Students at this KC school were disciplined for honoring Parkland victims with walkout
Students at a Kansas City school were disciplined for walking out of class on Wednesday to honor the 17 people killed in the Parkland, Fla., school shooting one month ago.
About 150 Park Hill High School students participated, according to junior Ethan Simon, who told The Star that each participant was marked truant.
Students at the Northland school were given the option to serve a detention or to attend an administrative conference, Simon added.
"To punish 150 students for standing up for what they believe in respectably and on school property ... doesn't seem too just. We protest out of necessity for change, not the novelty of just missing school," Simon said.
Simon added some students were locked out of their classrooms after the walkout. "The teachers stood in front of the doors and refused to let people go back to class until the next class started (about 15 minutes later)," he said.
Another participant, senior Angelo J. Pacheco, told The Star he believed the discipline doled out by school officials was fair.
"They had to make a point this time to ensure people can’t have walkouts for everything and anything," Pacheco said.
Students across the country walked out of class in honor of the Parkland victims on Wednesday. While the group organizing the walkout said the aim was to both honor the victims and call for stricter gun control, Simon said Park Hill students made a point of participating only to memorialize the victims.
Park Hill students tied 17 balloons to a flag pole in honor of the victims and gave speeches.
The district released a statement defending its response, saying its student-parent handbook calls for a conference following a truancy.
"As a district, we will follow our handbook for any such walkout," the statement said, according to Fox4.
School administrators are protected if they choose to discipline students for walking out, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, because doing so entails missing class time.
"Schools can discipline you for missing class. But what they cannot do is discipline you more harshly because of the political nature of or the message behind your action," the ACLU told The Washington Post.
But Simon, the junior at Park Hill, believes students should have gotten a pass for missing class to participate in the walkout.
"If we would have been disruptive in any way or stayed out longer than the 17 minutes," Simon said, "that's where I believe punishment is justified."
This story was originally published March 14, 2018 at 11:23 PM with the headline "Students at this KC school were disciplined for honoring Parkland victims with walkout."