Students calling for an end to gun violence walked out of school on Friday, the 19th anniversary of the school shooting in Columbine, Colo., an event that marked the start of an era of deadly school rampages.
The walkouts Friday were sparked by Lane Murdock, a 16-year-old at Ridgefield High School in Connecticut, who began an online petition calling for the protest following the February shooting in Parkland, Fla., that left 14 students and three staff members dead. Walkouts are planned at more than 2,000 schools nationally, Murdock said.
But the scale and scope of the protests appeared to be much smaller than a similar student-led national walkout March 14 and the “March for Our Lives” rallies that took place in Washington and cities and towns across the country March 24. A number of factors may have contributed to the lower turnout including a lack of promotion and questions about its goals, conflicts with mandatory standardized testing, and, in some cases, protest fatigue among students.
School administrators were also rethinking their approach to the student actions. In many school districts that had encouraged or even facilitated student participation in earlier walkouts or moments of silence on campus, administrators were less inclined to continue accommodating the protests.
At Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., the site of the February massacre, about 100 students walked out of class and went to a nearby park to sign a large poster in support of the Columbine students. But the vast majority of the school’s 3,100 students remained on campus.
Students at a Forest High School in Ocala, Fla., 270 miles north of Parkland, had to cancel their planned walkout following an early morning shooting at their school. One student was injured and the shooter, also a student, was taken into custody.
In the Washington region, several hundred students left their schools Friday morning and staged a vigil outside the White House to honor the Columbine victims and others killed by gun violence.
Aniyah Smith, 17, knew not everyone in her community could make it into the District to attend another school walkout. So, she had an idea: Collect letters from her classmates, teachers, community.
On Friday, Smith arrived from Arlington with hundreds of letters, packed into plastic bins and bags.
“We’ve marched and we’ve been ignored. We walked out and we’ve been ignored. Let’s see (legislators) try to ignore us when we drop these right outside your office door,” said Smith, a senior at Wakefield High School. “Letters are powerful. You can’t ignore what someone is saying when it’s in writing.”
Smith said she was inspired by the March 14 walkouts, and watching her peers become more involved in the March for Our Lives event March 24.
“I just always assumed someone else would do something about things that are wrong in the world, you know?” Smith said. “But then I realized, why don’t I do it? Why can’t that someone be me? So, I did.”
As hundreds of students sat in silence for 19 minutes — one for every year since the Columbine shooting — Smith filled the silence by reading the names of the victims over a megaphone.
“We stopped saying their names a long time ago,” she said. “So until the end of this moment of silence, I will continue to repeat their names so you guys don’t forget them.”
The students then marched to the Capitol for a rally and to deliver letters to lawmakers calling for tougher gun-control measures.
[A masked shooter. A campus killing. And a manhunt 159 years before Columbine.]
Hannah Weisman, 18, a senior at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda was among the first D.C.-area students to arrive Friday morning along with her friends, Piper Deleon, 17, and Zoe Tompkins, 17, both Walt Whitman seniors.
Though the three Whitman students said they expected Friday’s march to be smaller than the March 14 walkouts — in which hundreds of students marched in protest from the White House to the Capitol following 17 minutes of silence in honor of the 17 people killed in a February school shooting in Parkland, Fla. — they hoped their message would still be heard.
All three were born a year or more after the attack at Columbine High School.
“It’s scary because that was so long ago, and we’re here because nothing’s changed,” Deleon said. “I hope that us speaking up, the young people speaking up, will get everyone else to speak up.”
Weisman said that since the Parkland shooting on Feb. 14, she has been wondering if her school could be next.
“It’s really upped my paranoia,” she said. “We’ve gotten bomb threats, we do these active shooter drills. But it just feels so much more real now. It could happen here.”
The girls opted to forgo signs this time because they felt the mood was more somber than last month’s walkouts, which they described as a protest. On Friday, they were present to honor the slain.
[17 minutes to memorialize 17 lives lost]
As with a 17-minute walkout that unfolded March 14, school districts have tried to strike a balance between giving students space to exercise free speech and not disrupting learning or risking safety.
In Arlington County, students who leave class Friday without written permission from parents will receive an unexcused absence. Fairfax County school officials are encouraging principals to work with students to find opportunities to express their opinions in ways that don’t intrude on instruction, such as before or after school, or during lunch.
