by Sommer S, Liv K, Michaela E, and Ruby G

 

 

 

                                                          

On March 14th at 10:00am, Minnetonka High School, usually rumbling with the voices and footsteps of its’ Skippers, is practically empty and deafeningly quiet. This is because more than half of MHS students walked out of class to brave the cold of a Minnesota spring morning and to stand up for an issue greater than themselves, each one of them feeling anything but empty or quiet.

 

United by an unfortunate blend of fear, grief, and bravery, students all over the nation took part in regulated school walkouts on March 14th to honor the lives of those killed during the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida just one month prior. Minnetonka High School was one of over 2500 high schools across the nation that participated in student-led walkouts to protest gun-violence. The walk-outs lasted seventeen minutes in recognition of the seventeen lives lost to the Parkland massacre. Each minute spent marching, chanting, uniting in hopes that those seventeen lives will be the last lost to a tragedy that students believe was so preventable.

 

“I just feel like it’s an issue that’s been on going but not really acknowledged enough and everyone is just staying quiet but it’s time for people to speak up,” says Eliza Bemm, a Minnetonka High School Freshman who was particularly vocal about the event.

 

As students marched outside the high school building, seventeen chairs lined the sides of the chanting crowds but no one sat. This was MHS’s way of incorporating a memorial aspect to the walkout in respect of the victims. Seventeen metal chairs were set up on the sidewalks of the campus grounds, a picture and short biography of each of the fallen students were stuck to the faces of the chairs. As students marched past some stopped to grieve, some mentally gave their condolences, some clenched their jaws at the thought of the injustice, but none could help but fight the tears as they imagined their own names and faces in place of the seventeen.

 

“I want to honor those who awfully lost their lives. That’s the main reason I’m doing this, for the seventeen people who were brutally murdered,” says Carly Idema, a junior at Minnetonka High School.

 

Stepping out onto the campus grounds, a swarm of bodies covered in orange began to form (orange being the color chosen to represent anti-gun violence in honor of Hadiya Pendleton, a teen victim of gun violence). Each student stepped in line, marching beside one another as they began to chant, “What do we want? Change! When do we want it? Now!”. An electric pulse coursed through the crowd and lingered in the chests of the students as their faces brightened at the thought of potential change. Ribbons were handed out, buttons were designed, some students even came to school an hour early to help make signs. The dedication that students put into the walkout was nothing short of amazing and the payoff was clearly seen in the glint in their eyes, the edge it in their voices and through the synergy of the crowd.

 

“This shouldn’t be a partisan issue because this affects every single person. Nobody deserves to fear for their lives to get an education and it’s crazy to think that we’re the only developed nation where this is actually a problem. We need change,” stated Conor Joesephs, a Minnetonka Senior.

 

The most powerful part of it all? In the sea of orange, no one seemed to remember the differences between them and their neighbors; the contentious issues that previously stood like ironclad barriers had fallen as if they had never stood in the first place. Fear does not discriminate, and Minnetonka’s Skippers made that clear as they marched side by side not as “seniors and freshmen” nor as “republicans and democrats” nor as “us and them”; they stood as human beings, all in fear of what might happen if change is not made.