Jessica Rule, 18, entered Illinois State University this school year ready to step into musical theater as a major. Javon Phillips, 18, left his Austin community for Northern Illinois University with his eyes on a future that includes computer science.
The pair stood outside their alma mater, West Garfield’s Legal Prep Charter Academy, sporting red shirts with the words “Peace Warrior” emblazoned on them at the end of one phase of their life, ready for the next.
Rule and Phillips served as two of Legal Prep’s 46 warriors (students and staff members) last school year — representatives of the charter school’s in-house, student-led restorative justice force. The moniker speaks to the restorative justice program Pastor Gerald Smith (aka Pastor Peace) has practiced and preached for years, one that aims to teach youths how to interrupt conflict.
“It’s not just what we do within the school; it’s a way of life,” Rule said, who became a Warrior because she wanted to see a change within her school.
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Phillips joined the Peace Warriors because he was ready for a personal change. Before Peace Warriors, the duo recalled Legal Prep having three notable fights a week. Smith changed the school’s culture, said Principal Marquan Morrison, a member of Legal Prep’s first graduating class in 2016.
The program — in which youths apply, interview, take tests and learn mediation skills — was created after Smith, a pastor for over 30 years, grew tired of conducting too many funerals for young people.
“I’m asking their friends: Why did this person have to die? What was the issue?” Smith said. “I never got a satisfactory answer. I realized that school is a place where you can incubate a transformation of thinking.”
Smith began tutoring and mentoring youths in 1992; as he volunteered, he became attuned to their nuances.
“You’ve got them eight hours a day, nine months a year; it does take a level of intensity and focus, but you’re either going to spend your energy in grief and sorrow because of the loss of life, or you’re going to spend your energy pouring love and kindness into hearts and minds and demonstrating compassion,” he said.
Smith trains Peace Warriors in the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s principles of nonviolence to change mindsets within the school and community. Then, they volunteer to help de-escalate tense situations among peers and staffers on campus and off. Smith ran a Peace Warrior program at North Lawndale College Prep High School (in 2008) prior to joining Legal Prep in the 2025-26 school year.
A Peace Warrior’s day begins by arriving at school, playing music on a portable speaker, greeting students and personnel, and monitoring interactions to identify potential issues. Warriors regularly monitor social media channels to make sure “beefs” — or conflicts — haven’t percolated overnight and might spill over in the daylight.
Peace Warriors check in with those having a down day due to a family sickness or loss, offering candy and kind words. During lunch, a Peace Warrior may be mentoring a student who’s struggling. If a fight erupts, a Peace Warrior runs interference and recognizes those who tried to intercede, supporting the school’s culture of peace.
Peace Warriors work where hidden tension lies — where stress hasn’t led to a fight yet, but could, if left to simmer, then boil. When needed, Warriors step in, pull the conflicting parties aside, and conduct peace circles — mediating conflict-management sessions without confusion or confrontation — in a designated space in the school.
“We try to give them space to talk it out, so we can move forward,” Rule said.
If an altercation occurs, the involved students spend a day working with a trained proctor who helps them think through their missteps. After reflection, they write letters of accountability to one another and read them in front of classmates, specifying what they learned from the incident. By sharing their words in front of teachers and students, they try to get to the root of the issue and restore trust, Smith said. At the end, the parties ask whether the school community will receive them back into their good graces. If they agree, they applaud.
“Most Peace Warriors have gone through some physical altercation or bullying before they came into this work,” Smith said. “There’s fatigue that comes with violence and that fatigue drove them to say, ‘I like this alternative, let’s try it.'”
The Peace Warriors made last school year “transformative,” given its unprecedented run of successive days without physical conflict, according to Samuel Finkelstein, Legal Prep’s founder and CEO. Members of the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago and Legal Prep’s neighbor, New Mount Pilgrim MB Church, assist students during school dismissal, keeping youth safe at bus stops. At dismissal, Warriors are extra eyes and ears to ensure their peers are safe.
“As Dr. King said, ‘This is building the beloved community.’ We’re in the business of helping people, so we gave it a shot, and it worked,” Sam Castro, the institute’s director of strategic initiatives and partnerships, said.
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“Whether we’re in the building or not, they always have their antennas up,” Smith said.
Morrison, the principal, wishes Peace Warriors had been around when he was a student. He’s looking forward to more students and staff members being trained as Peace Warriors this year, and to the school continuing external partnerships with the community, including businesses, churches and parents.
Rule said she was never the type to break up altercations before becoming a Peace Warrior, but now she’s all about being an “upstander,” not a bystander.
“Once a Peace Warrior, always a Peace Warrior,” Rule said. “We want to keep the community and everybody within what we do, because we want to make a larger difference. … It starts with the youth first.”
Finkelstein is looking to partner with a local elementary school so Legal Prep students can mentor and train younger students on Warriors’ ways.
“We are often, as a city, as adults, trying to tell kids what they should or shouldn’t be doing,” Finkelstein said. “I think the power of this program puts the student voice at the center and student leadership at the forefront. We give students the opportunity to be leaders. We train them in what that means and what it means to act with integrity.”
Opportunities like these would make “teen trends” less of an issue, Finkelstein said.
Teen trends are gatherings that have become increasingly common since the COVID-19 pandemic in visible areas of the city. Researchers and crisis prevention experts say they stem from shuttered schools and plenty of deficits: a lack of robust, accessible youth programming, a lack of youth employment, lack of affordable housing, and lack of third spaces, which are social environments separate from home and workplaces or school where people connect and build community.
“It’s not accidental,” Almethia Franklin said about teen trends. Franklin is a researcher at the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois Chicago, on teen trends. “When spaces are engineered away from communities, young people don’t disappear. They find spaces elsewhere. They’re trying to link up with other teens that look like them, experiencing the same things that they’re experiencing and be in community.”