As students across the country prepared to walk out of school in protest of lax gun laws Wednesday, some Columbia middle schoolers were prevented from participating and threatened with disciplinary action, according to students.
“I was disturbed and confused by the way the teachers told us to stay inside or else we would get in trouble,” Elizabeth Brown, a seventh-grader at Gentry Middle School, said. “The fact that we have to be in fear that we would be in trouble after a protest like that didn’t make sense to me.”
After a 19-year-old gunman used an AR-15 to kill 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, last month, outspoken student activists reenergized the national debate surrounding access to firearms. Out of that momentum came the idea to organize a 17-minute nationwide school walkout to remember the 17 victims of the Parkland shooting and call for legislative action. Students from Florida to California to Missouri spent the last few weeks preparing for Wednesday’s protests.
Ahead of the planned event, Columbia Public Schools Superintendent Peter Stiepleman sent a district-wide email informing faculty, staff and parents that “if students decide to organize a walkout, we will provide them with a safe place and manner for which to express themselves with adult supervision.” Over 1,000 students took Stiepleman up on his offer, walking out of Rock Bridge, Battle, Hickman and Douglass high schools on Wednesday morning.
But when some students at Gentry Middle School — around the corner from Rock Bridge — attempted the same, Brown said they were directed to crowd into the school gym and reportedly told that if they walked out they would be punished for skipping class, which could carry a two-day suspension. She was also told that police officers were waiting for kids outside and said she didn’t want to get in the middle of it.
Columbia Public Schools spokeswoman Michelle Baumstark said no suspensions occurred as a direct result of those violations and that parents were notified prior to Wednesday that “middle schools designated an interior safe location for students if they chose to walk out of class. In most cases it was the gym.” Brown, whose older sister participated in the protests at Rock Bridge, said she had imagined protesting outside, too. But Baumstark noted middle schools, unlike high schools, do not operate open campuses. “The level of responsibility of a 12-year-old is significantly different than a 17-year-old.
We created appropriate safe locations for each student population to participate,” Baumstark said. When 13-year-old Brown made it to the gym, she met up with some of her friends, and they formed a circle and started to pray. “That was self-empowering for me, that’s what we wanted to do outside, to be together and pray for the families (of the victims).” But, according to Brown, she and her classmates also felt censored, “like they were containing us in the school, keeping our voices inside a box.”
Soon after, a whistle directed kids to return to their classrooms. “My teacher told us not to talk about it,” Brown said. “By doing it the way that they did, they told the kids they didn’t have a voice,” Marie-Josee Brown, Brown’s mother said. “What I don’t understand is why this plan of sending kids to the gym was not communicated to parents,” she added, saying that she receives regular emails and texts about a wide range of school events. “I find it suspicious.”
But Baumstark said the decision not to provide specifics came down to logistics: “For safety reasons we didn’t announce the designated locations publicly. Just that we would provide a safe place.” “We simply don’t have the ability to supervise kids all over campus and operate a regular school day,” she said. A similar picture apparently unfolded seven miles away at Smithton Middle School, where students interested in gathering outside for 17 minutes of protest were also directed to the gymnasium.
According to a Facebook post by Smithton parent Christina Holzhauser, her 13-year-old daughter Erika O’Connell-Weir said a police officer guarded the door and threatened to arrest students if they walked out while a teacher reportedly mocked the children saying, “I don’t know why half of you are leaving, you don’t even know what you’re supporting.” O’Connell-Weir said she and a group of her classmates went outside to the bleachers anyway, but an administrator told them to go back inside.
Ever since the Parkland shooting, the middle-schooler has been worried that what happened to the children in Florida could happen to her or someone she knows. “Most people are afraid to go to school because they’re afraid someone they know is going to shoot them,” she said. For O’Connell-Weir, being able to take her message out into the public means something: “If we are outside then people will see that something needs to change, and it will get more attention,” she said.
According to O’Connell-Weir, once in the gymnasium, Smithton students took turns voicing their concerns over school safety for about half an hour before going back to their classrooms. After her daughter came home from school Wednesday and informed her about what had happened, Holzhauser expressed her outrage on social media: “Not only do our children fear their own classmates, but they must also fear those who are sworn to protect them, and those who are supposed to be educating them.” Other middle school parents, including one from Jefferson Middle School, joined in, commenting that they, too, were disappointed in how the walkout was handled.
“It seems kind of fascist to say you can walk out, but not all the way,” Holzhauser said later. Public school officials maintain that the handling of the middle school walkout was within the bounds of their mission. “Our purpose is education, our number one priority is safety,” Baumstark said. “Our students were peaceful and respectful and were given the opportunity to express themselves.” But for Elizabeth Brown, the Gentry seventh-grader who had envisioned commemorating the Parkland victims in an outdoor rally, being confined to a gym was not enough. “It felt like they were taking away our voices, like our voices as middle schoolers didn’t matter as much as the voices of high schoolers.”