‘We are scared.’ Tacoma high school students hold walkout and protest over gun violence
Foss High School students wanted their voices heard Thursday after a Texas school shooting Tuesday left 21 people dead.
Over 100 students staged a walkout and anti-gun violence rally on Tacoma’s South 19th Street. Students crowded sidewalks on both sides of the street near South Stevens/Tyler streets. Passing cars honked in support and a few passersby joined them.
Marijah Johnson, 14, held two signs that read, “We can’t take it anymore” and “We are scared.”
The shooting in Texas on Tuesday that took the lives of 19 children and two adults has made her nervous and anxious.
“I shouldn’t have to come to school scared that I’ll be shot or anything bad’s gonna happen,” Johnson said. “That’s supposed to be a safe place. You shouldn’t have to worry about that.”
She thinks gun laws need to be reformed.
“I just want it all to change,” Johnson said. “I want us all to be safe.”
Protest organizers
The message to his fellow students is simple, said one of the walkout and protest organizers, Zaire Stubblefield, 15.
“That everybody has a voice and that everybody can make a change if they want to,” the Foss freshman said.
Another organizer, Sarai Reed, 14, said she’s ending the week feeling less safe than when it began.
“If it happened to elementary, if it could happen to middle school, then it can happen in high school,” Reed said. “It can happen anywhere.”
The students praised school staff for making them feel safer but said they can only do so much.
“It’s just with all these weights,” Stubblefield said. “It’s like anything can happen.”
School reaction
Foss was in a modified lockdown on Wednesday, a precautionary measure following Tuesday’s massacre. Classes are still held during a modified lockdown, but access to the school is restricted.
“We had parents who were calling, out of fear for their kids, asking us for that,” said Foss principal Lysandra Ness, who watched the protest from a nearby grassy knoll.
School officials and staff did not organize the walkout and protest but did not stop it, Ness said. No disciplinary action would be taken against the students, she said.
“I hate to put it this way, but I’m glad that they’re not numb,” Ness said of her students. “Because when we get to the numbness, that’s just not healthy or safe either.”
Wearing red
Some of the students wore red clothing, as Stubblefield did, as a symbolic gesture.
“To show the blood on the hands of us, the blood on the hands of the mass shooters and the blood on the hands of the politicians and the people in power that have allowed these gun laws that are so free that anybody can access a gun,” he said.
The students at Thursday’s protest were just four or five years old when the nation’s worst school shooting took place Dec. 14, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut. A gunman killed 26 people at an elementary school.
Now, a new generation of students have been scarred. Johnson wants politicians to know how they feel.
“They don’t understand that we don’t feel safe,” she said. “They’re not doing anything about it.”
The future
Reed doesn’t want her younger siblings to grow up with the fear she has this week.
“Not only do I want to change it for my siblings, I want to change for our generation and the next generation so we don’t have to go through this,” Reed said.
“And there’s so many people that want to spark the change with us,” Stubblefield said. “And it starts here, starts now. And this is only step one, this is only beginning.”
Student organizers said they are planning a city-wide anti gun violence rally on June 2 in Wright Park.
This story was originally published May 26, 2022 at 4:36 PM.
