An inside look at the walkout: Charter Oak High School

On March 14, 2018, students across the nation walked out of classes in order to protest gun violence and honor the victims killed just a month before. At Charter Oak High School, the walkout consisted of two memorials. One was comprised of white balloons dedicated to each of the seventeen victims of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. Plastic walls surrounded the balloons, where students stuck Post-it notes of love and aggravation in memory of those who were killed. The balloons were released later that day. The other memorial, created by senior Sela Pastrana, was an arrangement of seventeen desks. Each was accompanied with a poster of one of the seventeen victims, along with a brief description of who they were.

In order to avoid penalizing students for joining the student-led movements, the Charter Oak Unified School District set up a special schedule for the day of the walkout. However, this coincided with the school’s nutritional break. Many students felt that this defeated the purpose of the walkout and stayed for an extra seventeen minutes, where some decided to speak in front of the crowd.