Milwaukee kept school doors open on summer nights, and young people came 14,000 times

What happened

Doctors at Children’s Wisconsin have treated 79 young patients with gunshot wounds since Jan. 1, and six of them died, hospital officials told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. This past summer, the Journal Sentinel reported, the hospital joined Milwaukee Public Schools and city and county government, among other partners, on “Safe Summer Sites,” free evening spaces for young people ages 12 to 20. The program was aimed at summer nights, when organizers saw higher rates of violence.

According to the Journal Sentinel, six MPS schools stayed open weekday evenings from June 22 to Aug. 6 with boxing, mindfulness, a three-day lash certification course and popular cooking classes. Other sites, including parks and community centers, added poetry and basketball along with 30 pop-up events. MPS put in an estimated $2 million in staff time and facilities, the paper reported. The city and county gave $500,000 each, and smaller sums from health partners brought the total to about $3 million.

A Medical College of Wisconsin evaluation counted at least 14,000 visits, the Journal Sentinel reported. On 283 surveys, about 92% said they felt safe, and evaluators found no violence involving youth within 400 meters of the sites while they were open. A 14-year-old employed as one of 64 youth ambassadors told the paper the program “kept a lot of young people from having nothing to do.” Aziz Abdullah, CEO of community partner Inpower, told the Journal Sentinel that young people who first came “in hoods and ski masks” began arriving smiling, and he called the mask “like an anxiety blocker.”

Evaluators could not measure any direct effect on violence, the Journal Sentinel reported. They did note that people harmed by homicides and nonfatal shootings fell about 20% from June 22 to Aug. 29 compared with the same period in 2025, and about 22% among ages 12 to 20. Children’s president Gil Peri told the paper he cannot say the sites caused that drop but believes they contributed, and that about 45 organizations will meet again to consider expanding next summer.

Our reflection

Gil Peri told the Journal Sentinel about a room most of us never see: the emergency department waiting room, filled with the coach, the pastor, the teacher, the bus driver. Seventy-nine times this year a child came through those doors shot. Six never went home.

The detail I can’t shake is the ski masks. A teenager who hides his face in July has learned that being seen is dangerous. Plenty of us read that mask as a threat and cross the street. That reflex needs confessing. Fear that never learns a young man’s name is still fear, however wise it feels. And most of us wear a mask too, made of respectability or busyness, so nobody gets close enough to find the wound.

At the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus wept first. Then he called a dead man out, and Lazarus came with his face still wrapped in cloth. Jesus turned to the neighbors and said, “Unbind him, and let him go.” The life was Christ’s to give. The unwrapping he handed to the community. An open school gym on a summer night can be exactly that: grown men and women staying close enough, long enough, that a young person decides it is safe to take the cloth off.

Look at what Milwaukee did. It used buildings the public already owned, on the nights the danger ran highest. It taught skills a teenager can carry out the door, down to a lash certification. It hired young people as ambassadors, so the invitation came from a peer. And it told the truth about what it cannot prove yet: 283 surveys is a thin slice of 14,000 visits, and nobody claimed the drop in shootings as a trophy. I trust that honesty.

This is the ground We The Revolt works in Miami and in our other hubs. Our JCVI work reaches young people at first contact, before a record exists. Your city has fellowship halls dark on Friday nights and people who could teach a kid to cook or throw a jab if somebody asked. Most of what Milwaukee spent was buildings and time. Churches have both.

Pick one step below this week. Then ask your pastor or principal one question: what would it take to keep our doors open on a summer night?

The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him, and let him go."

John 11:44

Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Boxing, poetry, lash classes: new ‘safe sites’ subvert gun violence”