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March 14, 2018 Student Walkouts
Topic Started: Mar 14 2018, 01:19 PM (71 Views)
Webster
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..across the country students are walking out of classes in a show of protest in the wake of February's Parkland school shooting....

(The Guardian) After the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Florida last month, students refused to accept the usual rote statements by politicians, and reinvigorated a nationwide movement to reduce gun violence.

Today, a month after the shooting, students across the country will step out of class for 17 minutes – one minute for each victim of the Parkland shooting. It represents a memorial for the lives lost to gun violence and a demand for more action from lawmakers.

Guardian reporters will be sending dispatches to our live blog from protests across the country, including Parkland, Florida, where the massacre took place; the school in Atlanta formerly attended by Martin Luther King; and a school across the river from the White House.

Demonstrations will take place at 10am local time, starting on the east coast and ending in Hawaii, six hours later.

Those participating have several demands. Among them, they want to:

• Ban assault weapons
• Require universal background checks before gun sales
• Reduce militarization of law enforcement

And for any readers thinking of protesting, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published a one-page guide to student’s protest rights. Universities have said they won’t penalize college applications belonging to students who protest.
-Read more: https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/know_your_rights_for_students_and_free_speech.pdf
-Read more: https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/american-universities-say-they-wont-punish-students-for-protesting-gun-violence/4280509.html
-Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/13/walkout-wednesday-students-gun-control-protest
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Students at Georgetown university in Washington, DC. Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
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Webster
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(The Guardian) In the Baltimore Sun today, schools in the Washington DC and Maryland area signed onto a letter urging Donald Trump and Congress to enact stricter gun control measures.

One of the schools to sign on to the letter, St Andrew’s Episcopal School, is where the president’s 11-year-old son, Barron, takes classes. “As school leaders, we call upon everyone who cares about the education and the welfare of children to urge our government to act,” the letter said. “We need our teachers to be able to teach. We need our students to be able to learn. And we need everyone in every school around the country to feel safe.”
-Read more: http://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?pnum=9&edid=657b21d2-76c6-49c9-8e4b-3a66d61f3dde
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Eastern High School students walk out of class and assemble on their football field in Washington, DC. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
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(The Guardian) Chicago students: “Hey hey, ho ho, gun violence has got to go”
Students have been demonstrating against gun violence in Chicago, where it is nearly 10.30am.

Chicago Public School principals aren’t supposed to be involved in protests, but some school have changed class schedules today to accommodate the walkouts.

About 80,000 students at 200 Catholic schools plan to assemble in prayer, staging discussions and making signs promoting peace that they’ll hang around schools and parish properties, according to the Archdiocese of Chicago.

At Theodore Roosevelt College and Career Academy, dozens of energetic students chanted “Good kids, mad city / we’re under attack / what are we going to do / fight, fight back”; “Sí se puede” [yes we can] and “Hey hey, ho ho, gun violence has got to go.”

They then held a moment of silence, asking students to think about loved ones they lost to gun violence. The moment ended when community members arrived to support the students’ demonstration.

Good Kids Mad City is a new collective of Baltimore and Chicago youth demanding just for victims of gun violence. They have coordinated protests in both cities.
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--#GoodKidsMadCity (Soloman Drama, 14 March 2018)
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(The Guardian) Thousands of students march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
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--Hundreds of students on the west side of the Capitol where Democrats are about to walk out of the Capitol. They’re chanting “No more silence. Stop gun violence.” And “what do we want? Gun control. When do we want it? NOW.” (Lauren Gambino, The Guardian - 14 March 2018)
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(The Guardian) Atlanta: students take a knee
The Booker T Washington high school in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King was a student, saw more than 100 students participate in Wednesday’s walkout. “Dr King carries a legacy even in death, so I feel as if it’s an obligation to carry on what he wanted and what he was trying to fight for and that’s why this day is very important,” said Markail Brooks, a student.

Students were only permitted to walk out of their classes into the hallway and silently take a knee, so no action took place outside the campus. In an announcement around 9:30am, school officials explained that kneeling in the hallway was the approved form of participation and warned that “anything outside of that is not approved and you will receive swift and severe consequences”.

The school went on lockdown “to promote safety and security” until the protests ended.

For students at other schools who were not permitted to engage in any form of protest, Washington students had a message: “Fight. Fight, fight – our words matter,” said India White. “We’re the students of this school. We have a word because we attend this school, this is our home.”

The “take a knee” gesture was a unique twist on the national walkout, but not a surprising one given the resonance the gesture has taken on in the black community. The high school is 99% black, according to department of education data.

Former 49ers American football player Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem of games in 2016 to protest racism and police violence.

