Trigger Warning: Talk of gun violence and school shootings

With the new safety rules in place for the 23-24 school year, we as a team have decided to unpack them and give honest opinions from everyone around our Roosevelt community. Specifically we wanted to address the new lanyard requirements and yes, we understand that this isn’t just a Roosevelt rule, it’s district wide. According to an email sent to students and parents, PPS says that it’s a “safety measure” and not much more, but to put it very blatantly, they believe it will stop violence and honestly, school shootings. 

There have been 386 school shootings nationwide since 1999 and the most happening in these past few years. That’s roughly 17 shootings per year. 17 groups of young children whose lives were put in grave danger. PPS thought “yes, making students wear their ID and Lanyard will solve the problem”, when in actuality, the person shooting up the school will most likely be a student and will most likely have their ID. I know that this is a really harsh way to put it, but if we don’t talk about it, or if we tiptoe around the problem, it will just keep going and there will be more and more damage done. “Honestly, as a senior, I’m tired of the thought in the back of my mind that says I might not make it home that day, and displaying lanyards isn’t going to fix that. I’m tired of PPS making empty thoughtless decisions that impact the students so immensely. The Portland Public Schools Assistant Superintendent, Margaret Calvert said, “One of the benefits of having an ID is if you see someone entering a school building that isn’t displaying an ID.” In addition, Calvert said, “That would encourage someone to engage and be proactive like, ‘welcome to the school, how can I help you?’ With Roosevelt at around 1376 students, roughly the same with Ida B Wells, around 1000 for Benson, 2026 for Lincoln, 1625 for Cleveland, 2124 for Grant, 543 for Jefferson, and 1146 for McDaniel there is no way that you can stop each student and check for a lanyard every single day. So why does PPS think this will work? We sat down with KD Parmen, Principal of Roosevelt High School, and talked with them about our concerns. We recognize that the lanyard rule is new and a lot of people are agitated but most of the questions we asked were met with incomplete answers and feelings of defense and harm. We felt like she thought they were a personal attack on her and this school, but that is the complete opposite of the conversation we were trying to have. We made a point of telling them that we weren’t trying to create conflict and if it came across that way it was a misunderstanding on our part. One good thing that they brought up was the fact that there is a 13 point safety plan that the students were not told about. I tried to look up the safety plan so I could include it but I originally couldn’t find it anywhere

The day after the interview there was a new Trivory post about the 13 point plan that would be put in place at the next sporting event (check Trivory for more info).  While this article got slightly derailed by what occurred in our attempt to learn more about the new safety measures, we believe deeply that Roosevelt students and students district wide should have more input in their own safety. This topic does bring up many emotions about past school violence, including the lockdown of 2021. We don’t want to bring up too much about that event but we might revisit it in the future.