Florida Students Stage Walkout in Support of School Shooting Victims

While students who survived the Parkland, Florida school shooting march to the capital to meet with President Donald Trump and other legislators, students across the state staged campus walkouts to show their support.

Among the several schools who hosted walkouts this week, the students from West Boca Raton High School walked out of class on Tuesday to march toward Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where a former student killed 17 people.

Authorities from Palm Beach and Broward counties followed students to make sure they were safe, a spokesman told the Miami Herald. West Boca Raton High School is about seven miles from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

On Wednesday, students at Cypress Bay High School in Weston walked out of their classrooms to a nearby park to stand in solidarity with the #NeverAgain movement, a student-driven protest calling for appropriate action to end school shootings. School officials and security walked with them and stand in full support of the demonstration, the city of Weston tweeted.

The walkouts are an attempt to stand in solidarity with the students who survived the massacre, echoing their call to action for safer schools and tighter gun control laws.

While local high schools see mass student walkouts throughout the week, students of Stoneman Douglas arrived in Tallahassee on Tuesday to meet with lawmakers about their experience, and what should happen next.

Among those meetings, President Trump will host a listening session Wednesday about school safety in the wake of last week’s school shooting in Florida.

“This afternoon the President will host a conversation on how to improve school safety. He will hear from students, parents and educators who have directly experienced these horrific tragedies,” a White House spokesperson said.

While Stoneman Douglas students have scheduled around 70 meetings with Florida lawmakers, the state’s Republican-led House of Representatives voted Tuesday to reject a proposal to ban some assault weapons, like the AR-15 used in the deadly shooting.

“It was just so heartbreaking to see how many (voters’) names were up there, especially after it was my school,” 16-year-old student Sheryl Acquaroli told Anderson Cooper 360˚ of the vote. “It seemed almost heartless how they immediately pushed the button to say no.”