Oregon students and parents discuss school safety

There have been several shootings outside schools in the Portland area recently. There have also been traffic incidents leading to injury or death. Students, parents, school districts, and the city are talking about what they can do to keep kids safe. We hear from three high school students: Byronie McMahon, Danny Cage and Lana Rachielug. We also hear from two parents: Heidi Schultz and Leslie Kosoff.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. There have been several shootings outside high schools in the Portland area recently and there’ve also been traffic incidents leading to injury or death. Students, parents, school districts and the city are all talking about what they can do to keep kids safe. Later this hour, we’re going to talk with two parents who are both members of parent-teacher associations at [Portland Public Schools] high schools, but we’re going to start with three students. Byronie McMahon is a senior at Cleveland High School, Danny Cage is a senior at Grant [High School], and Lana Rachielug is a senior at Franklin High School. They sat down recently with OPB’s K-12 Education Reporter Elizabeth Miller. She started by asking each of them what safety means to them. Byronie McMahon went first.

Byronie McMahon: For me personally, this is a question that we definitely considered a lot, both at my school post the shootings, as well as just in the work at the district, and I think it’s both a sense of safety: in physical safety but also mental. And I think that’s whether you trust your administrators or you trust your community and you have this kind of open relationship and feedback. I also think it means when you go to school, do you have to actively worry about the things that are going to happen to you, or I guess, more safety generally if when you go anywhere you worry about the things that are going to happen to you. I think that level of worry is probably the biggest thing for me when I consider safety.

Lana Rachielug: I think that to me, safety just means, especially around school… I don’t think any student should have to go into a school and wonder if there’s an outside threat that’s going to affect their learning. I think that schools should be an environment where you feel, like Byronie said, mentally and physically safe. And I think that the idea of communities in school is very important. And I think you should be able to just feel that sense of community and go to anyone with anything that you want to discuss and just feel safe and secure in that school community.

Danny Cage: Yeah, I agree so much on the mental aspect because I don’t think it’s really talked about enough. For me, safety means that you should be able to go to school and not have to have anxiety or to worry about safety because at the end of the day that affects, you know, your emotional and physical  well-being as well, and that can also harm your academic well-being also.

Rachielug: And the learning environment is really important. I mean, we know statistically that when students feel safe in school and when there is a community and learning environment in which they feel they can thrive, that’s when they do. And I think that as Danny was talking about, that mental aspect is also really important and feeling that you have a community that not only listens to you, but trusts you and will listen to the feedback that you get and implement solutions to it is really important.

Elizabeth Miller: And so I do want to talk, if it’s okay, about kind of that experience for you, Byronie and Lana, of having shootings outside of your schools. Byronie, you were in school when the shooting happened in December. Can you talk about what that was like and what was going through your mind?

McMahon: Yeah, I can. So, I was in my third period literature class and we were all just sitting kind of. It was very normal. A lot of schools, every PPS high school, and I’m pretty sure it’s required, goes through these shooter drills. So the thing came on on the phone, just like the little message and so we were all quiet, you know, lights got turned off. And I think in those first moments I just thought it was a drill, I didn’t really give it that much consideration just because I’ve been through it so many times before in terms of it not being real. So I don’t think it really set into me that there was someone around. But then, probably about 10 minutes, maybe a little less in, my friends started getting text messages because it was right after lunch was when it took place.

[The texts were] saying that people had heard gunshots who had not returned to class yet. And so that definitely made it all of us feel a little more like, “Okay, what’s going on?” I think my immediate thought is you’d never want to trust the things that you hear necessarily, and I didn’t want to get into a panic. I think, everyone does [feel that way]. My teacher then started to… she checked her computer and I don’t know if it was her, whether students in her class had told her that other students around Cleveland [High School], had heard gunshots. And so there’s definitely a sense of fear that set in after that.

