focused on safety around people coming and going, and some of the negative activities, but what are the positive things around safety, where we can really engage young people early upstream and really develop those relationships that will impact them for the rest of their lives.”

Skip to: 02:22 To date, how many students and officers are involved?

“We have a number of individuals who are stepping up, want to play in that role and be mentors. So we’re excited about building this program even further.”

Skip to: 02:50 I imagine that [virtual component] may have been even more essential during these past months where folks were isolated. I imagine that might’ve even been more critical, that connection?

“You know and your audience knows that I think what people learn from the pandemic is how critical school is to our children. Anybody had any questions before that, all of that should be dismissed.”

“I’m really proud of the men and women who were involved in that virtual space. Because they kept it going through the supports of the strategic planning team, the principals, and those at the schools, we were able to keep it going and it was really exciting to see that happen.”

Skip to: 03:56 Are there short-term and long-term markers of success that will represent the program’s overall effectiveness?

“We are looking at, as we continue to build out the program, how do we bring in some of the research, because we kind of know mentoring works. There’s plenty of research in the spheres that tell you that it does, but we do want to make sure that the program is living to the efficacy of what it was developed to do.”

Skip to: 05:33 Does the experience of being a mentor and having that interaction with the students, does that also impact the school safety officers and how they carry out their role?

“I think sometimes we fail to realize, sometimes we get caught in this place where we lose our empathy and we kind of get very robotic and particularly in a safety space or even a law enforcement-centric space, the way you deal with the trauma, just lock it all out. And I think as an organization that’s changed its culture and really changing how it manages our young people in this space from an adolescent development approach and a trauma informed approach. When you get in a room and start to listen to kids and they talk about the issues they deal with every day and they humanized the process, it really can help that officer and those men and women in the field start to understand.”

“We’ve seen our men and women and our officers really talk about the positive experience they’re getting from working with the young people and how they feel so empowered and so grateful to be in the position to do what they’re doing.”

Skip to: 07:45 As part of the expanded program, there is a similar mentoring model for female students. Does that differ in any way from the program created for males or is it generally, the concepts are the same?

“Some of my women stepped up and said, ‘well, what about us?’ And so, as a result, we pivoted and said we would not turn away one of our school safety officers and our women who wanted to be in that space.”

Skip to: 09:15 Would you highlight what the mentor training includes? What is that newly envisioned role of the Office of School Safety? What does that look like?

“I tell folks these children are used to somebody coming into their life and then leaving. And then we come in and we play mentor for an hour, and then we leave. Well, it’s bigger than that… And so making sure that everyone understands that there’s a process to mentoring and you just don’t throw it up on the board and check a box.”

“And so this really fits neatly into our goal to really build relationships with our young people, respect them. And we’ve adopted a model around being procedurally just, and so that is all about being fair with our young people. They are our constituents; they are who we serve. And so the better we do that with all of these tools that I outlined … , we will be a better organization because we’ve set the tone for us here as an organization.”

Skip to: 12:23 Are there any future initiatives that are on the horizon for the program?

“Help us identify those kids that we know are going to need some help when they come to school. Let them know that there’s someone in the building who cares about them and wants to make sure that they assimilate well. And as part of that we’ll also be able to connect to the services that are available as they do their re-entry into the system.”

“We’re really, really looking for ways to connect our folks with our kids. And we think that mentoring is one of the key ways to do that.”

Q: So let’s start by, if you would, let us know what objectives were initially identified in the development and evolution of the program since it was launched?

A: Yeah, I think your lead out was accurate, what the strategic planning had put together, but the objective for us as an office and partnering with them is really to take our Office of School Safety and our men and women, particularly our men, our African-American men, and really start to connect them with our kids in our system. We are going through a process of revisiting our work in the Office of School Safety and really saying, how can we as Dr. Hite said relationships, touching kids in a positive way. And so how can we kind of build beyond just, as has historically been in the space, strictly focused on safety around people coming and going, and some of the negative activities, but what are the positive things around safety, where we can really engage young people early upstream and really develop those relationships that will impact them for the rest of their lives. So we really see that relationship building with those young people as an opportunity for us to really see our work and really support us as we continue to… Our evolution is really being more restorative based in our work.

Q: Okay. And to date, how many students and officers are involved?

A: So we have around 11 mentors currently and around 40 students, which we were glad to be able to continue to do virtually. And as we move into the next school year, we will be expanding that work. We have a number of individuals who are stepping up, want to play in that role and be mentors. So we’re excited about building this program even further.

Q: Great. And you mentioned the virtual component. I imagine that may have been even more essential during these recent, past 15, 18 months where folks were isolated. I imagine that might’ve even been more critical, that connection?

