COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO. -- Some parents say drug and alcohol problems are out of control at Palmer High School, and they want the district to do something about it.
Parents FOX21 News spoke to say students at Palmer have easy access to drugs and alcohol from nearby parks.
And since Palmer is an open campus, students come and go freely throughout the school day.
School District 11 officials say Palmer needs to be an open campus because the school doesn't have big enough facilities to feed all the students lunch at the same time.
Parents told FOX21 News in some cases, students leave for lunch, then spend the rest of the school day getting drunk or high.
A big part of the problem is Palmer High School's location.
Set right next to downtown, students are exposed to an urban environment and all that comes with it.
One mother of a Palmer student, who asked FOX21 News not to identify her, says problems with drugs and alcohol are so common at Palmer High School she decided to pull her son out.
"He was skipping school and we found out he was skipping school in Acacia Park," said the mom.
Another parent who wouldn’t go on camera says the students at Palmer have too much freedom and drug dealers target the students because Acacia Park is right across the street.
"It's surrounded by parks and it's surrounded by tunnels and unfortunately that’s where we find some of our youngsters that engage in risky behavior," said Police Sergeant Lisa Cintron, who runs the High School Resource Officer program.
Acacia Park is such a problem one mom says school officials warned her about it when she enrolled her son.
"The school themselves told me and since they told us in front of our child it was almost like they were telling us where he could find them," said the unidentified woman. She says when she found out her son wasn’t in class one day, she went looking for him.
"We went around driving around downtown and we found him in Acacia Park, smoking pot with his friends and there were about 12 of them there," the mother said.
Parents told FOX21 News that alcohol is also a big problem at Palmer High School. They say some kids walk around with soda bottles full of booze in the school.
"Another friend's child walked up to her mother smelling of alcohol right after lunch," the woman said.
School resource officers say there is no quick fix to the problems at Palmer High School. They say closing the campus wouldn’t do much. And kids looking for drugs and alcohol will still leave campus to find it.
D-11 officials say they educate all their students on the dangers of drugs and alcohol, and are working with school resource officers on the problem.
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