Exonians Take Part in School Gun Walkout

At 11:19 p.m. on Friday, April 20, Exonians across campus put down their books and closed their laptops to file out of their classrooms. They congregated on the Academy Building lawn to listen to speakers and a musical performance and to partake in a moment of silence as a part of the National School Walkout, a protest of congressional, state and local failures to take action to prevent gun violence.

Many students participated in this walkout— which was organized by seniors Auden Barbour and Daisy Tichenor—and returned to class during the next format. However, some remained on the J. Smith quad until 2:50 p.m., claiming that the approximately 30 minute walkout was not enough.

“I heard a lot of talk about, ‘Oh, if I miss this class then I’m going to get dicked,’ but that is the whole point of civil disobedience. You have to make sacrifices to stand in solidarity with other people to fight for an issue,” [Chinasa Mbanugo] said.

The shorter walkout had administrative support, as Barbour and Tichenor had emailed Principal Lisa MacFarlane to both inform her of the event and to request her backing. Following this, the administration asked faculty members to excuse B format absences that resulted from the walkout.

Upper Chinasa Mbanugo felt that students attending the walkout should not have been concerned with unexcused absences. “I heard a lot of talk about, ‘Oh, if I miss this class then I’m going to get dicked,’ but that is the whole point of civil disobedience. You have to make sacrifices to stand in solidarity with other people to fight for an issue,” she said.

While Barbour said that “the administration is not doing this with us,” the walkout’s planners “definitely want[ed] the administration’s support because it’s not like we’re protesting anything that they are doing in particular.”

Senior Matt Alburn conceded that administrative support helped the cause and added that a short, excused ceremony is “so much more accessible and so much easier. And that’s the argument for this school: that they made it accessible for everyone.” However, he said that “the actual event shouldn’t be that easy.”

Although this walkout felt powerful for many, some students felt as though this block of time was not enough to serve the purpose of this momentous day. For this reason, Alburn stood on the Jeremiah Smith lawn from 10 a.m. until 2:50 p.m. Students noticed Alburn’s statement and flocked to the cause; by 2:50, around 70 students participated in this secondary protest.

Alburn began his protest by standing alone in the middle of the quad. He attended the original walkout but returned to his post to finish off the day. “I didn’t want to be disrespectful,” Alburn said of his choice to be present at the first walkout. Yet he “considered the first walkout to be more of a service. I believe obviously in the same cause, so I was part of the service. I don’t mean any disrespect to what the school put on, because that’s important. It’s just different,” Alburn said.

According to some students’ Facebook posts, this second protest was a “real student walk out,” where students were able to participate in an “act of civil disobedience.” Some students believed that this component was missing in the morning walk out.

Martin felt similarly. “I don’t like how the walkout has become a school sanctioned event as opposed to a student event,” she said.

“I was annoyed because it didn’t feel student-run at that point,” senior Katie Goyette added. “I had the sense that it had been taken over by adults from the shortened time.”

This sentiment seemed to fall flat for Tichenor. “I get a little confused when people say it was school sanctioned. It was organized and run by students,” said Tichenor. “We informed the faculty what would happen and when and told them to do with that what they would.”

Some faculty responded positively to the movement. French Instructor Katherine Fair incorporated the idea of activism into her class discussion. “I wanted this issue to be connected into what we do around the table, even if before we weren’t talking about it as a class,” she said. “I thought it was a good opportunity to read an article (in French) from an important journal, Le Monde, and see what they had to say about it.”

According to the National School Walkout website, the event began at 10 a.m. Friday throughout the rest of the nation and finished at the end of the school day. Barbour and Tichenor decided that since 10 a.m. was in the middle of Assembly block, the walkout would be more powerful if switched to 11:19 a.m., the exact time of the beginning of the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999.

The first walkout commenced with a speech from Barbour and Tichenor, who emphasized the importance of this walkout as a first step towards diminishing gun violence. 

Afterwards, Mbanugo spoke to the relationship between the #NeverAgain and the Black Lives Matter movements. Upper Olivia Ross followed Mbanugo with a poem she wrote about her fear of losing her older brother to gun violence. After Ross, lower Kileidria Aguilar stated the names of some victims of gun violence, including the students at Parkland and Columbine. She asked crowd-members to put their fists in the air if they recognized such names.

New Hampshire State Representative Renny Cushing (D-Hampton) also spoke at the event, telling the audience of his experience with gun violence, and the Exeter Choral Union performed “We Shall Overcome.” The event concluded with a moment of silence for lives lost to gun violence, and many students then returned to class.

Students took part in the walkout for a variety reasons, some to be in solidarity with mass shootings across America. Senior AJ Bravo thought of his home state when participating in the walkout. “I’m from Florida, and we all saw what happened there as a tragedy. So I’m just doing what I can do,” Bravo said.

Like Bravo, senior Valeria Rios walked for her hometown of Las Vegas, Nevada, which experienced the deadliest mass shooting in American history on Oct. 1. “I’m from [Las Vegas], so that really scared me when I found out. I had to call all of my family members and friends to make sure that they weren’t there, and thankfully they were not,” she said.

Upper Jordan Davidson, a gun control activist, was impassioned by the walkout because he believes the students are coming together for one important cause. “I think the purpose of this walkout is solidarity,” Davidson said. “Everyone can look around and see the majority of their classmates are standing with them, thinking the same things, focusing on the same topic all at once.”

Upper Rose Martin, a participant in both walkouts, felt truly touched by the speaking portion of the first walkout. “I personally loved the performances. I thought the speeches were amazing. I even started crying,” she said.

For the future, Tichenor hoped that the movement would continue on campus. “There’s so much that has to happen, still, to fix this problem,” said Tichenor. “I think we’re finally getting there in terms of a culture shift: most of the larger public is now on the same page in regards to finally having some regulations on guns.”