With students across the country planning to hold school walkouts Wednesday to protest gun violence, some Aberdeen students and teachers are upset that they could be disciplined for doing so.
At Tuesday’s Aberdeen School Board meeting, Superintendent Alicia Henderson addressed district policies concerning walkouts, and went over a recently-assembled document she said they would use for future walkouts. According to these guidelines, she explained, students need their parents to give them permission to be excused before they can participate in the walkout.
The policy reads that these excuse requests from parents should be requested in advance, but that a “request after-the-fact may be granted at the principal’s discretion.” Students who are 18 or older can sign their own excuse forms.
Leaving class without getting permission would result in a lunch detention for high school or junior high students if it’s a first time absence, the document reads.
In response, the board’s student representative Nadia Wirta said she feels students shouldn’t be punished for what would be a 17-minute walkout at 10 a.m.
“A lot of students do want to do this,” she said at the meeting. “It may interrupt class, but especially in high school with classes lasting almost an hour long, 17 minutes from one class we don’t feel is necessary to be punished for.”
Wirta added that she believes some students will participate in the walkout even if it means getting a detention.
“Quite a few students will probably feel against it and say they don’t care, because I guarantee students who really stand for this will do it anyway,” she said. “They will say, ‘Throw me a lunch detention, I don’t care, I feel that strongly about it.’”
Central Park Elementary teacher Michelle Reed, who was in the meeting audience, also said it seems unfair to punish students for protesting, considering that students are taken out of class for much longer to participate in the “Every 32 Minutes” program, which focuses on preventing teen driving fatalities.
“We’re having this great impaired driver program. It’s important, all day, and pulls kids out of class to give them life lessons,” said Reed. “Now we have the possibility of our students wanting to walk out and protest gun safety, their own personal safety in the schools. It’s just as relevant and timely, and I’m wondering why those students should be disciplined? It doesn’t seem equitable to me that we’re having students protest gun violence and wanting to be safe, yet we’re going to discipline them.”
Henderson responded by saying the document doesn’t discourage students from participating in the walk-out, and that the policies are designed to be the same for any walkout event.
“It doesn’t prohibit anyone from participating in student-led protests,” she said. “If you read the whole document, you see how parents can give permission to students, and if they didn’t give permission, they can later. I think it’s a pretty content-neutral set of procedures that allow students to exercise their freedom of speech and interest to engage in an assembly to express their opinion.”
While formulating their own document on walkouts, Henderson said the district consulted policies on the ACLU website, which say that while students cannot be punished for the content of the protest, most states and districts have laws in place to punish absences.
When asked if she is in favor of students participating in the walkout, Henderson said she “understands and respects that there’s a lot of passion around school safety.”
It’s unclear how many students will be participating in walkouts at Aberdeen. Wirta said her friend group has discussed doing it, and that she’s heard a variety of opinions.
“Mostly, my friend group has talked about doing it, but I’ve also heard a lot of people say, ‘That’s sort of ridiculous, but they’ve got a point,’” said Wirta. “Or I’ve heard, ‘Yes, I want to do this because I don’t think someone that age should have a gun like that.’”
