KWAME Founds Nonviolence Program

Tyrone Thompson was a fierce education advocate who had mentored hundreds of disadvantaged youngsters. So when he was shot and killed by two teenagers in an attempted robbery last June, his family and friends were stunned by the irony.

"Those teenage suspects were the kind of boys Tyrone would have tried to mentor, if he had met them," said his brother Anthony Thompson, CEO of Kwame Building Group. "And if he had met them, I know he would have touched them."

On Jan. 14 the Thompson family provided a mentoring opportunity for hundreds of troubled St. Louis students when they unveiled the Tyrone Thompson Institute for Nonviolence. The grand opening event was held  at the St. Louis Community College William J. Harrison Education Center at 3140 Cass Ave. in St. Louis, where the Institute will be based.

The keynote speaker will be Rev. Dr. Bernard LaFayette, Jr., Distinguished Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. LaFayette is a civil rights movement activist, a minister, educator, lecturer and authority on nonviolent social change.

The Tyrone Thompson Institute for Nonviolence will address critical issues surrounding student suspensions in the St. Louis Public School District. Typically, suspended students are sent home for two weeks and the school loses funding. Many students are unsupervised at home and most fall behind in their classwork. For some, school suspensions mark the beginning of a life of violence on the streets.

As an alternative, the Tyrone Thompson Institute for Nonviolence program will offer a program to mentor and tutor suspended students in grades eight and younger. The Institute will set up a special room at the school where a mentor - a second-year male student from St. Louis Community College - will connect with suspended students, make sure they keep up with school work and help them with behavioral issues. Volunteers also will have opportunities to support the program.

"Hundreds of kids are suspended every week," said Thompson. "These are not bad kids, and they are not dumb. All they want is somebody to care about them."

The Institute will train nearly 200 St. Louis Community College students to be scholars in the program, Thompson said. They'll learn about community service while receiving a small stipend for their work. Parents will be required to attend a one-day workshop before the suspended student can return to class.

The Institute was based on a successful program that the Kwame Foundation initiated and funded at Dunbar Elementary School.

"We found that the kids who got in the most trouble didn't care if they got suspended. That was a day off for them," said Thompson. "So we funded a behavioral science instructor, who is a tutor and truancy officer rolled into one, and sent those kids to him. They didn't get by without doing their homework - they had a tutor who made them do it. A lot of these kids didn't have fathers in their lives - now they had a father figure. And we saw their test scores start to improve. When we saw that it was working, we thought about how we could get it into all the schools."

The Tyrone Thompson Institute for Nonviolence is a cooperative program with the St. Louis Public School District and St. Louis Community College (SLCC). The program will be housed at the SLCC's William J. Harrison Education Center, which was named after the educator, historian, and community and civil rights activist and built to bring educational opportunities to individuals in underserved areas.

Tyrone Thompson was a state investigator, former City of Pagedale police chief and a former University City police officer. He also worked at Kwame Building Group. At the time of his death, he was developing a mentorship program through his alma mater, University City High School. He served as president of the St. Louis Martin Luther King Non-Violence Support Group.

Kwame Building Group is a pure program and construction management firm providing estimating, scheduling, project planning, value engineering and other project management services as an independent advocate for owners and developers. KWAME is headquartered in St. Louis with division offices in Atlanta, Dallas, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Seattle.

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