PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Class was canceled Tuesday at Cleveland High School after police say a 16-year-old student was shot outside the school the previous day. Even though kids returned to school on Wednesday with increased security, some students still don’t feel safe on campus.
Cleveland junior Olivia Andriessen said she and many of her friends were genuinely scared to return to school. She also recalled the moments on Monday afternoon when her school’s lockdown alarm sounded.
“I just had a feeling it wasn’t a drill and so did everyone else,” she said. “All of a sudden my friend Sydney texted me and she said ‘I hear gunshots and other people are hearing it too’, and right at that point, I realized like, this is not a drill. Like this is something that’s actually happening. For about 10 minutes we just sat in the dark. Everyone was really stressed out.”
Andriessen told KOIN 6 News when the lockdown was over and classes were dismissed, students were turning to social media and news channels to find out what happened.
“We had to go around and dig for information because no one was telling us anything,” she said.
Portland Public Schools said they’re considering permanent safety solutions in response to the recent violence at schools.
In an interview with the district’s head of communications on Tuesday, KOIN 6 News learned the school would have police officers and additional “safety associates” when students returned to class Wednesday.
The district said safety associates build relationships with students and intervene in unsafe situations. Andriessen commented on what it’s like to see them at school.
“They have like little polo shirts on and just their jeans and they have their walkie-talkies, but they don’t really look like real security guards. Like if you could imagine what a real security guard looks like. They just walk around school and ask for kids’ hall passes,” she said.
In November, after a second shooting outside Jefferson High School, the district said they would accelerate the timeline for installing security cameras at Jefferson. They say now the same goes for Cleveland. However, a KOIN 6 News crew drove around both campuses Wednesday and didn’t spot any cameras at Jefferson, but did discover one at Cleveland.
Andriessen says as far as she knows and has seen, Cleveland only has one exterior camera. However, when KOIN 6 asked the district about it they said there’s more than one but wouldn’t say where they’re located.
PPS officials also refused to answer how many cameras each school has and when they are expected to be installed.
At a press conference on Wednesday, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and Portland Police Chief Chuck Lowell discussed the possible return of Student Resource Officers.
“If there’s one place people should feel safe in the community above all else, it’s the kids in our schools and they clearly don’t and they’re clearly exposed to criminal violence and we have an obligation to work together to do something about it,” Wheeler said.
“I have had some discussions with PPS around what we can do to keep children safe in the short term but there are some probably longer-term conversations that we’ve just started, what a return to schools would look like, it’s very early in those discussions,” Lovell added. “We’re excited to have any discussions that might lead to a return of officers in schools.”