D.C. charter school grieves after four students killed by guns -

Mashea Ashton sat down to type the words no school principal ever wants to say. In just one school year, it was her fourth time.

“It is with great sadness that I write to inform you …”

Ashton, the founder and chief executive of D.C.’s Digital Pioneers Academy, first wrote to the grieving community of 500 charter school students last fall, when 14-year-old Antione Manning was killed in front of his Southeast Washington home on Halloween night. Less than a month later, Jakhi Snider, 15, was fatally shot on his way to a Thanksgiving football game.

“A bright student, athlete, and loyal brother and friend,” Ashton wrote about DeMarcos Pinckney, 15, after he was shot and killed along with his cousin on Father’s Day.

Then, 15-year-old Jaylin Osborne was killed Tuesday outside the apartment where he lived with his family, and Ashton took a tone school leaders rarely express in public. “Right now,” she wrote, “the city is not safe.” She urged families to keep their children under close supervision during the day and indoors at night this summer.

Digital Pioneers opened its doors five years ago as a place for children normally shut out of computer science education to learn coding and game design. Instead of “students,” they are called “scholars,” and they aspire to attend the colleges printed on the felt pennants lining the school’s hallways. They are ushered toward careers that will allow them to outearn their parents.

Most of the students are “at-risk” — a broad designation that includes students who are homeless, in foster care or living in low-income households — and live in D.C.’s poorest wards. Last year, they were recognized for outperforming other schools with similar demographics on standardized math and reading exams.

But the Southeast Washington school also became a microcosm for the ongoing struggle in the nation’s capital to curb gun violence and keep children — particularly Black children — safe. A dozen youths have already been killed by gunfire this year, outpacing last year. More than 50 other youths have been shot and survived.

“I remember the third letter and wanting to add a little more,” Ashton said, sitting in her office on 12th Street SE, the building that houses the school’s upper grades. But she was urged to keep it simple.

After Jaylin, however, her students said more needed to be done. “This is not okay. It is not okay that we lost four Black boys to gun violence this year,” Ashton said. That figure doesn’t include Keenan Anderson, a 10th-grade English teacher who suffered cardiac arrest after being forcibly restrained and Tasered by Los Angeles police while visiting family over winter break.

Days before Jaylin’s death, Ashton had coaxed the teen into taking a picture at his eighth-grade promotion ceremony, which he reluctantly attended. She grabbed his cheeks and beamed: “You did it. You made it through, and it was hard, but you did it,” she remembers telling him. “And then I said, ‘Be safe.’ That’s what I said to all the kids as they were leaving for the summer.”

On Thursday afternoon, she taped that photo onto a large drawing of Anderson with his arms wrapped around Antoine and Jakhi — all of them in letterman jackets, united in their love of football. DeMarcos, in a different picture taken during a visit from the Washington Commanders during the last week of school, stared directly at the camera. It had become a memorial.

With violence surging this summer, a fight to keep D.C.’s kids alive

Without the structure of school, Ashton is fearing the worst. City leaders have presented a number of options — enrichment camps and job programs and summer school — but almost every year, summer proves to be a particularly dangerous time for children and teens. “We’re supposed to be relaxing and breathing,” Ashton said. Her own summers as a child were filled with butterflies and lightning bugs. “But instead, we’re bracing for the next 55 or so days.”

It’s why she invited the T.R.I.G.G.E.R. Project, a local effort to end gun violence, to campus this summer to hold sessions with students from Digital Pioneers and other schools. Outside a room where teens would study homicide maps, discuss trauma and learn to treat gunshot wounds, Ashton explained she’s constantly looking for partners in the community. “I’m just a school,” she said. “I’m angry. I cannot call another mother and tell her, ‘Tell me it’s not true.’”

Parents at the school are also feeling the pressure — Simone Scott said her 15-year-old plans to attend summer camps at Digital Pioneers’ lower school campus in Ward 8. The teen, however, has run into the same problem as many youths across the city: He has no way to get there.

“There isn’t a Metro,” said Scott, an entrepreneur. “We have to figure out how to keep our kids safe.”

Two days after Jaylin died, Digital Pioneers was largely empty, except for a few staff members and a room full of counselors who were waiting to see students. Ashton said some children had even shown up.

City leaders this week have reached out, again, to offer condolences and help. But Ashton’s not sure if she’s getting what she needs.

“If I don’t have any more deaths, then that’s the help I need. But right now, we’re dealing with four,” she said. Among her requests have been more counselors and nighttime programming for youths. “So either I’m not asking for the right thing or [the] city’s not — I don’t know. I could never have predicted four student deaths to gun violence in one academic school year.”

This week, Ashton and her team took matters into their own hands, calling every Digital Pioneers family and asking what plans their children have for the summer. “At the pace, we’re on, we actually have to do something,” she said, reading from a list of ideas that staff generated during a recent brainstorming session. “We need mentoring. We need ‘light out Friday’ from 5 to 9, which is Fridays 5 to 9, keep your kids inside … I mean, we had crazy ideas like giving our teachers some resources to have dinners with scholars.”

UNO tournaments, chess games, summer cookouts, college tours and movie nights were also on the list.

Ashton is also optimistic about the school’s burgeoning football team — a tribute to Antoine, Jakhi and Anderson, but also a safety strategy. Football games mean she can keep her eyes on students for a few extra hours after school.

Scott, however, said the events of this year point to something larger than any one school.

“Unfortunately, we are just another example of the need” for more support and resources for the city’s youths, she said. She wants to make sure what happened at her son’s school doesn’t happen to another campus. “We have to, as a community, figure this thing out together until there is state and federal change in the way in which things are currently.”

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLKlwcKaq6KnnmR%2FcX6SaGdwZ2BnfKWvjJ2goKGklrluvMiopZ6doqh6oq%2FAnZymsV2owbawxKerrGWjnby1ew%3D%3D