Parkland Students: Speak Up, New Haven

The kids at East Rock Community Magnet School wanted to know what it was like to live through a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and then emerge as leaders of a national movement.

The two students visiting from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School wanted local kids to realize that they too have survived an epidemic of urban gun violence and could become activists as well.

The two visiting Parkland seniors, Sofie Whitney, a musician, and Ryan Deitsch, an improv comedian and journalist, stopped by Wilbur Cross and East Rock on Tuesday afternoon. Later, they planned to swing by Yale University.

At East Rock, a classroom of roughly 35 eighth-graders hushed when the survivors first arrived and set up stools at the front of the room. But after someone threw out the first question — ​“Were you for gun control before the event?” — the back-and-forth didn’t stop until dismissal.

At first, the students focused on how the mass shooting on Feb. 14, 2018, in which 17 people were gunned down, could have happened. Had Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old perpetrator, been bullied? Why hadn’t any guidance counselors and school psychologists reached out to him? How did he get the guns? Why hadn’t security guards been able to stop him?

Whitney said she’d lost an ex-boyfriend, her first love. She said she prefers to know as little as possible about the killer. Deitsch said he wanted to move on and talk about what to do next.

“We personally like to talk about more of the positives that have come out of this, the things that have built up from it. We’ll answer any questions that you guys have [but] we like to talk about the other communities that have stepped out, the other voices that have risen up,” Deitsch said as he tried to redirect the conversation.

“We’re consistently told that children are the future, but we’re never told actually when. They never say when we actually take that future and when we’re in control,” he continued. ​“Our group, one of our main goals is to kind of seize that. We’re saying, ​‘Hey, we’re all kids out here and everyone is ignoring us. Why?’ At the end of the day, we’re going to be in charge. We might as well take it now.”

Whitney said that it’s easy to get involved if there’s an issue that students care about. She told students they could convince their parents, take their message to Twitter, march down to the mayor’s office or even commit an act of civil disobedience.

“The government works for us, and that’s what I didn’t understand as much until now. Their job is to listen to us, and if they don’t do that, we don’t want them to work anymore,” she said. ​“We have a voice and we’re supposed to use it.”

Both the school shooting survivors said it’s particularly important for students from urban areas like New Haven to weigh in on the gun control debate. While he credited ​“soccer moms” for the organizing they’d done on the issue, he said that the voices of black and brown youth need to be heard so people can fully understand how gun violence affects America.

Deitsch asked the East Rock students to raise their hands if they’d been affected personally by gun violence. A boy said his older brother had been shot in the chest while biking with friends. A girl said her older brother had been shot when a storeowner thought he was stealing. A teacher recalled a former student at East Rock was shot in the leg.

“These instances happen everywhere,” Deitsch said. ​“Whether it’s frequent, whether you’re affected or not, this can happen anywhere. We’re making sure that communities everywhere can be safe.”

“Do you think you’re making a difference?” one student asked.

“I like to think so,” Deitsch said.

Watch the full video of the East Rock class’s discussion with the Parkland students below.