A: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You know and your audience knows that I think what people learn from the pandemic is how critical school is to our children. Anybody had any questions before that, all of that should be dismissed. Everyone recognized that a child coming into a school around positive adults and a learning environment, a safe environment, thrive. And so we felt it was important to continue to, even though it was challenging. I won’t say it was easy. But to continue to work in that virtual space to give the young people in our place, their outlet to still talk about the issues they have. And I’m really proud of the men and women who were involved in that virtual space. Because they kept it going through the supports of the strategic planning team, the principals, and those at the schools, we were able to keep it going and it was really exciting to see that happen.

Q: That’s great. Are there short-term and long-term markers of success that will represent the program’s overall effectiveness?

A: Yeah. As you know, it’s a program that’s still evolving. I mean, obviously the short-term success and expectations that relationship building with a young person, that positive impact and those are pretty much immediate, right. You know at the point of contact when you’re mentoring young people, whether you’re being effective or not and when they were coming back. Right. When they were coming back for more and you can see them lighting up. In one case we featured one of our mentors and one of our mentees and the excitement, both the child and his parents had about the support they were getting from the officers. Those are immediate. We are looking at, as we continue to build out the program, how do we bring in some of the research, because we kind of know mentoring works. There’s plenty of research in the spheres that tell you that it does, but we do want to make sure that the program is living to the efficacy of what it was developed to do.

And so we are looking at what are the long-term opportunities to do further evaluation, interviewing the young people long-term even longitudinally, what did they look like two years from now, or three years now? And whether that mentoring did in fact have the impact that we hoped to do. So we’re looking for those opportunities to continue to review our program and to make sure we’re really servicing the kids, and the parents, and the community in the way we intended to do.

Q: And so we’ve talked about the impact to the youth, and we know that youth mentoring has a profound, or has the potential for profound impact on the youth, but does the experience of being a mentor and having that interaction with the students, does that also impact the school safety officers and how they carry out their role?

A: Yeah, absolutely. I think sometimes we fail to realize, sometimes we get caught in this place where we lose our empathy and we kind of get very robotic and particularly in a safety space or even a law enforcement-centric space, the way you deal with the trauma, just lock it all out. And I think as an organization that’s changed its culture and really changing how it manages our young people in this space from an adolescent development approach and a trauma informed approach. When you get in a room and start to listen to kids and they talk about the issues they deal with every day and they humanized the process, it really can help that officer and those men and women in the field start to understand, wow, I didn’t know Kevin was living in a foster home. And I didn’t know Kevin came from that kind of situation.

Guess what? I was like that when I was a kid. And so I think engaging young people in that way really, really changes how you view them. And really, really can do a significant change in the officers in that space as how they view our young people. And so we see that as an extreme benefit, particularly as we change our culture. And we’ve seen that. I mean, we’ve seen our men and women and our officers really talk about the positive experience they’re getting from working with the young people and how they feel so empowered and so grateful to be in the position to do what they’re doing.

And so, as much as they’re getting the benefit from it we, as an organization are getting 10 times the benefit of really, really being able to engage our young people, particularly our young African-American boys who are sort of struggling in particularly a lot of our challenge communities and having that man that they could talk to where many of them come from a single parent home and don’t have it, is a great opportunity. And we’re embracing it. And my men and women could not be more proud of what they’re doing in this space.

Q: That’s great. And you mentioned your men and women, and so that kind of leads into my next question. As part of the expanded program, there is a similar mentoring model for female students. Does that differ in any way from the program created for males or is it generally, the concepts are the same?

A: Yeah. The concepts are the same. I mean, it’s going to be an evolution, right? It was something that came out of the blue ironically during our preparing with the LEAD and obviously it was really focused on black male leadership. Some of my women stepped up and said, well, what about us? And so, as a result, we pivoted and said we would not turn away one of our school safety officers and our women who wanted to be in that space. And so it’s constructed the same way, but obviously different issues with our young ladies. But I think it also raised an understanding for us that though we focus on our, oftentimes our black males, we can’t forget about our young girls. And so that’ll probably take another stream and we’ll build out upon that. But we’re also excited about the opportunity to be able to put our school safety officers who are women into the space with young girls to also give them a place where they can have an outlet and build that collaboration with them as well.

Q: Okay. So I understand that all of the 325 school safety officers have received the mandatory mentor training that’s part of the Office of School Safety’s efforts to re-envision the role within the buildings. And so with that in mind, understanding that they’ve all received this training, would you highlight what the mentor training includes? And then maybe second to that, what is that newly envisioned role of the Office of School Safety? What does that look like?

