‘Something has to be done’: Summit County students, parents protest school gun violence today
At 10 a.m. on Wednesday, hundreds of Summit High School students walked out of their classrooms to sit in the common areas and hallways in silence. A few miles up the road along Highway 9, dozens of protesters waved signs to passing cars at a busy intersection in Frisco. Still further up the road and across Frisco Bay, seventh graders at Summit Middle School defied their elders and walked out the door to march in the sunshine.
It was a moment when Summit County residents joined schools and communities across America and declared that it had #ENOUGH with school gun violence.
These three separate protests in Summit joined with thousands across the country on “National Walkout Day,” which demanded action to stop school shootings exactly one month after the Parkland, Florida high school massacre.
In Summit County, each protest had its own leaders and mode of dissent. All were spurred into action by the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last month that left 14 students and 3 staff members dead.
At Summit High School in Breckenridge, four students organized a mass “sit-in” in the high school common area. Chase Byers, Jenna Piehl, Priya Subberwal, and Sylvie Westerhoff are SHS seniors and members of the school’s chapter of “People Power,” a grassroots organizing and activist movement endorsed by the ACLU. They said they were inspired to act after seeing Parkland student survivors like Emma Gonzales speak out about the lack of action on gun violence in schools, as well as rising anxiety about their own safety in school.
However, due to recent security scares at Summit schools, the People Power group needed to figure out a way to organize an event that promoted change while taking into account the community’s frayed nerves about school safety. The group decided that a mass sit-in and note-writing event in the high school’s common area would be more appropriate than a walkout, as it allowed students to protest while still being able to reflect about what they thought of gun violence in America.
“We felt like if people see all these students gather in a small area like the commons, they’d be forced to see how big the movement is,” Piehl said.
“We also wanted to do something constructive with a bigger outcome than just leaving the school and coming back,” added Byers.
Subberwal said that the group was also pragmatic about the ends it wanted to achieve while not placing an undue burden on students or school staff.
“We didn’t want to disrupt class too much, as the point of this isn’t to rebel against the school,” Subberwal said. “It’s to draw attention to the fact that we’re protesting violence in schools. We wanted a small, but impactful statement where we would walk of schools and condense in one area for 17 minutes.”
The 17 minutes of silence and reflection were observed around the country in honor of each of the 17 Parkland victims. Most students at Summit Middle School in Frisco also observed the 17 minutes with their own sit-in. However, around 150 to 180 students of the seventh grade class bucked school administration requests to stay inside and staged an actual walk out. According to SMS principal Greg Guevara, 10 to 12 adult teachers and security staff supervised as the students marched a lap around the school grounds.
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