Within a few months of returning to in-person classes when the COVID-19 pandemic eased in mid-2021, San Francisco public schools found themselves in serious trouble. Brawling group fights seemed to come one after another. Some students - even middle schoolers - were bringing knives and guns to school, and at least one serious injury resulted.
The school district was caught flat-footed. Agreements had lapsed for police officers to be posted in schools, leaving no one to confiscate weapons or break up fights.
"It was the perfect storm," said Jasmine Dawson, director of city and community partnerships at San Francisco's Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families (DCYF), which steers and funds youth programs in the city.
Dawson and DCYF Executive Director Maria Su convened meetings with representatives from San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and youth-serving community organizations. Without police on hand, an idea that had once seemed naïve rose to the surface: What about preventing violence? For such a bold shift to work, youth advocates would have to reach the most troubled young people through messengers they trusted.
"There was a need to figure out who else worked with these young people," Dawson said.
UCSF's Wraparound Project was among those invited to the meetings, "because of the historical knowledge the team has about the families they support," Dawson said.
Launched back in 2006, the Wraparound Project is a violence intervention program that works with people hospitalized at the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center (ZSFG) for a violent injury. The project treats violence as a disease: A person injured through violence has risk factors for it that are broadcast and further amplified when they are hospitalized. Wraparound staff approach these patients during their hospital stays to try to earn their consent to connect them with services - including counseling and conflict mediation and rides to court dates and doctors' appointments - to help them step out of their risk factors. The approach, called violence interruption, has reduced re-injury by half and made the project into a hub of knowledge about the patterns of violence in San Francisco.
We see preventing
re-injury as the very minimum we want to do."
"If you are born into a neighborhood and you live there your whole life and the neighborhood is violent - it's hard to get out of those situations," explained Amanda Sammann, MD, MPH, the project's director. "The Wraparound Project tries to find those risk factors and target them with services."
As a trauma surgeon, Sammann is all too aware of the limits of what she can do to repair the damage done by a bullet or a knife.
"We get tired of seeing people who are violently injured come into the hospital for something that could have been preventable," Sammann said. "We see preventing re-injury as the very minimum we want to do. If we can affect the upstream, we can stop the injuries from happening in the first place."
Hospitalized after a shooting. Now headed to university
As a result of the 2021 meetings with DCYF and SFUSD, the Wraparound Project expanded its client base to include students who self-refer or are referred by school administrators at three high-need schools. The pilot, which added two violence interrupters for a total of 11, aimed to explore whether Wraparound's success with hospital patients could work with students.
Sharmaine "Star" Quinnine, a San Francisco native who grew up in the Fillmore District, joined the program in mid-2023 to serve SFUSD students. In her professional life, Quinnine has worked to prevent recidivism among incarcerated people and parolees. Now she spends time at bus stops students use in the mornings and afternoons, talking to any who may be headed down the wrong path.
"The whole concept of, you know, 'I'm gonna kick your butt after school' is real," Quinnine explained. "Our role is to mediate and eliminate any type of violence with the youth. Sometimes it takes mediation with the parents, having them come in, or talking with the school, creating a plan. We do a lot of mediation."
