By Crystal Donaldson and Sam Wood
NORMAL – More than 300 students took part in a 17-minute rally outside Normal Community High School on Wednesday morning as part of a national school walkout to protest gun violence.
A similar protest was staged inside Bloomington High Schools and many other schools across the country.
The protests represented one minute for each of the 17 people who were killed in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. last month.
Students at NCHS chanted slogans including ‘Spread love, not hate, we just want to graduate’ and ‘Grades up, guns down’ and called on state and federal lawmakers to make them feel safe again.
After a freshman fired a loaded gun at NCHS in September 2012, students said the effects of that event are still felt today.
Faith Wenger, a senior and a speaker at the rally, said it ‘breaks her heart’ knowing her peers could have their lives threatened by guns at a moments notice.
“This isn’t a second amendment argument, this is an argument about life,” Wenger said. “Where a generation wants us to be safe. We want to walk in this school with worries about an exam and not our lives and the ones we love.”
The walkout was organized by the students in the Not In Our School club and the Peace and Justice Club.
“I think this is an issue for everyone,” junior Kavya Sudhir said. “No matter where you stand, Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, this is just an issue of safer schools. If we regulate our guns then there will be less chances of what happened in 2012 to happen here again.”
Unit 5 Superintendent Mark Daniel attended the walkout and called it ‘very powerful.’
Even though the walkout focused on the use of guns, Daniel says healthy relationships are what keep students safe.
“You can have various locks on doors. You can have bullet proof glass, but that doesn’t prevent this from happening. The way you prevent this from happening, in my opinion, is working with the actual students themselves.”
The superintendent also says the school has started looking for more social workers and psychologists to encourage those relationships.
“Let’s focus on relationships with each other and make sure those are relationships that are moving in a positive and constructive way. Not in a way where someone is so desperate that they’d actually perform an act of violence on their own peers.”
Bloomington High School
Bloomington High School students were not permitted to leave the building for a similar protest, where students filled the halls instead.
Organizers there were no less energized in their call for lawmakers to pass what they would consider to be meaningful gun control legislation.
BHS junior Fiona Ward-Shaw explained what that looks like from her vantage point.
“I think that comes down to banning assaults rifles and semi-automatic weapons,” Ward-Shaw said. “That comes down to ceasing the sale of bump stocks. That comes down to making solid changes that can really have a significant impact.
Ward-Shaw added she felt the protest would have been more impactful had students been allowed to rally outside.
“I don’t think it was the best choice for the administration to keep it as confined and sort of domesticated as it was,” Ward-Shaw said. “Democracy dies in this type of silence and I think the protested should not have any say in the protests against them.”
Fellow BHS junior Cary Slovell noted students played a role in planning the protests with the school administration.
“If students really wanted to determine how that all went down they could have spoken up more than they did,” Slovell said.
BHS students observed a 17-minute moment of silence as the names of the 17 victims were read over the school’s intercom system.
Daniel and District 87 Superintendent Barry Reilly both said administrators at each school worked
Eric Stock can be reached at [email protected].
