Hundreds of South Burlington middle and high school students walked out of class Thursday morning in response to Tuesday’s mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers.
The Uvalde shooting was the country’s 213th mass shooting in 2022, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit data collection organization. It was the 27th school shooting this year, and the deadliest school shooting since the attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.
While students organized Thursday’s walkout in response to the Uvalde attack, several said they were protesting not just one tragedy, but the pattern of school shootings throughout their youth.
“I feel outraged, but also at the same time, I feel numb,” said Parker Banas, a junior at South Burlington High School.
Multiple students who spoke to the crowd Thursday expressed frustration that lockdown and active shooter drills have become commonplace. The city’s adjoining middle and high school campuses were locked down as recently as September, when police responded to a gun threat at F.H. Tuttle Middle School.
But even the reactions to sudden tragedy now also feel routine, several students said.
After a school shooting, students read news stories and repost some to social media. In the following days, there’s an email from the school and an announcement over the intercom, listing people students can talk to.
“It’s the same exact email every time,” said Daishawnda Montgomery, a South Burlington High School junior.
Students organized Thursday’s walkout through word-of-mouth and social media. Just after 10 a.m., students trickled out of the middle and high school buildings and assembled on the high school football field. Raphaela Sulley, a student who spearheaded the effort, gathered about a dozen classmates to deliver remarks from the top of the bleachers through the stadium’s sound system.
At the mic, senior Brianna Jarvis described first hearing about the Sandy Hook shooting a decade ago. When she saw it on the news, she said, she found herself staring at a photo of a young, red-haired girl who looked like her.
Many of the students who gathered on the football field would be about the same age as the Sandy Hook victims. Those 20 first-graders would have been part of the class of 2024.
“Children should not have to learn to put their lives on the line if they’re the closest to the door in their classroom,” Jarvis said. “Children should not have to learn to find the closest exit in every classroom they walk into. Children should not be harmed at school, and children should not be killed at school.”
“It is miserable and awful and devastating,” Jarvis added, “and that is why you must think about it.”
South Burlington’s walkout to protest gun violence was one of several planned at Vermont schools this week. Essex High School students walked out of class Wednesday morning. Students at Champlain Valley Union High School in Hinesburg had also planned to walk out Thursday morning, but school administrators urged them not to, as the night before, a Burlington High School student allegedly threatened to “shoot up” CVU.
Police were investigating the reported threat as of Thursday.
Matthew Vigneau, a high school senior who spoke to the crowd on Thursday, described his peers as “the second generation of American youth to come of age in the era of school shootings.”
Students who attended Columbine High School at the time of the 1999 shooting in Littleton, Colorado, would now be in their mid-to-late 30s.
South Burlington High School Principal Patrick Burke said he’s now had to respond to several school shootings with next-day staff meetings, during which teachers review how to talk to students about the tragedy. This is Burke’s 25th year working at South Burlington High, and his entire career there has been marked by school shootings.
“I never imagined that, when I was going into education, this was gonna be a part of the job,” he said.
Several student speakers expressed frustration at federal lawmakers’ inaction on gun control, and urged their voting-age peers to take their anger to the polls, both in local elections and the upcoming congressional midterms.
“We are the generation for change!” Sulley said to the crowd.
Students cheered on the turf. Another student beside Sulley leaned over into the mic.
“All right, thank you, guys,” he said. “Back to class, guys, back to class.”
