Students Put A Megaphone To Their Message After Police Search
DENVER (CBS4) - In the hours leading up to their big moment on Thursday night, several students from Rise Up Community School in Denver felt pressure as they practiced their speeches.
"(I'm) excited to put a voice out there for our school," 17-year-old Mary Jimenez said.
A CBS4 crew was there as Jimenez and a few of her schoolmates practiced in front of a podium and read the messages they were getting ready to deliver at a Denver Public Schools board meeting. For days they had been preparing the speeches about what they say were overly aggressive actions by police.
"Just take a deep breath and slow down," an instructor told one of the students.
"Hi I'm Mary. I'm here from Rise Up Community School and I'm here to make a change ..."
"School should be a place where students can feel secure ..."
"Because we are students of color and low income we get harassed and pushed around ..."
The students say last month's confrontation with Denver police officers who came into their school on 23rd and Broadway made what they already experience worse. Many adults think they're just troublemakers and judge them by how they look.
"They're wrong," said Jimenez, who is a junior at the school.
Rise Up's principal says on April 24 officers pulled their guns on a teacher while they were looking for an attempted murder suspect who attends the school. However, police claim no weapons were drawn inside the school during the search.
A student also said police harassed him because his tattoos.
It turned out the student police wanted to question about the crime wasn't there.
The incident frightened both staff and students, and now many of the students don't want to come back to the school. Enrollment is normally 120, but since the incident a staff member says it has dropped to approximately 30 students.
Once the days of practice were through and Thursday night's DPS meeting got going, Jimenez wound up being one of the first students to speak. She told the school board she was tired of feeling afraid at school.
The adults in the audience listened, the first step in Jimenez's opinion, and applause followed her speech.
"Listening to someone's story and truly listening can change somebody's perspective," she said.
After the meeting, DPS Superintendant Tom Boasberg told Rise Up students and staff the situation should not have happened and that the school has the district's 100 percent support in the investigation into what happened. That investigation is being led by Denver's Department of Public Safety.
