Brown County high school, junior high and intermediate school students will be able to participate in a district-sanctioned “walkout” Friday, April 20, to express their views on school shootings and the issues surrounding them.
The walkout, starting at 10 a.m., will last for 17 minutes to honor the 17 people who were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Feb. 14.
However, because of “vulgar and threatening statements” the school superintendent has received about the school district allowing a walkout, students won’t actually leave school. The new plan is for them to conduct the “walkout” in their school gyms in order to better protect them, Superintendent Laura Hammack told parents in a letter April 13.
On March 14, students across the country participated in similar walkouts, but Brown County students were on spring break at that time. A second, nationwide student walkout was set for April 20, which is the 19th anniversary of the mass shootings at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado.
It will be up to Brown County students, “with guidance from their parents,” to decide whether they want to participate in the event, Hammack said in her original letter to parents last week. Teachers and administrators will be with both groups.
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The students who organized this event told district leaders that the walkout serves two purposes: to honor the lives lost in the Florida school shooting and to “demand increased school safety measures so that their learning environment is one where they feel secure in their ability to learn,” Hammack wrote.
“We expect all of our students to respect the opinions of their classmates and will not tolerate hateful rhetoric or actions directed at any student or group of students based on the position they will take on this very sensitive issue,” she wrote.
Hammack cited a Supreme Court case from 1969, in which justices ruled that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or freedom of expression at the schoolhouse gate.” If a student’s speech or expression does not “materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of a school,” it is an accepted expression of speech, she wrote.
In some of these demonstrations planned throughout the country, students are being encouraged to leave school for the entire school day. Hammack said Brown County Schools will require high school and junior high parents to sign a permission slip if they approve their children leaving school after the walkout is over.
Students who wish to participate in the walkout and then return to class will not need a permission slip, she said.
Elementary schools will not participate in the walkout.
Hammack’s letter, posted on the superintendent’s Facebook page, had generated 85 comments as of midday April 12. About half of them were critical of the decision to allow a walkout, 30 were in favor and the others were mixed or were not about that topic.
By the next morning, the comments had ballooned to 212. That morning, Hammack sent and posted a follow-up letter outlining the change from walking out of the school to walking into the gyms instead, and answering some of the commenters’ questions. Out of those online comments, only three people had called her to discuss their concerns as she had encouraged them to do, she said.
The original Facebook post containing her letter to parents had been removed by the morning of April 17.
“I expect that we will have school and community members who support the action of student protest movement during the school day, and I also expect that we will have those who do not support this action,” her original letter said.
“It is important to understand that schools are responsible to deploy the standards from Supreme Court case rulings when situations like these are presented.”
