Published June 25, 2026 at 6:02 AM EDT

Initiatives that Pittsburgh Public Schools has been undertaking to curb school violence seem to be paying off. Officials have reported at 23% reduction in disciplinary events this past school year from the 2023-2024 school year, and this summer they’re taking these anti-violence efforts off-campus. Danielle King directs the district’s Safe Passage program, and Taili Thompson is the director of violence prevention with Operation Better Block. They joined WESA’s Jeremy Scott to talk about the initiative.

Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Jeremy Scott: This Safe Passage program, in a nutshell, is one where the Pittsburgh Public School District and City of Pittsburgh actually pay high school students to be mediators. As of this past school year, it was in effect at six high schools and one K-8. How do you determine which students would make good hires for this program?

Danielle King: Once we're in the schools we have a six-week time period where we do observations. During this time we do observations. We see where the high traffic areas are in the school. We see the interactions of the students because, of course, students are coming from different sectors of the city, and within different sectors of the city, students greet each other certain ways. We also see which students have influence. Some social status, if you will. We typically don't look at the grades, per se. And then we engage those students, we engage their peers who they have influence on, and then we do a recruitment and enrollment process.

After they're selected, they go through an interview process. During that interview process we introduce them to our safety model, which is four-pillared: detect and interrupt violence, identify and treat high-risk individuals, change community norms, and then provide identities.

Scott: It was at six high schools and one K-8. Are there any concrete plans to expand it to other schools?

Danielle King: D, all of the above. And I think Taili can help me explain that a little bit better. But yes, we would love to expand to other high schools — the county, even — if given the opportunity, and a lot of K-8 schools. Because it's been in conversation that if we can get to the students younger, we think that it will be even more effective.

Taili Thompson: When we launched the expansion of the model as a partner with the city of Pittsburgh, it was originally in eight schools. And the middle school was one of the feeder schools, Arlington.

As funding started to disappear, as the original expansion grant from the state kind of came to an end, then we scaled back to six schools.

So what we're hoping is to gain back the financial support that we had when we had this expansion so that we can get back into eight schools and actually pick up more feeder schools, as well.

Scott: The city of Pittsburgh is planning to deploy so-called violence interrupters at pools across the city this summer. So why are pools specifically being targeted for this?

Thompson: I think that from observation of individuals that come from the community, they realize that that's a hotspot, even though it's a place to cool down. That's a place that you may have a large gathering. And when you really understand the whole concept of violence spreading like this contagious disease, what you're really looking for are transmission points.

So over the years, these places in different areas have been transmission points, meaning those are places where the transmission of violence can possibly happen when individuals from different areas that may have conflict come across each other. And you want to be able to find as many transmission points as you possibly can to be able to interrupt, because every interruption of that transmission prevents the future spread.