BEMIDJI -- Before classes began Wednesday, a few dozen students and staff at Bemidji High حلحلآ» wordlessly filed out of the school’s cavernous front hallway and gathered around its flagpole for a 17-minute moment of silence -- one for each victim in a school shooting a month earlier in Parkland, Fla.
As they stood there, fidgeting in the March morning air, a few more students stopped to watch or joined the crowd. Others filed past as they headed to class.
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The gathering at the flagpole was one substitute for an earlier push for a school wide walkout to protest gun violence. District leaders said they wouldn’t support that effort and the walkout’s organizer, an English teacher at the high school, then canceled the planned event. BHS administrators and student leaders hoped students at the school would perform acts of kindness Wednesday and, next month, attend a “school safety forum†with Bemidji-area lawmakers in place of the broader walkout.
But that didn’t stop about 60 Lumberjacks from leaving class at 10 a.m. Wednesday to join the nationwide protest. Those BHS students linked arms and stood silently for 17 minutes, too, then headed back inside.
Casey Johnson, a senior at the high school, said the walkout was a collective effort by students there. She characterized it as peaceful and organized.
At Blackduck High حلحلآ», 57 students quietly protested school violence. Sophomore Rachel Roberts read the names and short biographies of each of the 17 Parkland victims, plus a brief snippet of what their classmates and teachers thought of them.
The school was the endpoint of a 2005 shooting spree that ultimately left 10 people dead, including the gunman. Most of the victims were students and staff at the school.
At Cass Lake-Bena حلحلآ»s, about 20-25 high schoolers and a group of middle schoolers calmly left class, and about a dozen students walked out of class at TrekNorth Junior & Senior High حلحلآ» in Bemidji after a student-led school-wide assembly about strengthening intra-community relationships and ways to prevent school shootings.
No students at Voyageurs Expeditionary حلحلآ» walked out, Director Scott Anderson told the Pioneer. Staff didn’t push them in one direction or the other, he said.
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Some students at Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig school met around a ceremonial fire and placed asemaa -- tobacco -- in the fire after saying a prayer for safe schools and those who have been lost to violence in them.
The national walkout was intended for high schoolers, but K-8 charter حلحلآ»craft Learning Community north of Bemidji held a demonstration as well. There, a trio of sixth-graders designed a slow, contemplative walk through the woods outside the school that took approximately 17 minutes, Executive Director Adrienne Eickman said.
Students also read about kindness and brainstormed some acts of kindness, which they then posted in the entrance to the charter school’s main building.
