PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philadelphia teachers are facing the continuing concern that some of their young students may be resorting to gun violence. When Philadelphia police last week shot and killed a 12-year-old boy who they said had a semiautomatic handgun, the incident raised once again questions about how young children get guns in the first place.
Teachers hear things, says Joacim Fuentes-Rojas, who taught at McKinley Elementary for the last three years. He says children often have access to guns through adults in their household.
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“I’ve seen it as early as sixth grade. Those are 12-year-olds. And it’s very scary,” he said. “I’ve definitely heard conversations of kids as young as third and fourth grade that know where the weapon is in their home.”
Fuentes-Rojas teaches at Frankford High School now. He says he grew up in the Kensington-Frankford area of the city.
“We just have had a long history of having those things be available even at a young age, which is very scary.”
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As a teacher, he says, he’s required to report possible neglect if a child has access to a gun.
"If I were to hear a student say there’s a readily available weapon in my mother’s or father’s nightstand, then I feel like there needs to be a possibility for a ChildLine call to say 'Listen, there is a possibility of neglect in this area because this student has access to this weapon.'"
The wider challenge for educators is to listen for details about why kids consider guns an option at all.
“The kids are very angry, and they’re not getting the support that they need,” said Miranda Thompson, an art teacher at Constitution High School. “They were angry before the pandemic and scared before the pandemic, and I think it’s gotten worse.”
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Thompson has experienced gun violence — as a student, when a sixth-grade classmate was shot; as a parent, alerted to a child carrying a gun in a backpack; and as a teacher, when one of her students survived being shot twice in the same year.
Thompson says she encourages her students to express their fears and pain through art — “just to release some of that pain and fear and anguish that they have.”
Only then, she says, can you begin to address academics.
“How do you push a kid to care about chemistry or Shakespeare or Ukraine or whatever when they’re really dealing with impossible problems?”
The artist statement attached to the drawing above reads, in part:
“My artwork is a picture of an African American boy surrounded by police with no eyes. I made the police have no eyes because police officers these days have no eyes when it comes to seeing injustice. … I put the young boy at the center surrounded by smaller police heads that all look the same to show they are one against many.”
Thompson says it helps her students to know that she listens and cares, even if she doesn’t have solutions.
“They see so much news paying attention to people dying halfway around the world, and they are worried about this,” she said. “But they’ve also lived, growing up in a city, where people have been dying around them their whole lives.”
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