Graphic By Joaquin Dorado-Mariscal

By Peter Romano
Veteran’s Park has been a place for students to go during lunch for a long time, but there have always been problems with the park’s close proximity.
The original issues still stand. Students venture out to the park before school, during lunch and during class to smoke illegal substances and settle disputes with violent confrontations.
The students who go to the park during lunch, regardless of what they are doing there, are sometimes causing a problem for teachers as well. Students will commonly leave through the door in the E1 hallway since it provides the most convenient access to the park.
“People put stuff in the doors so that they can go out to the park and come back through that door, or they’ll like bang on the door to get back in,” Student Resource Officer Mike Cobb said.
Students banging on the doors to get someone’s attention disrupts classes nearby. When students leave the doors propped open, it also becomes a safety issue.
When the doors that are supposed to be locked are propped open, it’s another opportunity for someone who isn’t suppose to be in the school to get inside and roam the halls. However, the door situation is nothing new.
“I think that’s always been kind of a problem,” Assistant Principal Mike Norris said.
The illicit activities are beginning to have more consequences outside of school. The neighborhood around Veteran’s Park is taking action.
“The community members have all been talking with their neighborhood resource officers,” Cobb said. “They have addressed a lot of problems with students in the park. So I know that the community was kind of banding together, like a neighborhood watch, to call in any time they see stuff. So patrol will be very present over there.”
When students head over to the park to participate in illicit activities, they are breaking the law. Families in the neighborhood are hesitant to go to the park during school hours because of what the students do.
“I went up there the other day when there was supposedly supposed to be a fight in the park, and I just stood over there and waited for the people who wanted to fight to come so I could talk to them. There [were] people in the park with their babies in strollers and people trying to teach their kids to play sports,” Cobb said. “They came up to me and were like ‘Hey I’m glad you’re here because every day there’s a bunch of kids over here selling drugs and smoking weed.’ ”
Drug use at Veteran’s Park is becoming a bigger issue. Marijuana is no longer the only illegal substance causing a problem at the park .
“There’s a new type of what they call I guess ‘acid,’” security guard Shawn Ledford said. “It’s a homemade way that they’re making it now. Actually one kid died from [using] that in Kansas City a couple weeks ago.”
Acid is meant to mimic the semisynthetic psychedelic drug, lysergic acid diethylamide (more commonly abbreviated as LSD).
According to abovetheinfluence.com, LSD disrupts how your nerve cells and the neurotransmitter serotonin interact throughout the brain and spinal cord. The disruptions cause distortion of visual judgement, sensations, moods and feelings. Some users of LSD have been known to experience terrifying thoughts such as feelings of despair, fear of insanity or even fear of death.
In this impaired state, one can lose their grip on reality, thus making it more likely for an unexpected and fatal accident to occur.
LHS security has also received reports of kids using cocaine at the park. People from the neighborhood that frequent the park called in one of these reports.
“The time that we had to deal with somebody [snorting cocaine], that’s how they got reported. A parent flat out called like, ‘Hey, this is what’s happening. They even busted out the straw, snorted it in front of me and kind of looked at me like ‘What are you going to do about it?’” security guard Danny Salazar said.
The introduction of harder drugs, like cocaine and LSD, at the park has brought an older crowd with no association to LHS to campus.
“We had a guy come in here straight from the park with one of our freshman boys, obviously with bad intention,” Ledford said. “We caught right on to that and got him out of here. That’s a problem too. They bring people in here that don’t belong from the park.”
Students bringing people from the park onto campus has become a serious issue for the security staff.
“We’ve never had anything go down because we’ve been able to catch [them],” Salazar said. “But, if somehow one day we’re not by the front doors and we’re busy doing something and we don’t notice, it could be an issue.”
One of the outsiders brought in by students could be under the influence and potentially have a weapon on them. This puts the entire school in danger.
From the students he works with, Norris has not seen the situation at Veteran’s Park get worse.
“I think anecdotally I’d say it’s probably gotten better this year than it was last year,” Norris said.
Overall, security staff disagrees.
“As far of what we’ve seen over at the park, I don’t know if we’ve seen less of anything,” Ledford said.
However, the security staff explained that it is not as bad as it is made out to be.
“I was around the Topeka school district for a long time. The drugs and fighting is on a whole [other] level there,” security guard Armond Enclarde said. “[Because] Lawrence is such a small community, it can seem like a bigger deal than it really is. I’m not trying to you know, sugar coat it for you, but you know it’s not as bad as it seems.”
The security staff wants what is best for students.
“I don’t feel like we have bad kids,” Ledford said. “I feel like we have bad decision makers.”