Shootings outside of three Portland high schools this school year have left students injured and district officials seeking solutions. Last month, district officials met with city officials, including Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and police chief Chuck Lovell.
Putting police officers back in Portland schools has been named as a possible idea to curb the violence. They’ve been out of Portland schools since 2020.
Missing from the public conversation so far has been students. OPB talked to four seniors at three different Portland high schools about safety and solutions.
On recent shootings outside of three Portland high schools
Byronie McMahon serves on the school board for Portland Public Schools as its student representative. She’s also a senior at Cleveland High School in Southeast Portland, where in December, a student was shot and injured just outside the school on a Monday afternoon.
McMahon recalled sitting in class after the school went into lockdown, not knowing if it was an actual threat or another drill. While McMahon didn’t hear any gunshots, she said her sister, a freshman, did.
“The emotion that I remember the most is waiting for my sister,” McMahon said. “I think it’s just heartbreaking to hear that the younger kids at my school and my own sibling had to go through that experience, something that no kid should obviously ever go through.”
Senior Lana Rachielug left Franklin High School before a shooting during a basketball tournament in January. She saw a video of fans in the Franklin gym, reacting to the shooting, on Snapchat.
“Seeing the panic and everybody running out of the gym, it was just like watching a movie or a TV show,” senior Lana Rachielug said. “It didn’t really click for me that this is my high school that this is happening in.”
The week after the shooting, Rachielug said a conversation with a teacher gave her a new perspective.
“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 priorities to keep them safe,” Rachielug said.
Some students at other schools found out about the shootings from social media. Danny Cage is a senior at Grant High School in Northeast Portland. He said any incident has a broader effect on students.
“I know people, their sense of security — mine included — do drop, even when it doesn’t happen at your school,” Cage said.
On whether students “feel safe” at school
Students say that feeling safe isn’t just about feeling physically safe but also feeling safe mentally and emotionally.
Despite shootings outside of their schools, McMahon and Rachielug said they continue to feel safe at school. They say it speaks to the resilience of students growing up today.
“I think that it really didn’t fully hit me,” Rachielug said.
Portland senior high school students Danny Cage, Byronie McMahon, and Lana Rachielug at OPB in Portland, Ore. on January 27, 2023. Students talked to OPB about safety at their schools.
Elizabeth Miller / OPB
Rachielug said another important part of feeling safe at school is having a community and people to talk to when you need help or want to talk.
Hazel Beard is a senior at Cleveland, where she leads the Cleveland Alliance for Racial Equity, an elective class that includes 35 sophomores, juniors, and seniors. The class prioritizes including Black, Indigenous, and other students of color.
In the class, students talk about race and current events happening in Portland and around the world. As an Asian-American woman at a school that’s majority white, Beard said both personal experiences and events she’s seen portrayed in the media have negatively impacted her mental health.
“In terms of physical safety, I would say I feel pretty secure,” Beard said. “Emotional safety? Definitely not.”
But similar to McMahon and Rachielug, Beard said she feels desensitized to threats and violent experiences she’s encountered as a student.
“I feel more safe now as a senior since I’ve experienced all this, compared to when I was a freshman and I was like, first coming in, and this was crazy and I was like, ‘oh my god, all this problematic stuff is happening and I don’t know what to do!’” Beard said.
“Now it’s like I’m accustomed to it.”
Students said the lack of feeling safe and secure may also impede their academic success.
“How are you supposed to learn math if you’re scared there’s going to be a school shooting?” McMahon said. “I think, generally, there’s always this disconnect with students and I think that it makes it even worse when there’s questions around safety — whether that being in that very physical way, or whether that being in a more mental aspect.”
Students say having police officers might further complicate that feeling of safety for some students.
On school resource officers
The seniors OPB spoke to did not have experience with school resource officers. But when it comes to the current conversation around police officers returning to school buildings, students are concerned that it’s a reactionary proposal to a gun violence issue affecting the whole city
“There is a reason why they were taken out of our schools,” Cage said. “I’m really scared because I feel like this conversation is being led predominantly by people who have money and power in this city.”
Research on the effectiveness of school resource officers varies. While some studies show that police officers correlate to a drop in the number of violent incidents in a school, other studies show an increase in discipline and arrests made in schools where officers are present.
McMahon said improving student outcomes is the district’s main priority, and bringing officers into school won’t help that cause.
“The biggest thing for me and the driver for me has been, ‘well does it make students feel safe?’” And what I’ve heard, almost categorically, is ‘no’,” McMahon said.
“It’s just not conducive to the learning environment.”
It is not clear that having police officers in a school reduces school shootings. In last year’s shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, The Texas Tribune reports that 376 police officers responded to the deadly shooting, but none of them acted immediately. After an initial push to remove school resource officers in 2020, districts across the country are talking about bringing in officers, including in Seattle and Boston.
In the years since officers came out of Portland schools, a lot has happened to the public perception of law enforcement in Oregon and across the country. McMahon said that’s an obstacle district leaders need to think about.
“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 are not necessarily sure or trust,” McMahon said.
At Cleveland, Beard said the CARE class on racial equity had a conversation about SROs after the shooting outside of Cleveland.
“I think many people were conflicted about how they felt,” Beard said.
Beard says she personally agrees with others who say that having school resource officers would not make her feel safer. She worries about the impact on students of color at her school, who she said already feel disproportionately targeted by current school security.
“There are several students in CARE who feel targeted by security for doing the same things that white kids are doing,” she said.
The students OPB spoke to acknowledged that some members of the school community have had good experiences or connections to police, and hearing from many voices is important in any decisions made about the future of school safety.
“I get emails from community members all the time,” McMahon, the student board rep, said. “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.”
Students say there’s broad support for more mental health resources, including counselors with a manageable number of students, so they can create meaningful bonds with students.
On conversations with friends, classmates, and parents about safety
The PPS students have had different conversations with their families about safety and gun violence in schools.
Danny Cage’s mom was a survivor of the 1998 shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield. She’s also a teacher. Cage said she cried learning about the shooting at Uvalde.
“That’s how the conversations really look, they can be induced with emotion,” Cage said.
Among students, McMahon said the conversation hasn’t really continued. She said it feels like yet another situation students have had to deal with and move on from.
“It affected them, but so did the pandemic, and so did not going to school for years, and so did having an education barrier when they came back to school, and they were asked to move on from those things,” McMahon said.
On what adults and elected leaders can do
If there’s one thing elected leaders in Oregon can do to better support students, it’s giving schools more money, McMahon said.
“Obviously money doesn’t solve all of our problems,” McMahon said, “But certainly it allows for investments in student programs, and programming allows for investments in our teachers who need support as well.”
Making sure those funds support specific community needs is important too, Cage added.
“Different communities are going to need different things,” Cage said. “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.”
When it comes to school safety measures and the conversation around police officers in schools, students are pushing to be included. PPS officials have been working on that, setting up conversations with groups of students, including a small group conversation with Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero this past December.
Cleveland student Hazel Beard wasn’t able to attend that conversation, but she wants to make sure adults — including parents — ask their children for feedback.
“We are growing up in an age where lockdown drills, lock-ins, earthquake drills, a lot of this stuff is our reality, and we are used to it,” Beard said. “And I think for a lot of parents, they cannot understand how this feels.”
Beard said her family is against bringing officers back into school, but she sees a lot of attention given to parents who do want officers restored. And while she respects the differences in opinion among adults, she wants those adults to hear what their children have to say, too.
“I think it’s done out of love, but I really think that they need to listen to how their child or how their students really feel and then rally to that.”
Thanks to Byronie McMahon for helping organize the conversation with students.