For some teenagers, protesting at school isn’t enough.
Megan Black, an 18-year-old at Patriot High School in Prince William County, plans to walk out of her school with peers who have passes signed by their parents.
“If people across the country are taking action, I want to be a part of that,” she said. “I wouldn’t feel right sitting in school all day while people my age are out protesting and working for a change.”
Montgomery County school officials said they were hearing little about walkout plans for Friday, after the March 14 protest drew about 2,500 students off campus. They said their position remains the same — that they encourage students to express their views but can’t ensure their safety if they are off school grounds. Students who leave campus are marked as unexcused.
But Brenna Levitan, a 17-year-old at Montgomery Blair High School, said she plans on participating in the rally.
For Levitan, who leads a student group advocating for more stringent gun-control laws, gun violence is personal. She said she tutors children who have fled violence in other countries but fear shootings in their U.S. schools. One of her friends, she said, tried to commit suicide with an illegally obtained gun.
“The issue is a lot more than just school shootings,” she said. “In fighting this, we need to take all aspects of gun violence into account.”
Officials with D.C. Public Schools said they are aware of students planning to participate in the walkout.
The school system sent a letter to parents and students expressing support for students’ right to protest, but said absences would be counted as unexcused.
Other students will have a tougher time walking out. Some schools are administering national standardized tests this week, and administrators said students leaving in the middle of the day could compromise the exam.
At Thurgood Marshall Academy, a charter school in Southeast Washington, students will not be participating in the walkout, according to Richard Pohlman, the school’s executive director. The school was thrust into the spotlight this year when students from Stoneman Douglas visited the campus to meet their D.C. counterparts, many of whom regularly encounter gun violence in their communities.
One of the school’s students, Zion Kelly, spoke at the March for Our Lives rally about his twin brother, Zaire, who was killed in a robbery on his walk home from school in September.
“Walking out of testing won’t be an option as it would create a test security violation,” Pohlman wrote in an email. “Given these challenges, we supported students earlier in the year planning walkout activities when they were announced.”
[Parkland, D.C. students make plea for tougher gun laws ahead of March for Our Lives]
While those students prepare for demonstrations, teens who attend the high school at the center of the day are scheduled to have a day out of the classroom. Columbine High does not hold classes on the anniversary of the 1999 shooting, a practice that began the year after the assault, in which two teens killed 13 people before taking their own lives. Students will instead dedicate the day to community service activities such as volunteering in soup kitchens, participating in a park cleanup and reading to preschoolers.
Scott Christy, Columbine’s principal, and Frank DeAngelis, the principal at the time of the shooting, wrote a letter urging students at other high schools in the county to do the same rather than participate in a walkout.
“April has long been a time to respectfully remember our loss, and also support efforts to make our communities a better place,” the letter read. “Please consider planning service projects, an activity that will somehow build up your school . . . as opposed to a walkout.”
Rachel Hill, a Columbine sophomore, said the principals’ letter was written with input from community members. Columbine students have tried to turn the day into something meaningful by committing time for service. Hill said she doesn’t believe Columbine’s viewpoint was taken into account as the national walkout was planned.
“We feel like doing anything on that day is disrespectful for the families of people who died,” she said. “There’s a time for protest, but it’s not that day.”
Sam Craig — a sophomore at nearby Chatfield Senior High School who organized a walkout involving three schools, including Columbine, earlier this year — said students in Jefferson County, Colo., don’t plan to participate in Friday’s demonstration.
Instead, he said, they prefer to use the day for remembrance.
“It’s a really raw and emotional day,” Craig said. “It’s a very difficult day for our whole community. . . . We want to respect Columbine.”
Laura Kirk has never known a pre-Columbine world. Born the year after the shooting at the Colorado high school, lockdown drills have been a regular part of her school experience. At 12, after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, she was struck with fear that not everyone in her class could cram into a closet if a gunman rampaged through into her school.
“Before I was learning how to read or write, I was learning how to sit in a dark classroom to make sure a shooter won’t see us,” said Kirk, a junior at West Springfield High School in Fairfax County. “It’s kind of ingrained in who we are as a generation.”
Sarah Larimer, Donna St. George, Perry Stein and Debbie Truong contribued to this report.
