Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, and Superintendent of the Philadelphia School District William Hite participated in a panel discussion about My Brother’s Keeper, Obama’s initiative to eliminate the gaps in opportunity and achievement for boys and young men of color.

The panel, organized by Discovery Communications and Discovery Education in partnership with the School District and moderated by Renee Chenault-Fattah, NBC10 news anchor, kicked off with a sneak peak of a TV special to support the My Brother’s Keeper initiative, which will air on Father’s Day (June 21) on Discovery Channel, Oprah Winfrey Network, and in Spanish on Discovery en Español.

According to Dwight Jones, from Discovery Education, U.S. students are less likely than their parents to graduate from high school. “Sadly, we are the only industrialized nation where this is true,” he said.

Jones added that the gaps in graduation rates between race and ethnic lines are widening, and cited a 2015 report that revealed that only 59 percent of black males and 65 percent of Latino males graduated in 2012-2013, in comparison to 80 percent of white males.

Also participating in the panel were Edwin Desamour, Executive Director of Men in Motion in the Community (MIMIC); Rosalyn J. McPherson, president and CEO of the Urban League of Philadelphia; Robert L. Listenbee, from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention at the U.S. Department of Justice; and a graduating senior from the School of the Future, where the event took place.

When asked how to repair or build the relationships in the communities they serve, HIte talked about the importance of providing opportunities to engage with students.

“We all talk about students, and talk a lot about them (but) too seldom we talk to students about the issues that are very important to them,” Hite said.

In reference to the protests in Ferguson and Baltimore, Ramsey said that the dissatisfaction that people have with police is nothing new.

“This has been simmering beneath the surface for quite some time… it just happened to bubble up during a particular point in time,” Ramsey said. “The reality is that there has been tension for a long time in many of our communities between police and those residents.”

In regards to “Stop and Frisk”, Ramsey talked about the importance of training officers to understand they need to have reasonable suspicion before they stop someone and being respectful to the community they serve.

“A lot of the complaints we get aren’t about the stop, it’s about the behavior of the police officer during the stop,” Ramsey said. “How we react and respond to the community I think is a big part of the problem that we have.”

Nutter agreed that these issues and tensions have been going on for some time.

“It was evident in the killing of Trayvon Martin,” he said.

The mayor added that throughout different places that he goes he hears young people constantly complaining about being stopped by the police, “three times a day, eight times a week, almost every other day (…). And that, for me, crosses the line from officers paying attention to what’s going on to a certain level of harassment.”

“There are a lot of really great young people out there who are doing the right thing each and every day, and there are a huge number of fantastic police officers who are also doing the right thing,” Nutter said. “We cannot allow small groups of folks in either of those cohorts to damage how we interact.”