Just so it’s clear like it was not a targeted school shooting, the shooter never made it in the building. [But] we didn’t necessarily know that during the time, which I do think is a distinction to make is we were unaware what the circumstances of the shooting were. And I was definitely scared as we were in a building that was almost sectioned off from the central area of Cleveland, that it could have been someone inside the building. I mean, it was scary. It was terrifying, like during that lockdown and then we got released from the lockdown into a lockout for about two hours and we just stayed in that classroom…

E. Miller: And the lockout and the lockdown are different?

McMahon: Yeah, a lockin is basically where everybody in the room… everything stops. Lights go off, all the internal classroom get locked, all the windows get closed, blinds get closed. And then a lockout is when just the external doors are closed, but internal doors are allowed to be opened and then you can kind of resume more activity. I think that the emotion that I remember the most is like waiting for my sister, she’s a freshman at Cleveland and she texted me during the lockout being like, “Oh, I heard gunshots.” It’s just heartbreaking to hear that. The younger kids at my school and like my own sibling had to go through that experience, something that no kid should obviously ever go through.

E. Miller: And Lana, so the shooting outside of Franklin happened on a Saturday. How did you find out about it, and what was your thinking after that?

Rachielug: That day, everybody was at school because it was a basketball tournament. So it’s like four or five schools, I think, playing against each other. And that day I had gone in the morning to watch the first couple of games. And after, I want to say two games, I left and went home and then I went to hang out with my friends. And I remember I was hanging out with my friends and I started going through social media just out of boredom. And I see a video on somebody’s Snapchat story, somebody that I know… I’m not really close friends with them, but a video of a bunch of people like running out of a gym and just panic. All the players were running off. And I remember watching it through a couple of times before, I was like, “Is this at Franklin?”

E. Miller: As you were saying earlier, it felt like a movie, right?

Rachielug: Yeah. I watched it through, several times, before I realized this was actually at Franklin because it was… I believe it was footage taken for the game, to watch back the game. And it was just crazy to me because even after I watched it, I was like, unfazed by it. Which was a little bit sad to me. Just the fact that it didn’t really shake me I think as much as it should have.

McMahon: I mean it was a Lincoln [vs.] Cleveland basketball game. And so I saw I had friends who had gone to watch and I have friends on our basketball team who were there, and I think the timing is awful because [it was] only a couple of weeks after what happened at Cleveland. But it’s kind of funny that we talked about [how] it was like watching a movie, because even when I recall sitting through the lockdown, I feel very unfazed. And I mean, I went to school the next week, kind of like, “Okay, well it’s fine.” and that’s definitely been interesting for me, like that sense of like, I feel like I should feel worse about this and I actually feel like, generally okay. And I think that’s probably a testament to, as you said, how much it happens and how many people it happens to.

Rachielug: That day at school, I talked to one of my teachers and we were just talking about gun violence in general and she had actually told me that we were having a staff meeting at Franklin, just for teachers, to talk about how they feel about the experience. And just to have sort of a sense of community, to be able to share all of their feelings. And I just can’t imagine, as a teacher, how scary that might be for you and maybe a sense of responsibility you feel for kids that you’re teaching as well and a priority to keep them safe. And I imagine it’s just as scary for the teachers as it is for the students.

E. Miller: And, so Danny, there haven’t been any incidents like this, thankfully, at Grant. So how has this landed for you, as a student at a different school, still in Portland, still dealing with gun violence in the city. How have you felt about these things and has it impacted you in any way?

Cage: To touch on what the two of them said, the social media aspect because everything is so public now, you can see what happens at Franklin, you can see what happens in Cleveland, you can see what happened at [Jefferson]. And it is really hard to be… I don’t think anyone thinks that any of these incidents were going to happen at their school. And after seeing that it could happen at Franklin, after seeing it could happen at Cleveland, and [Jefferson], the immediate assumption for a lot of people was like, “Oh, it can happen at my school.”

E. Miller: Yeah, it’s not just shootings. I mean there are other other threats. There are other safety issues. In Cleveland, dangerous intersections have been a big topic of conversation. So how does it feel to be a student right now when you have all of these sometimes scary things happening?

Cage: For me, I would say: responsiveness. And that’s both community members as well as government. Immediately after there was the incident where someone was killed in an intersection over by Cleveland, community members came, by and large, and created a public demonstration. I believe green was what they were wearing, and you know, to call on ODOT to help create safer intersections, especially around school. And you had then ‒ it feels odd to say ‒ Commissioner Hardesty call for more public investments in infrastructure around transit, especially around the high school. And so for me it’s reassuring when I see community members come out and say “this is wrong.” But we don’t have to live in doubtfulness, we can create solutions because there are solutions to tragic incidents.

