Students from Westglades Middle School during the nationwide school walkout, March 14, 2018.
By Mike Stocker/Sun Sentinel/TNS/Getty Images.
Today’s National School Walkout was scheduled to last only 17 minutes: one for each of the fallen at Marjory Stoneman Douglas School one month ago today. Twenty-five-hundred schools
across the country had agreed to participate, each in their own manner,
and Douglas had settled on a quiet, dignified, and controlled affair.
The plan was simple: walk out to the football field at 10 A.M., observe a
moment of silence, listen to a song and a short speech by the
principal, then file back inside at 10:17. The press, a constant
presence and growing irritant since the attack, would be kept at bay,
locked behind the tall fences sealing off the campus perimeter.
The
plan had a glitch: much of the Douglas student body thought it was
dumb. They had been grumbling to me and rolling their eyes the past few
days. What was the point of limiting the protest to 17 minutes? And
reporters could be super annoying, but wasn’t this exactly the wrong
moment to shut them up? This was a show of force, so why seal off the
messengers?
Lauren Hogg—a freshman at Marjory Douglas and the sister of David Hogg, an organizer of the #NeverAgain movement that has channeled grief over the shooting into a national push for gun control—says
she first got wind of a brewing rebellion on Instagram just this
morning. Another student showed me a Snapchat message she received in
first period that read, “after the 17 minutes, please march with us to
pine trails. 17 minutes is NOT enough.” (Pine Trails is the name of a
popular park about two miles north of the high school.)
As
the protest unfolded, however, 17 minutes appeared to be all the
students would get. They milled about on the football field, safe behind
the fence still festooned with flowers, brown and crumply now, and
countless teddy bears water-stained by recent storms. Hundreds of
reporters lined the sidewalk, way too far away to speak to the students.
Scattered parents wandered among us, filming on cell phones and raising
the occasional chant.
It’s unclear how many
students were planning to ditch the simple protest and desert the
campus. They had been warned that anyone who passed outside the gates
would not be let back in today.
But everything
changed when a younger group of kids made a big move just down the
street. Students at Westglades Middle School, whose campus abuts
Douglas, were also chafing at the contained walkout approved at their
school. So a handful of students, led by Christopher Krok, rushed for the exits.
Security
tried to stop him, and so did the principal, but Krok, who later
identified himself as commander of the Junior R.O.T.C. program at
Westglades, rushed past them, two friends and his sister in tow. Several
followed, a trickle at first, and then the dam broke. “I didn’t think
anyone would actually do it,” eighth-grader Justin St. Piere told me. Waves of frustrated students poured onto Holmberg Road.
A
minute later, press and parents in front of Douglas noticed the sudden
commotion: nearly a thousand invigorated Westglades students streaming
toward us. At first they moved slowly, gleefully chatting with
reporters, calling for an end to guns and for adults to start protecting
them. ”I’m here to honor the ones who have fallen, and to spread more
gun control,” St. Piere said.
Then,
as the front of the pack reached Douglas, a few kids began to run.
Within seconds, most of the crowd was running, sprinting. None of them
could tell me where they were heading. “I honestly have no clue,” St.
Piere said. “I’m just following the group.” Finally, a kid yelled, “Pine
Trails!”
The
Douglas students, far beyond the fence, noticed, too. Many of them
later said that was the moment they decided to go. Their little brothers
and sisters had taken to the streets to support them—enough with this
protection! They filed back into the school to collect what they needed
for a sudden change of plans. David Hogg, who ended up giving a powerful
speech at the Pine Trails rally an hour later, said he first got wind
of the revolt when he saw students heading for the doors.
They
all gravitated to Pine Trails because that’s been the primary memorial
site, with a stage holding 17 life-size angels that glow white each
night, and 17 crosses in a nearby field, each its own private memorial,
with huge piles of flowers, signs, and memorabilia. Signs posted
everywhere said that the items will be collected for long-term
preservation soon.
The kids have mostly stopped
coming here, and the one rally that had been scheduled for today was
originally set to take place at North Community Park, much closer to the
school. But plans changed spontaneously at 10:17, as thousands of kids
began to run.
That was the remarkable thing
about the rally. It was entirely spontaneous—organized, reconfigured,
and expanded on the fly via Snap and Instagram. But its seeds had been
planted nearly a month ago, when plans were announced for a National
School Walkout to be held on April 20, timed to the 19th anniversary of
the Columbine High School massacre. That date felt too far away to
EMPOWER, the youth arm of the annual Women’s March. They set up today’s
march to commemorate the one-month anniversary of Douglas, and it
quickly caught on.
Christopher Krok led the
Westglades rebellion dressed in full U.S. Army dress greens. By the time
I caught up with him, he was surrounded by dozens more young boys in
uniform, many 12 and 13 years old, several under four feet tall. One
after another spoke to reporters, passionately calling for stricter gun
laws and limitations on the sale of military assault weapons. They said
there were about 55 students in their unit, and they believed virtually
all of them had participated.
“This was planned
about two seconds before it started,” Krok told me. “Because we had
organized a walkout, but the school said O.K., but they put us in the
field—which we thought wasn’t enough. That won’t show anything. So Ryan,
Spencer, me, and my sister here, we were like, ‘Let’s just walk out.’
We got stopped by security and the principal and we just said, ‘No,
we’re going.’ And then sooner or later, the entire school started
following us.”
Meanwhile, 17-year-old Douglas student Susana Matta Valdivieso had spent weeks planning for an assembly at North Community Park. She had speakers lined up and had invited a Rabbi, Melinda Bernstein,
to offer an invocation and lead a moment of silence. As she watched her
classmates rush out the Douglas doors, yelling at one another to meet
at Pine Trails, she realized she had to change her plans. Matta
Valdivieso took up a position in front of the 17 angels and introduced
the first few speakers, and the thousands of kids milling the park moved
closer to hear them. Rabbi Bernstein soon arrived with a mobile
loudspeaker, and within minutes it was a full-blown rally.
I
was standing near the speakers, and a little girl with over-ear
headphones around her neck leaned toward me to meekly ask, “Excuse me,
sir, what if I want to speak?” I pointed her to Matta Valdivieso, who
had yet to introduce herself but seemed to be in charge. A few minutes
later, that girl, Westglades sixth-grader Aarayln Hughes, took the mic and wowed the crowd. She was not meek now.
Many students had come from other schools. I spoke to a small contingent from Coral Gables Senior High School. Recent graduate Angel Lopez
helped organize them and other local schools through his Instagram
account, @browardstrong. He said the administration at his school
insisted on a walkout of “17 minutes in the hallway. It’s absurd. The
kids that were daring jumped the gates.”
As the
rally broke up around noon, Matta Valdivieso was visibly relieved. It
had been a huge success. “So when did you decide to move it here?” I
asked.
“Around 10:17.”
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