Student government leaders told reporters that the knee was to “show respect” for students who have died by gun violence.
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(The Guardian) A group of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students pray in front of a memorial during the walkout in Parkland, Florida. Photograph: Cristobal Herrera/EPA
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(The Guardian) Sasha Koren, editor of the Guardian’s Mobile Innovation Lab, sends this dispatch from the Upper West Side in Manhattan....

On a sunny street corner next to a busy subway station on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in mid morning, just after the commuting rush, students from the West Side Collaborative Middle School, accompanied by Paul Kehoe, their social studies teacher, stood in a loose group holding bright signs with slogans like “Enough!” and “End it!”, their chants led by three girls who identified themselves and Skyler, Jane and Jenn.

“It’s up to us,” said Jenn, when asked why they had walked out. “If politicians won’t do anything we have to do it. We should be able to go to school and feel safe.”

New York City has reported falling crime rates in recent years, with the 24th precinct, in which the school sits, reporting no shootings in 2017, a 71% drop since 1990. Still, these students took the prospect of gun violence in their community as a real risk.

”It’s a problem everywhere,” said Skyler. “If one child gets hurt, everyone gets hurt.”
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(The Guardian) Brooklyn: “We walk out for the black community”
--Hundreds of students walked out of the Academy for Young Writers high school in Spring Creek, Brooklyn, at 10am ET. The students, who are predominantly black, have expanded the protest beyond just the issue of school shootings to include racial inequality and the problem of black and brown people losing their lives at a disproportionate rate to white people.

The pupils walked out for 18 minutes, to honor both the Parkland victims and 18 people of color who had lost their lives, sometimes at the hands of police. The names of Tamir Rice, Eric Harris and Philando Castile, black men and – in Rice’s case a child – who were shot and killed by law enforcement.

Zayinab Jagun, 17, was carrying a sign which condemned school shootings and also said: “We walk out for the black community.” “The black community has been faced with lots of violence all the time,” Jagun said. Spring Creek is close to East New York, a neighborhood which has a troubled history with crime.

“Every time I watch Brooklyn 12 news [a local television news program] I see someone’s son, daughter, mother or father getting shot down in the black community. So I think having a new take on gun reform would be able to stop that as well.”

Jaelah Jackson, 15, was among those who gave speeches during the walkout. “I know a couple of people and they had mixed feelings towards the walkout because they felt if it was a black student being gunnned down or black students being shot or shot at it wouldn’t have got so much coverage,” Jaelah said. “They felt like minorities and African-Americans are diminished. They aren’t really represented and their cases aren’t presented as equally.”
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(The Guardian) A high school in Sayreville, New Jersey, said it would suspend students who participated in the walkout. Instead, the school allowed students to gather in an auditorium on campus.

One student, Rosa Rodriguez, walked out anyway, according to 1010 Wins radio. “If you were gonna come outside in the first place, you should have still came outside. Just because you didn’t want to have these consequences and stuff, just stay inside, you should have came outside and proven them wrong,” Rodriguez told the radio station.
-Read more: https://1010wins.radio.com/articles/students-new-york-area-take-part-nationwide-gun-control-walkout
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(The Guardian) As students across the US walk off campus, link arms in the hallway and take a knee at school to protest gun violence, the story of one armed teacher who accidentally shot a student yesterday is circulating.

The California teacher, a reserve police officer, accidentally discharged his weapon during a lesson about public safety and injured a male student, according to police.

The weapon was pointed at the ceiling and debris fell and hit the student, not a bullet. “It’s the craziest thing,” the student’s father, Fermin Gonzales, told local TV news. “It could have been very bad.”
-Read more: http://www.ksbw.com/article/seaside-high-teacher-accidentally-fires-gun-in-class/19426017
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(The Guardian) Q&A with 11-year-old march organizers in Alexandria, Virginia
--More than five years ago, 20 first graders were murdered in their classrooms at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Today, children as young as the Sandy Hook victims are participating in walkouts protesting continued government inaction on preventing gun violence.

In Alexandria, Virginia, Naomi Wadler and Carter Anderson, both 11, spoke with Guardian US about organizing a walkout at their elementary school. More than 60 students walked out, some of them as young as in first or second grade, and stood in front of their school for 18 minutes, holding signs commemorating the victims of the Parkland, Florida shooting, and then falling silently to the ground.
-Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2018/mar/14/wednesday-walkout-gun-control-parkland-florida-students-live?page=with:block-5aa94c01e4b0d7d09c5c7515#block-5aa94c01e4b0d7d09c5c7515
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(The Guardian) National Walkout Day at Mohawk Trail Regional high school in Buckland, Massachusetts Photograph: Rick Leskowitz/for The Shelburne Falls and West County Independent
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