E. Miller: Yeah, and that can prevent them, right?

Cage: Yeah, I think the best thing is, preventative measures, not reactionary measures.

E. Miller: Byronie, Lana, is there anything either of you would like to add about the state of things as to you right now?

McMahon: I think, sometimes, people underestimate the strength of the students today. I mean we just keep going and I hear a lot like at board meetings when we talk about all these conditions. I was there on the day when the woman got killed outside of Cleveland, and I think the resilience of my peers is just really profound in the fact that we are all able to just get up and move on the next day.

Rachielug: Yeah, I think that the community amongst students between different schools is very important and I think that it really helps me, personally, to hear stories from my friends at other schools, especially like Cleveland, about their experiences and what they’re going through. And I think it’s really important for everybody to be able to have an outlet where they can share what they’re feeling and just compare experiences with their peers. And I think that really helps a lot of people, especially me, just be able to keep going and be very resilient, like Byronie was saying.

E. Miller: I just wanted to talk real quick about what kind of conversations you have with your parents, your families, about this topic.

Cage: Yeah, I mean for me, I feel like mine is a little, my family is a little bit personalized. You know, my mother was a survivor of the Thurston shooting here in Oregon, which happened in the 1980s. School shootings weren’t that common.

E. Miller: Near Eugene?

Cage: Yeah. It really shocked a lot of the state, the country even. She’s a teacher, as well, in [Portland Public Schools]. You know with [the Uvalde, Texas shooting], like when that happened on the news, she cried, and she cried as a person who has been in a school shooting, who has physically watched people die. She cried about why the police just stood there and didn’t stop the shooter, why this even had to happen to begin with. So conversations like that happened in our house, as a survivor of gun violence, as a survivor of gun violence who was also a teacher. Our family hasn’t been too fond of guns because in our personalized experience and so that’s how the conversation’s really look, is that they can be infused with emotion.

McMahon: I think with my parents, definitely they’re scared. For them, I don’t think it’s something that they thought would happen. I also think there’s something to be said about [how] Cleveland’s, in general, in an upper class neighborhood where it is very uncommon to hear gunshots like at any level. And so I think for a lot of the students, certainly for a lot of the parents, it’s the first time they’ve ever experienced anything having to do with guns. Which is not the same for a lot of schools and not the same for a lot of parents from other schools. And, I mean, that’s definitely had an effect. Like they never thought this was going to happen. You know, sending their kids to Dunaway, then Sellwood, then Cleveland. They didn’t think living in Eastmoreland, that it was going to be like that. And I think that definitely, for me, has really exposed this truth. [For] the students at Jefferson, it’s not the same: like, this is not the first time that a lot of them have ever heard gunshots in their life. But talking to Cleveland freshman, it certainly is for them.

At school, I think we didn’t even, we didn’t even really talk about it in classes. We didn’t address it …

Rachielug: Yeah, I don’t think any, our school didn’t either.

E. Miller: Like in an assembly or…?

McMahon: Some teachers addressed it just being like, “Is everyone okay ready to work?” I mean some teachers, I think were more in depth, and then some teachers I know just didn’t say anything, and it’s just business as usual.

Rachielug: So personally, I don’t know if other teachers at Franklin did this, but none of my teachers addressed it. And I think that it might have been helpful… maybe not for me because I wasn’t there, but it would have been helpful for some people to maybe for us to all just take a breath and talk about it and address it. And not just try to sweep it under the rug and move on and say, “Okay, just kind of forget this happened.”

No, I think we really need to address it because especially we don’t know what our peers and what our teachers lived experiences are, and maybe this event was very triggering for them and it’s probably way more traumatizing for other people than it was for me.

Going back to that idea that me and Byronie were talking about, how it kind of didn’t feel real, it kind of felt like a movie and we were just able to move on from it. But I think that that might not be the case for some of my peers and maybe we don’t know how this affected them. And I think that we really need to take a look at that.

