Skip to main contentWhen high-school students walked out of class earlier this month to protest an impending war with Iraq and cuts to education, they got a police escort, television coverage and face time with the mayor. (See "Reading, Writing & Radicalization," WW, Feb. 5, 2003.) But when 42 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders from the Family Cooperative School staged their own budget-cuts walkout last week, there was little fanfare. Chanting "books not bombs" and holding signs, they made a few laps around the school but were ultimately ushered back to their seats by Principal Larry Whitson.
The protest against budget cuts came last Thursday and Friday, Feb. 13 and 14, at the small, public, K-8 alternative "school within a school," located inside Sunnyside Elementary on Southeast Salmon Street. One student, Annie Oldani, says she's particularly upset about cuts to Outdoor School, a wilderness science program for sixth-graders.
On the first day, the students stayed out of class for a half-hour, by which time they felt they'd made their point, says Oldani, an organizer of the protest. The second day, the principal put the kibosh on the walkout, and sent home a letter reminding students they were subject to district policy on leaving campus. "He was nice about it," Oldani says.
Erin Jones, an organizer with the Student Activist Alliance--a coalition of area high-schoolers--was pleased to learn of the middle-school protest.
The alliance was not involved with that walkout, but Jones says the SAA is working to include younger students in future actions. "A lot of us would've been excited to do this in middle school," she says, adding that if students are mature enough to be concerned about their own education, there should be no age limit on activism.
WWeek 2015