BALTIMORE, MARYLAND - Sirens wail frequently outside Bronwyn Mayden’s office, with ambulances and squad cars rushing to the University of Maryland Medical Center half a block away. It’s a trauma hospital, the one where 25-year-old Freddie Gray wound up dying in April from a neck injury sustained in police custody.
Mayden deals with trauma, too, but of a different kind. Assistant dean at the university’s School of Social Work, she’s also executive director of , an academic-community partnership that assists one of West Baltimore’s neediest neighborhoods just over a mile from her office.
– like the adjacent Sandtown neighborhood where Gray grew up, and like many other poor areas in the U.S. and abroad – cries out for urgent care.
"This is a neighborhood of extreme poverty," said Mayden, 62, who also grew up in predominantly black West Baltimore.
More than half of the neighborhood’s households have incomes below $15,000; three out of five youngsters live in poverty. It has the , at 63 years, and among its highest rates of unemployment and incarceration. Sagging, boarded-up row houses mar many streets.
"I could take you in apartments that we’re attempting to raise children in," Mayden said, "that are filled with rats."
The challenges have grown since Gray’s death April 19 sparked sometimes-violent demonstrations against excessive use of force by police.
The beleaguered city now grapples with a soaring homicide rate, the worst in 40 years. May alone brought 43 homicides.
Several West Baltimore residents told The Associated Press they and see more brazen criminal behavior, such as guns flashed on the street. Arrest rates have sunk citywide.
Promise Heights was designed as a counterweight to those burdens.
Launched in 2009, it uses four public schools – two elementary, a middle and a high school – as hubs for delivering services to nurture students, their families and the entire community.
The university and 25 other partners – city and state governments, philanthropies and churches – offer comprehensive, “cradle-to-college-to-career” support. That ranges from enrolling pregnant women in the city’s prenatal care program, to tutoring youngsters, to counseling parents on paying bills or even lining up a burial plot.
One of these community schools is Historic Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Elementary (HSCT).
Mayden placed social worker Henriette Taylor there to coordinate services for its 467 pre-K through fifth-graders and their families. The school sits across the street from McCulloh Homes, a public housing project that served as a backdrop for the gritty .”
The drama continues in real life, said Taylor, who introduced herself after school one spring day as she shepherded some youngsters heading home to McCulloh. As she said later: "I work in an at-risk, trauma-informed school. My kids experience all types of violence."
Over the Memorial Day weekend, for example, a 9-year-old student lost an older friend to gunfire, Taylor recounted. "Violent death is not a stranger in our neighborhood – except now people are watching."
Mental health professionals continuously staff a resource room where teachers can bring students showing signs of anxiety or anger. It has crayons, Play-Doh and stress balls for those too young or too frustrated to articulate their concerns.
"When we talk to the children, they say, 'Everything’s great, everything’s fine,'" Taylor said.
But their artwork says otherwise.
After this spring's rioting brought in the National Guard and legions of additional law enforcement, one youngster drew "little brown figures, all smiling, then little blue figures with scary teeth," Taylor said. "... We see a lot of pictures about tanks, and inside the tanks [are] people with guns."
The sound of gunfire in the night sends fifth-grader Shamira Wedlock bolting to her step-grandmother’s bedroom for reassurance, she said in a phone conversation days after meeting a reporter near her school.
Her older sister, Kishawna Pinder, was fatally shot in a triple homicide in West Baltimore on March 19, 2013, a date Shamira has committed to memory. Now she monitors what's happening around her.
"I watch the news every day, and sometimes I hear stuff and I Google it on my grandma’s phone," the 11-year-old said.
Steady exposure to community violence, and poverty itself, carries risks for youngsters – whether in a poor U.S. neighborhood, a refugee camp in Syria or a bunker in eastern Ukraine.