Even going back to [that] some teachers said something, some teachers didn’t, how can we expect a teacher to go through a trauma with students without any training? And also for many teachers, hopefully, they probably don’t have a lot of experience with it either. And they’re going through their own thing. And so it’s just so difficult without the training necessary, how can we expect teachers to have that conversation with kids? But also how can we expect kids to go without that support?

E. Miller: So what kind of solutions do you feel you’d like to see, or do you think Portland needs when it comes to safety on the roads, or gun violence, or… these are very big issues to solve, but…

McMahon: I’d call in the state legislature directly. We need money. Obviously, money doesn’t solve all of our problems, but certainly it allows for investments in student programs and programming allows for investments in our teachers who need support as well. And I want to underscore what Lana was saying about [how] teachers also go through these horrific traumatic events, and many times get very little space to consider and heal from what happened. Because I mean gun violence specifically is a pervasive issue and it’s not going to stop just because we implement one solution. It’s a cultural and social issue that is pervasive in the United States and it’s something that has to be addressed at all levels.

And there’s no one fix that I can ask, but I think investing in our public schools so that we have the resilience in our communities and the programs that we need, or the school buildings that we need, or the staff that we need. That’s how we make sure students feel safe in school. So money; state legislature, if you are listening to this, we need money!

Cage: So often we’re scrambling to create these policies or these measures or funding resources without actually asking that. We have different issues through different pockets. You know, the issues in Goose Hollow look a lot different than the issues in Parkrose. That’s just a fact. And so we can create a one-model- size resource, but at the end of the day different communities are going to need different things.

We have housing investments, we have the fact that people are struggling with poverty, we have the fact that people are struggling with mental health. And it looks different in different communities, whether that be social, political or cultural as well. So I cannot agree enough with what Byronie said about investments, but also how we invest in communities is really an important part of it.

E. Miller: So one of the ideas that’s come up in this solutions conversation, especially when it comes to gun violence and threats of gun violence, and something that PPS is looking into is bringing back school resource officers, which are armed police officers stationed in schools. PPS along with a couple other Portland area districts ended their SRO programs in 2020. Other districts around Oregon have also reconsidered or reworked their relationship with police in the last few years. And it’s also been a point of conversation nationally. So I wanted to ask all of you, what do you all think of having school resource officers in your school?

Cage:The conversation around public safety can’t be reactionary, and that is just what I’m seeing right now. We see gun violence is happening, therefore we have to put resource officers in. And there is a reason why they were taken out of our schools.

I am really scared because I feel like this conversation is being led predominantly by people who have money and power in the city, and my fear and my concern is that this isn’t a solution, this is not going to fix school safety. I mean we just saw Uvaldi. And I’m also very concerned for the fact that we know that the presence of school resource officers makes students, especially Black students, unsafe and not want to go to school.

The mere presence of police in school statistically lowers the amount that Black students, especially Black men, graduate, which is very concerning, especially when we talk about public safety. If people aren’t graduating and if people are not going to school, what do they end up doing?

McMahon: Yeah, I agree with what a lot of Danny said, I think that it’s a reactionary measure and it’s been proven that it doesn’t help. And I think [in] the district, our job is to make sure student outcomes are improved. That is our only job. And it’s important that we keep students safe, obviously. That’s part of them achieving successes, is them feeling safe in school. And so I think the biggest thing for me and the driver for me is, “does it make students feel safe?” and what I’ve heard almost categorically, is “No.” Me and Jonathan Garcia, the chief of staff at PBS [are] planning on meeting with students. We have our district student summit coming up where we’ll be talking with students on this issue. I’ve personally gotten to visit so many schools and consider this issue with students. And it’s just not conducive to the learning environment.

And also there’s been these other considerations around, well, do we need metal detectors? And I think that kids want to come to school and learn, they don’t want to come to school and be questioned or feel like they’re going through airport security. I think that sometimes we have to think about not only, “We want to keep students safe.” And I understand, wholly, why the Portland police and why a lot of our legislators and a lot of our public leaders are interested in this, and why parents [are]. They’re desperately worried for their children and that’s understandable, but at the same time that has to be balanced with [student success] and is this going to be detrimental to that? And my opinion is, “Yes.”

McMahon: I think that rather than just bringing police officers into schools, we need to have mental support for kids and students.

