“Our Voices Matter! Students from Allentown, Emmaus and
Parkland School District speak their truths!”
What are your thoughts on the funding of police, and
the policing in schools?
(min. 15:09 and min. 59:50)
- The money that’s being used to place police in our schools should be used to get more counselors, more people there to help the kids.
- We’re there to learn . . . there’s a certain disconnect between teacher and student in the school that people don’t understand, and that fact that you have police there, I already don’t feel comfortable.
- I think there needs to be more counselors to help these kids.
- These kids grow up in harsh environments, these kids have trauma, and you look at them, and you just blame them for acting out.
- You don’t need police, you need help, the kids need help, the police aren’t doing anything, they’re just standing around getting paid for nothing.
- We need help, we need counselors to talk to.
- Those funds should be used for the community . . . not for the police to do nothing.
- I really think schools should consider . . . hiring POC counselors . . . probably don’t feel comfortable talking to a counselor not of their race, feeling that they can’t relate.
- Our counselors aren’t even trained properly to address these situations. Literally all they do is help schedule our classes and help get a study hall and basically saying, O, my job’s done.
- That’s not what we need. We come to them trying to confide in them, trying to have them help us when they don’t know how to, and it’s not necessarily their fault. Because it’s not to them in their job description.
- Your life at home affects your life at school . . . and that’s not fair to students that they don’t have anybody to come to.
- All that money could go into helping students becoming better.
- Allen is notorious for fighting and there aren’t that many to justify that amount of money for SRO’s to be in that school.
- We need to give our counselors that proper training so that they are able to adjust the situations that their students bring to them.
- “Resource” officers? They don’t give us resources. They’re not there to help us.
- They’re literally to just track us from the school to the prison . . . You are written up . . . arrested on paper . . . labeled for the rest of your life.
- They’re not nice, they’re looking down on us . . . They can’t relate to us, they don’t know the type of anger we have, the type of things we go through at home.
- They say that they help, but they don’t help.
- What if a child does resist, because they’re scared, they’re going to retaliate like that, put a knee on a kid’s neck . . . somebody who has no knowledge about how to control their actions because they are not taught to.
- There are literally examples of officers in school to protect the students doing absolutely nothing.
- If you’re constantly in my face . . . harassing us . . .
- I don’t feel safe with you here.
- You’re not distributing the money evenly or fairly.
- Give me facts, give me data that they have helped improve the safety.
- I feel safer at home than I do at school.
- What would they teach us? How when you are stopped by the police you can try not to be killed?