She Stops School Fights Before They Start. Oakland May Cut Her Job

At Castlemont High School in Deep East Oakland, Phelisha Saffold stands in the sunshine surveying the courtyard.

“Today is a good day out,” she said as students sat in clusters, talking and eating lunch. “Drama-free.”

She points out the cheerleaders. “They’re not hyphy about nothing.”

A few yards away, the boys are doing their thing. The courtyard is filled with lively chatter; there are no raised voices, which would signal that things could go sideways.

“That’s when your antennas come on, and you want to put your ear to it,” she said.

Over two years working as a school-based violence interrupter at Castlemont, Saffold, 54, has learned to decipher the signs that can precipitate a fight. Yelling is obvious, but sometimes they’re more subtle: A student just seems different one day. Maybe they’re quiet or grumpy.

Saffold’s duty is to get ahead of conflicts before they boil over into brawls — or worse. It’s a job that took on renewed urgency after a student was shot and injured at the city’s Skyline High School last month, but with Oakland schools facing a crippling budget shortfall, the future of that work is in doubt.

Someone for students to turn to

The term “violence interrupter” doesn’t mean much to Saffold’s students. To them, she’s a mediator, mentor and confidant. She’s got a dozen “school daughters” who call her “mom,” but her vibe is more cool auntie than nagging parent.

This work is a long game — less about swooping in right before a squabble breaks out than it is about building relationships far ahead of time, when there’s no sign of trouble.

“My goal is to get them to understand that they could trust me and they could count on me,” she said. “A lot of the students are not used to that.”

She buys gift cards to celebrate good grades and takes students out to eat, or to a food pantry, if they don’t have groceries at home. For her, that’s part of preventing violence: addressing conditions like neglect and hunger that can give rise to it.

“She checks in on kids, like, ‘Hey, why are you not in class? Are you feeling good today?’ Like, anything and everything,” said 16-year-old junior Nevaeh, who asked to be identified by only her first name.

Saffold spends most of her time listening to students. All day, they approach her with updates about their minor beefs or major family troubles. They vent and ask for advice, and in between, they keep her keyed into conflicts brewing out of her view on social media.

“You hear that somebody’s about to get into a fight, but she already knows, so she’s stopping both of the girls,” Nevaeh said. “She’ll let other staff members know. She’s like, ‘Watch out for them.’”

At lunchtime one day in early December, instead of going outside to eat and talk with friends, Nevaeh and a handful of other students sat themselves at desks circled around Saffold, who greeted them with, “There go my girls!”

They’re here to discuss gossip and rumors, one of the biggest sources of campus drama.

“We’re going to talk about how to navigate around he-say she-say and how to solve your own issues without it escalating,” Saffold said.

Along with the two other members of the school’s violence prevention team, Saffold created this twice-monthly group to focus on building students’ communication skills. It’s voluntary and open to anyone, but it usually ends up being a group of mostly girls who work closely with them.

Today, Saffold asks 15-year-old sophomore Kay’Lonnie Jackson to talk about a conflict she’d just worked through. Jackson and two other girls in the group had been clashing over some gossip all week, and that morning they’d finally put it to rest.

“Our beef was over some he-say she-say stuff, and both of us was in the wrong for listening and dragging on the beef,” Kay’Lonnie said. “So as a young lady, I went up to her and addressed myself where I was wrong, and she addressed herself where she was wrong and we apologized to each other.”

This is Saffold’s goal: to teach students the skills to defuse arguments and think before they react to provocation. Progress is hard won. In this case, Saffold had met with the girls several times over three days to mediate the dispute before they eventually ended it themselves.

“Y’all was driving me crazy this week,” she said. “I felt like I wasn’t getting nowhere. So for you guys to call me today and y’all pretty much fixed it on y’all own, it just made me super proud. It let me know that you guys are listening to what I’m saying.”

When Saffold dispenses advice, it comes from someone who’s been there: She was once a student at Castlemont — and a self-described hothead who got into her share of fights and ended up in continuation school.

Things have changed since her high school days. She recognizes the rumor mill that drives conflict, but technology has supercharged it. There’s social media, with its ability to broadcast a slight campus-wide in a second, and the way smartphones have turned students into amateur PIs. “They’ll record a conversation and take it to another student and say, ‘I got proof that this has been said,’” she explains.

Still, Saffold knows this community because it’s hers. She grew up in East Oakland, “so nine times out of ten if something is going on, I might know your mother, your grandmother, your uncle, your cousin,” she said.

In this work, which is as important as the training violence interrupters receive.

“They use that credibility, they use that experience, to gain trust with the individuals that they’re working with,” said David Muhammad, executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, which works to reduce violence and incarceration. “They serve as an example for these young people.”