Elizabeth Miller: Do you feel like that’s sufficient in your schools right now? Is that something you would like to see more of? Whether it’s more counselors or more time to kind of go through things emotionally or socially? What, how are those resources right now at your schools?

McMahon: I’ve got [around] six counselors at Cleveland, and all of them are assigned hundreds of students. How on earth are you supposed to create a bond in which a student would feel comfortable to share their intimate experience after a traumatic event like a shooting, if they’ve probably met you once or twice.

And so I do think it comes in like an investment, unfortunately, I’ll come back to it – that bringing in money to the school district where we can have the actual resources needed to give students the resources that they need. And that doesn’t just come in [the form of] counselors. It also comes in like bringing outside resources into school buildings and because there’s so much in like community investment in organizations that work to help students and actually giving them space in buildings or having them come into buildings. And on top of that social workers and people that are specially trained in restorative justice and in gun safety and gun reactionary training. And so I think that a lot of those more specialized things that we just don’t necessarily have the resources to have in this district right now are really important.

Cage: I think a lot about the slogan “counselors, not cops.” You know what Byronie said about having six counselors, that’s very much the same in my school. It’s overcrowded. It was an issue during the pandemic where the six-foot rule was pretty much void when you’re at a school that’s over 2,000 students. And I definitely agree that those investments are absolutely needed and not just in the sense of education and the education space. I also just think in the sense of a general investment in the general population.

Rachielug: And just returning to what we were talking about with SROs, you have to take into account how we think about, in the four years that they’ve been gone from schools, and all the reasons that they were taken out. One, there is no relationship coming in. Many students have little to no relationship with any police officers. And then also just beyond that, there is this stigmatization around police and there is this impression of who they are, whether that’s granted or not, that I think really needs to be considered when forcing a community into taking on this new person that they’re not necessarily sure [of] or trust?

Elizabeth Miller: Do you think there are some students who want officers there, or do you think it’s more of parents/guardians/district officials having their own idea of what they want?

Cage: You know, PTAs, I think are a great example. You know often those are led by middle to upper class white people, especially middle upper class white women dominate the PTA field. That is just the general truth. We’ve seen at these schools how the PTAs want this, I think it’s very important to talk about who wants this, right? Because not all communities have had bad relationships with police officers. Police… it was just MLK Day… to talk about the fact that the Black community has been brutalized by the police, and not every community has that same history. And so for some people it is very easy for them to go, “Oh, well I want police officers.” Because you don’t have that negative history.

And I think the conversation around who is leading this is really important because if you look, it is a lot of middle to upper class white people. It’s the political action groups who have large amounts of money and wealth and heavily influence our politics in this city.

E. Miller: And Byronie you’re sitting at every school board meeting, so I’m sure you’ve heard,

McMahon: Yes! All of that. I get emails from community members all the time, but I’ll be honest, I have also heard from both sides and I have seen people from all walks of life who have advocated for both sides of this issue. And I mean we recently had a school board meeting at Jefferson in which we had public testimony from members of the Jeff community being like, “No, you need SROs back in schools and we need our students safe.” Because Jefferson… I mean yes, Cleveland went through it, but Jefferson has had multiple instances. And I have heard from community members, they’re saying that we do need a solution, and if that’s SROs, then that’s what they’re going to advocate for.

But I think still what Danny said about how comfortable you are and what experiences you’ve had is really important. Let’s be real, Cleveland is in an upper middle class neighborhood. We have a population of nearly 80% white students. And that does make a difference in how people view the issue. And I guess what I implore everyone to think about when considering... and also like this binary of “yes to SROs” or “no.” I don’t necessarily love… but I think when you’re considering that issue specifically, I encourage everyone to think about, “do I think this?” “Why do I think this? Do I think this because I’ve only ever had good interactions with police officers,” and to be really critical about why you choose the stance you do. Because at the end of the day if we implement an SRO Program, that affects everyone equally, everyone gets an SRO in some capacity.

E. Miller: If you could talk to Superintendent Guerrero… I know you all probably have because you’re very involved. Byronie is on the board. But if you could talk to the superintendent or Mayor Wheeler in Portland, what would you tell them when it comes to safety and security? And then the second part is, what do you want from the adults in your school?

