Students Voice Safety Concerns During National Walkout

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Rhea Rohr, Editor-in-Chief

“School should not be a place where we learn to run from bullets,” said senior Kyle Slagle. On March 14th at 10:00 am, hundreds of Sahuaro students packed into the auditorium to protest lack of gun control and security, and honor the memory of the 17 victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The walkout was organized solely by students, but was silently supervised by administrators, and included a public forum where any student could come up to the stage and give a speech. Many of the speeches featured students’ fears of coming to school with all of the recent shootings, though some focused more on a necessity to support those with mental illness and avoid the issue altogether. Noë Austin, junior, stated, “Just because their voice is different than yours does not mean they don’t deserve to speak it.”

However, some people were not so thrilled with the walkout. “In the beginning, it was good,” senior Angelica Cañez started, “but then everyone repeated each other.” Abby Aalberg, senior, said, “We need more about how we can fix it and less about what we need to fix.” People also complained that nothing good would come out of having a protest in the first place.

It may be true that one walkout in one school will accomplish little, but thousands of schools across the nation protested, which can certainly make a change if the right people listen. As senior Abi Nash stated, “All the guns in the world are not as valuable as one single life.”