Social work education often speaks about prevention, community engagement, and interdisciplinary practice. Lehman College’s LITE program offers a concrete example of what those ideas can look like when a public college works with a justice agency to support young people before their challenges become crises.
Lehman identifies LITE as Lehman’s Initiative for Tutoring and Empowerment. The college describes it as a student-centered mentoring and academic support program that partners closely with the New York City Department of Probation. It provides tutoring, coaching, and enrichment opportunities to young people affected by the justice system. Dr. Maurice Vann, an assistant professor of social work at Lehman College, was listed as the organizer for the March 2026 opening of the shared Reentry@Lehman/LITE office.
That combination—education, mentoring, probation partnership, and a welcoming campus presence—deserves attention from the social work profession. It demonstrates that community safety is not created only through emergency response. It can also be built through relationships that strengthen a young person’s confidence, academic performance, access to college, and belief in a viable future.
Academic Support Is a Prevention Strategy
Tutoring is sometimes treated as a narrow educational service: a student struggles with a subject, and another person helps the student improve. For young people involved with the justice system, however, academic support can carry broader meaning.
A consistent tutor or mentor can help a young person reconnect with school, navigate institutional expectations, prepare for college or employment, and experience a dependable relationship with an adult who sees ability rather than a case file. Academic progress can strengthen self-efficacy and expand the realistic choices available to a young person. Those outcomes belong in any serious account of community safety.
This does not mean that tutoring alone can overcome structural inequality, family hardship, housing instability, disability, school exclusion, or the collateral consequences of justice involvement. It means that academic support can become one component of a coordinated prevention system, especially when it is connected to mentoring, enrichment, social services, and pathways into higher education.
Dr. Maurice Vann’s Work Connects Education, Reentry, and Safety
Lehman’s faculty profile identifies Dr. Maurice Vann as an assistant professor of social work and academic director of Campus Honors. His scholarship focuses on forensic social work, policy, social justice, and programs that help formerly incarcerated people reintegrate into society. Lehman has also highlighted his collaborations with the Department of Probation involving virtual reality and animation designed to promote healing, resilience, social development, and the ability to de-escalate stressful situations.
LITE fits within that broader body of work. It treats a college not as a distant institution waiting for young people to become conventionally “college ready,” but as an active community partner capable of bringing educational resources closer to them. It also places justice-impacted young people in contact with a campus environment that can make higher education feel imaginable and accessible.
The shared Reentry@Lehman/LITE office reinforces this philosophy. Lehman described the space as a welcoming place for justice-impacted students and their peers to meet, relax, and build connection. Belonging is not a decorative feature of education. For students who have repeatedly experienced exclusion, this can affect persistence, help-seeking, and trust.
Social Work Programs Should Learn From the Model
Social work programs routinely require field education, teach person-in-environment theory, and emphasize work across systems. Yet the profession too often organizes community safety into separate categories: criminal justice in one course, school social work in another, community practice somewhere else, and technology or tutoring barely visible at all.
Programs like LITE reveal why those divisions are inadequate. A young person involved with probation may simultaneously need academic coaching, family support, assistance with benefits, mental health care, credible mentorship, transportation, digital access, and a realistic employment pathway. No single profession or agency can supply all of that. Social workers should be trained to build and evaluate partnerships.
Schools of social work should consider several practical steps:
- Develop field placements in college-probation and college-reentry partnerships.
- Train students to connect academic engagement with trauma-informed, strengths-based, and anti-oppressive practice.
- Include tutoring, mentoring, and educational navigation in community-practice curricula.
- Pay students for program work whenever possible, rather than treating unpaid labor as a professional commitment.
- Involve people with lived experience in program design, staffing, governance, and evaluation.
- Measure outcomes beyond rearrest, including educational persistence, confidence, college enrollment, employment, relationships, and participant-defined goals.
Partnerships Need Accountability, Not Just Praise
Innovative programs should be celebrated, but they should also be evaluated. LITE and similar initiatives can strengthen the evidence base for education-centered community safety by publicly documenting who is served, what services participants receive, how long relationships last, and which outcomes participants consider meaningful.
Evaluation should not reduce young people to risk scores. Nor should a program’s success be defined solely by whether participants avoid arrest. A fuller framework would examine academic gains, school attendance, credential attainment, college access, employment, well-being, trust, social connection, and the quality of participants’ experiences.
The partnership should also make clear how young people are referred, whether participation is genuinely voluntary, how information is protected, and how power is shared among the college, probation personnel, participants, families, and community organizations. These are as much social work questions as administrative ones.
A More Expansive Vision of Social Work Education
The profession needs educational models that prepare students to work where community safety is actually produced: schools, campuses, probation offices, libraries, housing programs, health systems, neighborhood organizations, and public spaces. LITE offers one such model by joining individualized academic support with mentorship, institutional partnership, and access to a college community.
Its larger lesson is that education is not peripheral to community safety. Helping a young person strengthen skills, imagine a future, and build relationships with people and institutions is safety work. Social work education should name it, study it, fund it, and prepare students to do it well.