McMahon: I did talk to him about this and I said that I don’t want students getting lost in this conversation. I think immediately parents get really involved, which of course they should, it’s the safety of their students. Community members get really involved, organizations get really involved. This is a question that should not be answered by anyone except students. And we should consider a lot of different perspectives from a lot of different students and really have students weigh in on this and also collaborate with adults because adults should be a part of this conversation as well. But we, I think student voices should be prioritized.

Cage: You know, it comes to a conversation of: can we even still have these goals and these priorities of our Black and Indigenous students with SROs in school? That would be one of my main focuses. And again, also as a budgeting issue, where is this money supposed to come [from] for police? Last budget session, you know, that was a very heated budget session. The union was in there, every single budget meeting. It was blue, and those were very heated debates with sometimes… Byronie, you remember with community members sometimes yelling sometimes, interaction between board members and community members, staff members and community letters. It got very heated and that was with the money that we did have with SRO Funds.

McMahon: Yeah, the budget’s only getting smaller.

Cage: And so now we’re expected to pay for police when we’re struggling to add an extra or even have a library teacher. I’ve had the pleasure of, in my role, visiting some of the schools and some of them don’t even have an assistant principal or even a principal.

McMahon:This is going to be a very interesting budget year, because we might just not have the money to do what we need to do, let alone what we want to do. And so I think that’s the consideration, like if you’re going to put school districts in the spot where they have to consider, “hey, are we going to be able to maintain the same number of [full-time equivalent staff],” and then you also want us to fix all of the issues surrounding student safety. We don’t have the physical financial resources to do that.

And if we want students feeling safe, which I really hope that everyone does, then there needs to be a clear investment in school districts where we reach the most students. Because as I was saying, we don’t reach every student, we don’t reach every kid through school, but we reach a lot. And I think there’s a really profound impact that investing really heavily in schools this year is going to make, because we’re still recovering from the pandemic and we’re also now experiencing higher than we ever have before, all of these student safety issues.

E. Miller: Thank you all so much for being a part of this conversation. I really appreciate it.

D. Miller: Now we’re going to get the perspective from one generation up: Leslie Kosoff is the president of the Parent-Teacher Association at Cleveland High School. Heidi Schultz is the co-chair of the Safety Committee at the Parent-Teacher-Student Association at McDaniel High School. Welcome to you both.

Before we get to specifics, I’m curious to hear from both of you about just what stood out to you in this conversation with Lana, Danny and Byronie? Heidi Schulz, first; what most struck you?

Heidi Schultz: Well, I think first and foremost, I just can’t believe what these students do have to think about on a safety level when they’re going to school, and it breaks my heart. And that gets me first and foremost as a parent, because we should be doing better by these kids. They were amazingly articulate and I really have to hit on some of the points that they made, the mental aspects and the anxiety, you know, how this affects them. I really appreciated hearing about taking preventative measures as opposed to reactionary measures when we try to figure out solutions to safety.

D. Miller: All of which I’d love to dig into with both of you as we go forward here. But first Leslie Kosoff, what stood out to you in what we heard from these three remarkable young people?

Kosoff: Yeah, they were all remarkable and their remarks were… I mean they were heartbreaking to hear and also very inspiring, because they are solution-based and they have something to say and we should be listening, because it’s very different than what goes on at a normal PTA Meeting between parents and not having the kids involved.

D. Miller: That’s a really important point. How different is what you just heard from what you hear at a normal PTA meeting?

Kosoff: Well I think you have parents that are reactionary. They’re terrified. I mean I know when I got the text that there was a shooting at Cleveland and I got it from another parent, I immediately ran down there and it was just absolutely terrifying to have those… to think that these kids are sitting in the classroom thinking that maybe a shooter is in the building. Is the shooter inside? It’s just terrifying…

D. Miller: You were saying that it was parents who were talking about that, days later, I guess, at a PTA meeting.

Kosoff: Yeah and just within the community, not necessarily at a PTA meeting, but just a very reactionary moment of what is the school doing? What are the police doing? This reactionary stance that you stay in because you’re absolutely terrified, as opposed to hearing them, wanting to know what we can do to be proactive and not reactive. And I think that that’s the path forward that we have to take.

