Philadelphia School Officers No Longer Feel Safe in Schools

The coronavirus pandemic has drained a lot of resources out of many industries over the past year and a half. Companies have had to let go of employees left and right because they could not financially stay afloat during the beginning. Now here we are months and months later and they are struggling even more because of the lack of staff.

Take our school districts for example. Officers are saying that they feel as if they lack the resources needed to protect the students and themselves. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, because they are so understaffed, no one feels safe. The kids don't feel safe. The staff doesn't feel safe and neither do the officers.

Violence has been significantly increasing in not just Philadelphia as a whole this year, but in the schools as well. Did you know kids are bringing guns into the school? It is getting extremely scary. There aren't even enough officers to keep up with all the fights and violence. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, officers have expressed the fear they have walking into school buildings without bulletproof vests.

Some of the school officers are forced to leave some of their duties of keeping people safe, to pick up the slack in other areas of the school where there are shortages. Police officers shouldn't be signing people in at the front desk and running around doing the jobs of the administration staff. However, that is what it has come to.

This breaks my heart. I have family in the Philly school system and to think that their lives could possibly be in danger every day is scary. The fact that it has become normal for there to be violence in the classrooms and there isn't much being done about it makes me want to never let my kids go to school in person.