Community members accuse Quakertown school leaders of mishandling student ICE protest

Community members accused the Quakertown school board Thursday of failing to keep students safe during the walkout against immigration enforcement last week that ended in a clash with police and five teenagers arrested.

While the school district attempted to cancel last Friday’s planned walkout after receiving what officials called a credible threat, some members of the public said school officials could have offered students the opportunity to protest on Quakertown Community High School’s campus, knowing they were likely to walk out anyway.

“Instead of guiding them to a safer option, we left them to navigate it on their own,” said Jessica Buhman, a parent of two children in the district who addressed the school board before a packed room Thursday. “The risks were foreseeable and unfortunately they materialized.”

Some others faulted the district for allowing students to walk out at all. In the “real world … people don’t walk off their jobs to protest,” said Amalia Ritter. “You walk off the job, you’re fired. You want to protest, you do that on your own time.”

School officials have said they had no authority to stop about 35 students who left the high school Friday, walking off campus.

In town, a confrontation broke out. Video footage appears to show Quakertown’s police chief — dressed in plainclothes — putting a girl in a chokehold.

A police affidavit obtained by The Inquirer Thursday said that students blocked traffic, struck cars, and assaulted the chief, Scott McElree, who is also the borough manager. It doesn’t mention a chokehold.

The five students were charged with aggravated assault, a felony-level crime, and jailed. As of Thursday afternoon, four of the teenagers had been released; the fifth teenager was expected to be released Thursday night, according to the girl’s attorney.

Lawyers for two of the students denied that their clients hit McElree. Witnesses have said McElree didn’t identify himself as the police chief before engaging with the teenagers.

Much of the attention in the aftermath of the incident has focused on McElree, but on Thursday, residents voiced their frustrations with the school district.

“How does an administrator … not know these kids were going to do something?” said Wes Comes, who also questioned why the district didn’t hold the protest on its own property. “We missed the whole ball. We whiffed.”

A number of speakers, Comes included, questioned what the threat was that prompted the district to try to cancel the protest — saying there had been a lack of transparency with the community.

Some faulted the district for not making any statement of support for the arrested students, who were in custody for days.

“It seems the school is wiping its hands of the kids who were injured and arrested,” said Lisen Cummings.

Laura Foster, an organizer with the liberal Upper Bucks United group, said the district’s communications were “tone deaf.”

“Thanking the students for staying in school while ignoring your students who were out there getting brutally attacked by the police … everyone on this board should have been like, what are we doing?” Foster said.

The meeting was at times tense, with arguments breaking out as speakers took their turns at the podium to share their perspectives. A Pennsylvania State Police trooper stationed at the meeting defused an argument between two women in the lobby.

The board’s president, David O’Donnell, told the crowd that “the emotions up here are just as raw as they are out there.”

“No one up here would celebrate violence against children,” O’Donnell said. “I acknowledge that we probably have a lot to learn from how we handled the situation.”

Outside the school before the meeting, a few dozen people attended a gathering organized by Upper Bucks United. Stickers reading “support Q5” and “Apoya Los Q5” — referring in English and Spanish to the five teens who spent several nights in jail — were available at folding tables next to a gas burner providing hot chocolate to the protesters.

“The First Amendment is a right not a privilege,” read one of the signs protesters carried.

In the crowd, Wayne Codner — the mayor of neighboring Richlandtown Borough, which is in the Quakertown Community School District — shook hands with friends in the Democrat-aligned Upper Bucks group.

“I’m a Black, first-generation immigrant from Jamaica in a town that is 95% white — and I’m mayor,” Codner said. “And this doesn’t represent us,” he said of the Friday incident.

Numerous speakers inside the board room tied the incident to a broader climate of intolerance and racism in the Quakertown community.

Ashley Crowell, a “single parent and gender queer individual” with kids in the district, told the board that she had been threatened by men in loud pickup trucks while running in her neighborhood, “because I look offensively masculine” based on her haircut.

Crowell said she believed the escalation during the walkout “was brought about by similar behaviors, also by men in loud trucks — maybe even the same people that made the threats which triggered your decision to cancel the walkout.”

“Our students spoke up … and that resulted in mismanagement of the situation by white men, with ignorance of other people’s lived experiences with discrimination,” Crowell said.

One student grew teary as she spoke about fears that “something would happen to my family” while she was at school, and how “35 students were fighting for my rights.”

After the comments, one board member, Chris Spear, said the board had “heard a lot of accusations of racism,” and suggested the district should bring in a consultant, as he said it had in the past.

Spear also noted the criticisms that “this was predictable.”

“As much as the students are going to learn something, the adults are going to learn something as well,” Spear said.