D. Miller: It’s really striking as you’re describing that, because it almost seems like what you’re saying is that the young people, the 15, 16, 17, 18 year-olds, are being more thoughtful in a productive way than their parents are.

Kosoff: I think so. I think that might take away from listening to these kids for the last 30 minutes.

D. Miller: That does sound like a problem.

Kosoff: Mhm. I think it is.

D. Miller: Because it’s the parents, basically, or the teachers or the administrators or the mayor or law enforcement who are still in charge. But you’re saying that the kids are not being listened to enough?

Kosoff: Yeah. Within days of the shooting [at] Cleveland there was a petition going around to get the SROs back in school, and that was in days. So the initial response from at least one group of parents was, “We need cops back in the schools.” And I’m hearing the kids say, “Well, maybe not so fast. Not so fast.” Just listening to Byronie talk about the counselors, that’s… with the number of students at Cleveland, that’s 300 plus students per counselor.

We’re post-pandemic. Everyone knows that there are issues that are going on because of this gap in normal community interaction. And yet where’s the response to that? There isn’t. Have they increased counselors? No. Do we need to do that? I think the answer is clear that it’s yes, we do. We need more counselors, more attention to these kids’ mental state. And to hear them talk about, like, “it’s just normal” or “I didn’t have a real response.” They’re having a response, but it’s all being internalized. There’s no way…you can’t experience trauma and it not have an effect on you.

D. Miller: Right. Just that that line struck me, it was they all said it in different ways, but one of the things that Lana said was, “I feel like I should feel worse. But generally I feel ok.”

Heidi Schultz, there are a lot of overlapping issues here. But just one binary is, we can look at security inside schools and security outside school. So if we take these one at a time, how would you assess the security situation inside McDaniel High School?

Schultz: So at our school, we’re out on 82nd Avenue, NE 82nd Avenue. And we’ve got a long list of safety concerns that are going on around the school campus, aside from any safety concerns inside the campus. So our principal, he set up two different meetings with our community. At the first meeting last month, he specifically talked about what they are doing within the campus in the school to keep our kids safe. And it was a very eye opening, educational evening to hear what they are up against.

So then what we come up against is what’s going on off property, and that’s where our safety committee has tried to step in and help our administration with safety concerns around the school that they can’t get to. And even though on their lunch breaks, our principal walks up and down 82nd Avenue trying to check on kids. So would teachers, on their time off. So yeah, there are two different things handled two different ways.

D. Miller: When you said it was really eye opening, in terms of the off-campus security issues, what are you talking about? Can you give us a sense for what surprised you or what shocked you?

Schultz: You mean for what is happening off-campus?

D. Miller: Right. You said that you got that presentation and that it was really eye opening.

Schultz: Right, and what I was saying [was] “eye opening,” was basically the procedures that our principal and school staff go through every day when those kids are coming and going to make sure it’s students that are coming in the building and nobody else, and all of that kind of thing. Where I am focused, where we are focused with our safety committee, are the alarming things that are going on across the street from the school, two blocks, one block from the school. We have drive-by shootings, the sex trafficking is rampant and these kids are walking by it all the time, day and night. So those are just a few… then you have speeding. It’s a long list.

D. Miller: And one of the issues here in Portland, which is not the case in a lot of cities of Portland’s size or larger, is the confusing jurisdictional issue here that the city of Portland doesn’t really control Portland Public Schools. It’s not that way in a lot of other big cities. How does that complicate the question of safety off campus?

Schultz: Well, the way our principal talks about it, it’s beyond their jurisdiction. So then it’s a matter of, “okay, now, what do we do?” And so it’s a matter… we’ve been talking with different community organizations, we’ve been having great communication with the City of Portland’s Community Safety Division, just to try to figure out other solutions. Where we are at on 82nd, ideally we would love to have more of a police presence up and down 82nd to deter some of the criminal activity going on. We can’t have that right now. And based on the second meeting we had in January where it was the [police] commander of East Precinct, we had somebody from human trafficking. We had somebody from [the] office of violence prevention and also from Tri-Met. And so all of those organizations, they were telling us what their situation is. And we were explaining to them what we need to have happen and how do we all come together to make something happen with the limited resources that we have?