Saffold’s connections help when she needs to involve students’ families to end a conflict — which sometimes means persuading a dad, aunt or cousin not to take things into their own hands and retaliate on behalf of their student.

Vital work at risk

Today, most large urban districts in the country have some kind of violence intervention specialists on campus, said Muhammad, who has helped lead gun violence prevention strategies in cities nationwide, including Oakland.

Here, Saffold is part of a violence prevention ecosystem developed after the district dissolved its school police department in the wake of the George Floyd protests and committed to overhauling its approach to safety. She works with the former school security officers, now called “culture keepers,” who are focused on de-escalation and trauma-informed restorative practices, along with counselors and social workers, among others.

Two of her closest allies on campus are the gender-based-violence specialist, who focuses on dating violence, sexual assault and exploitation, and the life coach, something between a mentor and a case manager who works intensively with students. The trio is part of a pilot program rolled out at seven high schools across the district beginning in 2022.

These three-person School Violence Intervention and Prevention Program teams are paid for by the city’s Department of Violence Prevention using money voters allocated for improving public safety through 2014’s Measure Z. The department funds community-based organizations like Saffold’s employer, the nonprofit Youth Alive, to carry out the work.

A city-funded evaluation of the program by the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization, found that from its start in 2022-23 through the end of the 2023-24 school year, violence interrupters held 681 mediations. Almost 60% were proactive, while 11% were aimed at preventing retaliation. Overall, evaluators called the pilot program “promising,” though they noted that it was understaffed and underresourced.

But funding is set to sunset at the end of the school year, and the district is in no position to pick up the tab — the Oakland school board just approved a plan to cut $100 million from next year’s budget amid leadership turmoil as it looks to avoid another state takeover.

Nelson Alegria, the district’s newly minted executive director of safety, said administrators parsing data to try to streamline the program might pare away positions at some schools and staff up at others. But the program as a whole, he said, would stay largely intact.

“Safety is a top priority,” he said. “We want to make sure everybody understands that safety is not one of those things that we’re putting on the table to be cut.”

School board director Mike Hutchinson, who chairs the Budget and Finance Committee, has doubts.

“This is an extreme financial crisis of the likes we’ve never seen,” he said, noting that it could be a struggle for the district to fund even its core educational programming. “I’m concerned about a lot of our programs, from our culture keepers on campus to our restorative justice programs to definitely our violence interruption teams.”

Hutchinson said he plans to sit down with the head of the Department of Violence Prevention to discuss alternative funding sources, citing the Skyline High shooting as proof the district needs to double down on violence interrupters.

For Castlemont’s principal, Joseph Blasher, their work is essential. “You can’t learn if you don’t feel safe,” he said.

He credits campus violence prevention efforts for helping to boost attendance and cohort graduation rates and get families more engaged.

“I couldn’t imagine all of us just having to leave the campus. That would just be traumatizing,” Saffold said. “Not just for the students — I think for us as well, because we build these bonds.”

More than just a job

Bonding with teenagers and getting them to open up, even those Saffold has grown closest to, is a skill that takes constant upkeep.

Saffold’s is on display when she spots junior Tamiya Easley, 17, at lunch one afternoon. “You know we need to talk, right?” Saffold said. “About yesterday.”

Tamiya tries to dodge her. “What did I do yesterday?” she asks. “I didn’t even do nothing yesterday!”

“We’re going to talk about it,” Saffold said with a laugh. She gives Tamiya a sly smile and another warm “We’ll talk about it.”

That disarms Tamiya. “Oh, when I was upstairs tripping?” she said.

“Yes, you of all people,” Saffold said with a tone that let Tamiya know she expected better.

“Mom! It’s because I don’t like disrespect.”

Tamiya explains that she heard some students had been talking about her. She got heated, and they got defensive. But she ended up apologizing, and it blew over.

Saffold applauds. “That’s what I’m talking about!”

“My anger got the best of me. I know that,” Tamiya said.

Saffold often reminds her students that this isn’t just a job for her. She loves it, but it’s more than that. It’s deeply personal.

“I don’t want to say it’s what saved my life, but it’s what helps me get through the loss of my son,” she said.

Saffold’s son was shot and killed four years ago, when he was 28. And her son’s father died the same way 32 years ago. She said neither of them was in a gang or violent. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

She tells students their stories to drive home a point: “If you’re kicking off violence, you’re not going to always be the winner.”

“She keeps it real,” 16-year-old sophomore Kamarion Warner said, sitting across from Saffold during the lunchtime group meeting. Saffold proved to him how much she cares about students when he briefly moved to Stockton in ninth grade and she enlisted her granddaughter, who lives there, to take him under her wing at school.

“She wants you to succeed,” Kamarion said. “You just have to be willing to listen.”

“I’m trying to change lives. You guys know my story,” she tells the group. “If I could just save one of y’all, then I feel like I’ve succeeded.”