A: Yeah, yeah. So part of it, I mean, the mentoring process is really, we’re working with MENTOR IR, MENTOR Independence Region, a national organization that provides mentoring. And most of the training is really based in evidence-based development approach. How to deal with interactions with young people, practicing the listening skills that are necessary to engage a young person and kind of how the work and establish the boundaries and around what that process looks like. And because I think what oftentimes we think about mentoring, but you can hurt a child. I tell folks these children are used to somebody coming into their life and then leaving. And then we come in and we play mentor for an hour, and then we leave. Well, it’s bigger than that. Right.

And so making sure that everyone understands that there’s a process to mentoring and you just don’t throw it up on the board and check a box. It really has to be, because you hurt a child and that’s the last thing we want to do. And so that mentoring really good sets us as an organization, really leaning forward into that space. So everyone understands, what does it mean? Before you touch that child, understand what that looks like. As we move into our Office of School Safety, part of what our evolution is, we’ve created a strategic plan, really rooted in five pillars, but one of the core pillars is really restorative practices. And in those restorative practices, so in addition to the mentoring, we’re training our men and women on restorative circles. So they’ve been trained.

So we have a large quorum and many of our mentors are also been trained in being able to do restorative circles. All of that with the purposes… We come into our school setting, particularly this school year, when we couple that with our youth courts, we have a very large-scale diversion program and training that we’re going to be giving them to really understand adolescent development. And understand the trauma that our kids come from and into the school. That we are prepared as an organization to really work with our young people to keep them safe and to deal with the issues that manifested in a normal adolescent development scenario. And that they’re prepared, fully prepared to be able to deal with that child in that setting and have the tools and things necessary that they have at their disposal to be able to address that.

And so this really fits neatly into our goal to really build relationships with our young people, respect them. And we’ve adopted a model around being procedurally just, and so that is all about being fair with our young people. They are our constituents; they are who we serve. And so the better we do that with all of these tools that I outlined and many others, we will be a better organization because we’ve set the tone for us here as an organization. And we want to be the best school safety agency in America. And to do that, we have to make some significant shifts on how we deal with our kids in a school setting.

Q: It sounds like your well on your way to that goal of being the best and the most effective. And you’ve talked kind of about the evolution of the program. Are there any future initiatives that are on the horizon for the program?

A: Part of what we’re going to do, the LEAD program is really, really obviously a very structured program, but we also, as we build that out, we also didn’t want to minimize the opportunity for other officers who are in their schools who want to mentor. And so part of what we’re going to do is as we continue to build out the LEAD program, we’re also going to give opportunities for our men and women to conduct mentoring in our schools, in schools that are not part of collectively, in the LEAD program. I mean, we’re doing something very unique. One of the things we identified is we have a number of young people come back from placement who oftentimes are struggling. And particularly in some of our neighborhood schools, we’ll get a large group of kids in a specific school and collectively together, they struggle.

And so we’re also identifying now working with our Office of Support Services to work with those kids, using our mentors, using our restorative circles, to bring them in when they come into the school setting. Create a space for them to voice their needs. Help us identify those kids that we know are going to need some help when they come to school. Let them know that there’s someone in the building who cares about them and wants to make sure that they assimilate well. And as part of that we’ll also be able to connect to the services that are available as they do their re-entry into the system. We have a large program, but oftentimes there’s a disconnect because we’re dealing with them every day and they don’t see them like that. And so having those connecting and filling that gap when they’re struggling or when they have some needs and them knowing that, hey, guess what?

I can go to the school safety officer because Kevin Bethel is one of our mentees and he’s in our restorative circle. And we can talk about what I need. We think that may be an advantage, both for the child to help them come back into the system and also help for us to deal with the safety issues. And some of the things that often manifest themselves because they’re struggling, then their behavior will manifest in a different way, and we think that’ll help us. So we’re really excited about the opportunity with that collaboration with our Office of Student Supports to bring that into our work. And so we’re really, really looking for ways to connect our folks with our kids. And we think that mentoring is one of the key ways to do that.

Kevin J. Bethel

Kevin J. Bethel is a former Deputy Police Commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department, the 4th largest police department in the nation. As Deputy Commissioner he was in charge of Patrol Operations for the entire city. He also served as Founder and Executive Director of the Law Enforcement Juvenile Justice Institute. Kevin’s commitment and passion for reforming the Juvenile Justice System remains an ongoing priority.Kevin Bethel

In his role at the District, Kevin guides our continuing efforts to create and maintain safe, supportive, and caring environments in which our students can achieve at the highest levels. He is charged with implementing school safety best practices District-wide; revising standards, job descriptions, and recruitment practices for school police and other safety sensitive positions; partnering with the Office of Student Support Services to integrate social and emotional learning and student advocacy into safety initiatives; standardizing the security screening implementation to promote positive school culture; and forging meaningful partnerships with community, city and union stakeholders.

Kevin holds a Master of Science in Public Safety Management from St. Joseph’s University and is a graduate of the FBI’s National Executive Institute.