my name is brendan anderson. i am with the oakland unified school district. it was through the courage of our superintendent, dr. tony smith, that our department was able to come to fruition. he saw a need through the data and through the experiences of african-american students in our school district that we needed to focus and be delivered and intentional to help support the needs of our african-american male students in our city. our department was initially set up to focus on improving the achievement of our students, the attendance, graduation rates. we know there is a big outflux of students, whether from dropouts or even our high achieving students, when they are in middle school they tend to go to private school when they are going to high school. we wanted to keep our high strivers in our district as well. we are charged to lower the suspension rate and incarceration rate for our african-american male students. so part of our job is to be interrupters from this school to prison pipeline. we want to make sure that we interrupt all situations that the