D. Miller: You’re talking about wanting more Portland police officers outside of your high school, McDaniel High School in Northeast Portland. What about the question that Elizabeth Miller posed to the three students in the first half of the show, about whether or not to have armed police officers inside schools, so-called school resource officers?

Schultz: Yeah, I feel, I feel that the more funding to help kids with their mental health is huge. At our school, there’s a big push in community, everybody talking to everybody, you know, building those bonds with the teachers so that if you see something, you say something, that kind of a thing. Yeah, I kind of stepped back from the SRO debate because I’m more focused on police presence dealing with some real serious stuff outside our schools.

D. Miller: We did ask listeners on social media in the last few weeks, what they think should be done about school shootings and their opinions on school resource officers. We got a variety of opinions.

Drew Kelly from Portland said, “School resource officers have been shown to target POC children, raised the level of mistrust and obviously don’t stop school shootings. Hire more school counselors so the students can have people who care about them and the necessary time to help them.”

Mike in Oregon said, “The parents need to actually parent their children and be consistent with rewarding and discipline. Schools are at the mercy of how well people actually teach their kids when they’re in the early stages of growing up. I remember when I was young, if I did anything remotely stupid, it was dealt with with a swift consequence which I continued to learn from.”

And finally, Bonnie McDonald wrote, “I see a need for more school counselors who have studied child and teen development and have a toolbox of skills to use besides violence. You know, if there needs to be a gun on campus, keep it in a safe and a designated trained person can be authorized to get it if necessary. But no, cops do not prevent the unknown from happening. Compassionate, trained and wise adults offer more. Remember the coach who disarmed the student and then hugged him.”

Leslie Kosoff, I want to go back to where we started. What you heard in those student voices and which you say you don’t often hear among parents. One of the things that these students said is they really want their voices ‒ and not just these three ‒ but all of their fellow students’ voices, to be prioritized, to be listened to first and foremost when it comes to making really serious policies. What would that actually look like?

Kosoff: Well, maybe, PPS needs to organize some kind of student summit around these issues. I mean, this is the appropriate time to do so. Invite the student leaders and the rest of the population, get counselors, get the police, get everyone that could possibly be involved and organize some kind of summit so that all of these voices can be heard, and then we can have the panel of experts. I mean, when we had our safety meeting, it was quite clear from the police that they don’t have the money for SROs and SROs are probably not going to be on the drawing board because they simply don’t have the staff for it.

So then what’s the answer? I think having a summit and getting everyone together and trying to come up with these proactive solutions and the governor has said that she wants education to be a priority. Well, how about stepping up now and making it a priority, the mental health of all of these kids involved.

I mean, my kids even told me they don’t like sitting by the door because then they’re the first desk of a school shooter. That just breaks my heart, when I hear about something like that. So how about: get together a summit, and listen to everyone and get some committees going to address these issues. We know they’re there. [At] Cleveland, our principal, Joanne Watkins, and the staff has done an incredible job. They have had… I mean this was supposed to be like the new year where everything starts out fine, and between September to December, we’ve had the two shootings that were so… one outside Cleveland [and] Franklin involving the school and then we had the poor woman that was killed by a truck.

They’re dealing with a lot, and they need help and support, and that’s where I think the state needs to step in and step up and start funneling some money towards the schools if they want these to be safer places. They’re educators, they’re not police, they’re not counselors. They’re educators and we need to bring in more money to support them.

D. Miller: Heidi Schultz, before we say goodbye, what have you heard specifically from teachers about all these issues?

Schultz: I mean, I haven’t. I haven’t had a lot of one-on-one interactions with the teachers. I know that they’re working time and a half to not only educate, bur to also keep our students safe. I mean, our principal said that it used to be that they would focus on education first, but right now in our schools, they have to focus on the childrens’ safety first and education second. I mean that’s terribly unfortunate. I can speak to the kids … my son for example. The Glenhaven Park, which is right next to the school, he had a car drive by waving a gun at him. I mean I’m 53, I’ve never witnessed anything like that. So yeah, it’s just heartbreaking.

D. Miller: Heidi Schultz is the co-chair of the Safety Committee of the Parent-Teacher Student Association at McDaniel High School in Northeast Portland, Leslie Kosoff is the PTA president of Cleveland High School in Southeast Portland.

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