1,500 Cross Students Walk Out For Gun Protest

Christopher Peak Photo

Yaakov Gottlieb, a student organizer, at Cross’s walk-out.

Brianna Chance, a Wilbur Cross junior, holds up a sign.

At Wilbur Cross High School, students participating in a nationwide walkout Wednesday spoke of their fear of a mass shooting, but they also addressed the more pervasive violence in New Haven, including homicides that buried their classmates.

Across the nation, a generation of students who’ve seen one mass shooting after another walked out of school in protest on Wednesday morning, saying, Enough.” A month after a gunman opened fire in Parkland, Fla., students from every local high school — and even a few elementary schools — led a day of action in New Haven. School administrators worked with student leaders to coordinate the events, all of which happened on campus.

We are tired of being the mass shooting generation. We are tired of having nightmares featuring carnage, tired of wondering, Am I next?” And more than that, we are tired of the day-to-day gun violence in our cities that is normalized by the media and by the government,” said Margo Pedersen, a Cross freshman. Some will ask, What will today’s action do? We walk out, and then what?’ We are walking out, not walking away. We may be tired, but we are not too tired to keep working for change.

In our lifetime, we will fight for stricter gun laws. In our lifetime, we will vote out elected officials who do us more harm than good. In our lifetime, we will stand together to make our schools and communities safer,” she went on. We, the students, are the voice, and we will be the change.”

The rally at Cross came together in the days after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Watching videos on Snapchat of Parkland kids returning to class, three Cross students decided to do something. That could have been my school, that could have been my friends being shot,” said Grace Ozyck, one of the organizers. She said she’d seen scores of school shootings throughout her short lifetime — from Columbine in 1999 to Sandy Hook in 2013 — and felt the grown-ups hadn’t done much about it.

With help from the Future Project, Yaakov Gottlieb, Valencia Harris and Ozyck met with the school’s principal, Edith Johnson, to coordinate a walk-out. They crafted signs for students to carry, and they worked on a lesson plan for teachers to host a discussion during a flex period last Friday.

Cross students fill the bleachers.

On Wednesday morning, their month of planning all came together. At 9:45 a.m., nearly 1,500 Cross students came streaming out the school’s front doors, carrying signs as they walked down Mitchell Drive to the athletic complex.

Girls’ clothes are more regulated in schools than guns in America,” one sign read. NRA, there is blood on your hands,” read another. “#NeverAgain,” said many.

Every seat in the bleachers soon filled up, and students crowded along a fence the length of the football field.

Seventeen speakers — the same number of students and staff who’d been killed in the Parkland shooting in Florida — took the microphone. State Senate President Martin Looney and New Haven school board member Joey Rodriguez watched from the sidelines.

Neisha Rivera shares facts about gun violence.

In speeches, several questioned why it is easier for them to buy a gun in most states than to pass a driving test.

For those who haven’t gotten your [driver’s license] yet, it’s almost a year-long process that involves eight hours in a classroom, a six-month waiting period and three different types of tests. At the end of this, you get put into a database and given an identification card that you must have with you whenever you are driving,” said Maya Murarka, a junior. Each year, cars kill about as many people as guns. However, the process of being able to fire a gun is much easier than the process of being able to legally drive a car.

Car control works,” continued Murarka, whose father died in a crash because of a design flaw that led the vehicle to be recalled. When seatbelts became mandatory, no one feared that the government was going to take away our cars. Toyota did not pay off politicians to make sure it was legal to drive high. When the U.S. Department of Transportation banned bus drivers from texting and driving, no one compared Obama to Hitler. Laws like these have decreased car deaths. Imagine how many more people could be saved if we regulated guns like cars?”

Some students also read poems. One performed a song to guitar.

Johnson said she was proud to see her students exercising their rights, whichever side of the gun control debate they were on.

The school’s stance is that we wanted to give students an opportunity to express themselves. But we wanted to make it meaningful, versus having 1,500 kids participate because they just don’t want to go to class,” Johnson said. So the school organized an assembly on safety and a classroom discussion about gun violence.

We were clear with teachers: This is not shoving our personal opinions down their throats,” Johnson said. Instead, we said, Here’s a topic that impacts you that a large number of students want to discuss. Where do you fit in?’ This is not about the adult voice. It’s about how they feel and what they want to contribute to this national debate.”

Students who organized Cross’s walk-out: Tahjee Galberth, Daniela Flores, Tyler Jenkins, Maya Murarka, Margo Pedersen, Gaston Neville, Yaakov Gottlieb, Grace Ozyck and Neisha Rivera.

Some of the classroom discussion focused on whether teachers should be armed, as the Trump administration has proposed. Most students said they didn’t like the idea. One boy told Johnson that teachers didn’t need guns, but she, as principal, should come packing. She told him that she didn’t want to carry a weapon. She would have been a police officer if she did, she said.

My job as a principal is to create critical thinkers, to give them opportunities to implement their learning, to analyze a topic, to provide evidence for their opinions and support it with facts and statistics,” Johnson said. The walk-out gave her students a chance to take all those skills and use them.”

Ribbons with names of New Haven gun violence victims covered a fence outside the field.

After the rally, students returned to class for their second period. At the complex’s gates, they passed white and orange ribbons that carried the names of children who’d been gunned down in New Haven.

Three years ago, Jericho Scott, a 16-year-old baseball star at Cross, had been murdered, right outside his house. His younger sister, Sahara, said she’d lost a role model, a friend and big brother.”

I stand before you to say enough is enough. We need to take a stand for our own safety,” Scott said. Who in your life would have to die from gun violence before you support gun control?”

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