To the editor:

I’m writing to you about the issue of safety and the School Resource Officers that I’ve seen in the news lately. I am a graduate of T.C. Williams, now Alexandria City High School, and I have family who currently attend Alexandria City Public Schools. I am an immigrant. My family members are immigrants. We keep seeing in the news that minorities don’t support police or safety in schools. Where are they getting this information? Nobody has asked us!

I feel safer having a police officer in the schools. The administration cannot take care of everything. My own family has experienced bullying, and it feels like nobody is listening. My brother got hit by another student while at school. My mother took him to the hospital as he was suffering from pain in his head due to the student hitting him multiple times on his head.

My mom feels like nobody is taking her seriously due to her limited English abilities. We feel the treatment Latinos get with city services is as if we are not being heard. We feel as if they are putting us down due to our lack of the English language and maybe even our class in this city as essential workers, cleaners and restaurant workers. We strongly feel Latinos are being left out and not being heard and we feel that something needs to be done.

Nobody asks us anything. It is almost like we don’t exist. My mom has had previous conversations about bullying with other parents who also feel that nothing is being done to prevent school bullying. It’s also really sad how they aren’t even representing Latinos much anywhere.

ACPS has a pretty big quantity of Latino students and not all schools do much to even talk about our heritage or culture. As a former ACPS student, I barely even got to experience celebrations of Hispanic Heritage Month and, honestly, this was pretty disappointing. It made me really upset and I can remember my past classmates being mad at this too. Only our teachers were able to hear and understand us.

I’m tired of seeing all these videos and pages being uploaded and posts made on social media about the fights and also seeing ACPS or council members or leaders saying “we will take care of it” but the very next day another fight will break out. The Hispanic community has been in this area forever. We came here for a better life. We can speak for ourselves.

-Lesly Cruz, Alexandria