Local students got to experience history face to face this week- when the Erie PAL (Police Athletic League) took a bus down to Philadelphia.<\/p>\n
Around 20 high schoolers and a handful of program mentors drove down on Monday, explored the city all day Tuesday, and are driving back to Erie this evening.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, this is where America was basically first started. And it\u2019s amazing. It\u2019s like, it\u2019s not something we get to do every day,\u201d said Alejandro Miranda, a graduated senior in the program.<\/p>\n
PAL connects local students with police officers for summer camps and other events. While it builds trust between communities, officers also aim for it to let students travel.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe feel it\u2019s important for these kids to know the world is bigger than Erie,\u201d said Tom Lenox, captain of the Erie City Police and leader of the program.<\/p>\n
The city of brotherly love has lots of fun things to do, but also lots of history\u2013 especially with exhibits responding to America\u2019s 250th birthday.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, we all need to learn our history and where we began. Some of the ugly, which results in some of the significant things that\u2019s happened in our country,\u201d Lenox said.<\/p>\n
An Erie News Now reporter joined the fun for part of Tuesday\u2013 and got to pick students\u2019 brains on what they were learning.<\/p>\n
\u201cStuff that I\u2019m learning here, I learned in school already. But it is something that I didn\u2019t learn, like about the cracked bell. I didn\u2019t know nothing about that for real for real, because they never talked about it in schools,\u201d said Jayquan Myers, another program senior.<\/p>\n
Myers said that even for topics he learned about in school, there are more details and a different experience when learning those topics at museums and on site.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight here\u2013\u201d said William Przyblski, while pointing to Independence Hall behind him, \u201c\u2013is literally where it started. Out over there. That building right there, started the whole country.\u201d<\/p>\n
The trip exposed students to history, but it also had a bittersweet note. It was the last trip for seniors, some of whom have been with the program since its beginning, when it started 10 years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cI stuck around for the dodgeball,\u201d Myers joked. \u201cOnce we start getting close to each other, it definitely changed me. I\u2019m not as quiet, like I used to be. And I\u2019m more open. It pushed my comfort zones.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Local students got to experience history face to face this week- when the Erie PAL (Police Athletic League)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":222068,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[2288,136,138,137,37,5929],"class_list":["post-222067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-erie","tag-bureau","tag-erie","tag-erie-headlines","tag-erie-news","tag-harrisburg","tag-pennsylvania-capitol"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}