Lovey Mazique-Rivera, the principal of MS 80 in Norwood, worries about what happens to her impressionable middle schoolers once they leave the friendly confines of her newly-renovated building on Mosholu Parkway.

"I can protect them when they’re inside of this building," Mazique-Rivera says, "but I can’t protect them once they’re outside."

When she first arrived at MS 80 four years ago, Mazique-Rivera says there were 17 gangs represented inside the middle school. Since then, with the help of her staff, she has eliminated gang activity in the school, but that doesn’t stop them from influencing her students once they’re outside of her control.

These days, gangs recruit her youngsters, literally, once they hit the streets after school. The gangsters, she says, have already marked their territory at local parks, specifically at the Reservoir Oval Park and the basketball courts on the parkway. Many gang members approach her kids and offer what Mazique-Rivera calls "a sense of belonging."

MS 80 Parent Coordinator Angela Roker angrily says she won’t even let her teenage son go to the park unless she’s there supervising.

In an effort to promote more constructive alternatives to joining gangs and/or dealing drugs, Mazique-Rivera and Roker joined up with Anthony Rivieccio, a former community board member and long-time local activist, to create the second annual "Community Night Out."  

Last year’s "Nigh Out" focused on child abuse following the horrific death of 2-year-old Quachaun Browne. This year’s focus on after-school activity as an alternative to violence – which featured panel discussions for adults and workshops on film making and horticulture, among others, for the kids – coincided with the shooting of four young men (none of whom died), three weeks earlier, outside of Tracey Towers.

Tracey is just a few blocks west of MS 80 on the other side of Jerome Avenue. But Mazique-Rivera said although all of her students come from the east side of Jerome Avenue, because of school zoning requirements, her children are not immune to stray bullets. And although Community Night Out was conceived before the shootings, Mazique-Rivera said the incident served as a wake-up call to everyone.

She said she spoke to her entire school about the shooting incident after it happened. "My children are afraid and they’re feeling that [the violence] might spill into the schools," Mazique-Rivera said.

Local elected officials have taken notice since the shooting as well. Senator Efrain Gonzalez showed up at a press conference at MS 80 a week prior to Community Night Out. At the actual event, he was joined by Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz and Assemblyman Jose Rivera, along with representatives from Council Member Oliver Koppell and Assemblywoman Naomi Rivera, for a panel discussion on what can be done to alleviate the violence.  

Mostly, the conversation kept returning to the failure of the city’s school system, which the politicians cited as one of the primary reasons students drop out, fall in with gangs and turn to illegal activity.  

At the end of the discussion, Lilly Lozano from Jose Rivera’s office, stood up and pointed to the mostly empty MS 80 auditorium (perhaps 30 adults from the neighborhood were in attendance). "This auditorium should be packed with people," she said, warning that if more don’t people get involved, nothing will change.

"If we as a community can’t look out for our own kids," Rivieccio said during a break in the programming, "it will push them into the prison system."