MONTPELIER — Standing before hundreds of people at the Statehouse Saturday afternoon, Amy Wardwell, a social studies teacher at Champlain Valley Union High School, described waking up to a recent email from her principal. Just days after the deadly school shooting at an elementary school in Texas, a gun threat had been made against the Hinesburg school.
School would go on, the email read, albeit with an increased police presence.
When Wardwell pulled into the parking lot that morning, “it felt like I was driving into a prison, not a high school,” she said. “A place where we would not be able to build the trust and relationships with students that make learning in Vermont possible, because we were starting that day from a place of suspicion.”
Wardell was among the educators, students and activists who spoke at Montpelier March for Our Lives rally, organized by GunSense Vermont and Moms Demand Action Vermont Chapter, to demand tougher gun laws they said would prevent school shootings and other forms of gun violence.
The speakers included high school students like Francesca Gallati, of Essex, who described how a tap on a door handle or a balloon pop can make her friends flinch, as they fear “someone might be firing in the area.”
Eliza Doucet, a sophomore at Mt. Abraham Union High School in Bristol, recounted how she and many of her classmates were afraid to go to school in December of last year, after other students threatened to bring weapons to school.
“When I returned to school a few days later, I was jumpy, peeking around every corner,” Doucet said.
The Montpelier rally was one of more than 450 March for Our Lives rallies held across the country Saturday. The rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., drew thousands of protesters.
March for Our Lives was created in 2018 by survivors of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Fourteen students and three adults were killed in the attack.
Saturday’s protests came just weeks after mass shootings at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, in which 10 Black people were killed, and at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that claimed the lives of 19 elementary school students and two teachers.
The day after the Uvalde shooting, Montpelier police announced they had seized weapons in the preceding weeks while investigating a “potential threat” to the city’s high school. Lake Region Union High School in Barton canceled a day of classes the next week after a student threatened gun violence on Snapchat.
Vermont students and educators spoke to the crowd about how fears of gun violence have pervaded their school communities.
Elleen Barandse, who introduced herself at the podium as an educator from Chittenden County, described what an active shooter drill looks like in her classroom: She tells her students to spread out so they’re not one big target, to crouch under their desk, to grab scissors or a water bottle to throw at anyone who comes in the room.
During one recent drill, it was quiet, except for the hum of an air purifier, Barandse said. Her students were all wearing masks due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The classroom was cold, as the windows were open to help with air circulation.
“In that moment, it all felt like too much,” Barandse said. “Too much weight for schools to carry, epidemic layered upon epidemic.”
Doucet, from Bristol, called for Vermont to pass a safe storage law, and for a nationwide assault weapons ban.
“How do you not see that an entire generation is traumatized?” she said to the crowd.
U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., also spoke at the rally. As he stepped up to the podium, someone in the crowd yelled out, “Let’s get it done, Congressman!”
During his remarks, Welch called for an end to the filibuster to force a Senate vote on stricter gun laws.
“The filibuster means that we don’t even have the United States Senate take a vote, so you can’t even know where members stand,” Welch said. “That is not right. You are entitled to better service from your democracy, and your United States Senate.”
Welch was among the cosponsors of the Protecting Our Kids Act, which passed the U.S. House this week by a vote of 223-204. The bill would raise the age to purchase a semiautomatic centerfire rifle, place limits on large capacity magazines and create federal regulations on ghost guns — firearms that can be bought online as a kit and assembled at home.
A group of U.S. senators are simultaneously working on their own, likely more limited, package of gun reforms, but had yet to reach a deal as of Friday.
Allie Breyer, a volunteer with Moms Demand Action Vermont who spoke at Saturday’s rally, said that alongside stricter gun laws, she wanted Vermont to invest more in suicide prevention and mental health.
Nearly 9 in 10 firearm deaths in Vermont are suicides, according to 2021 data from the state Department of Health.
Breyer also argued that gun regulations were important for racial justice efforts, particularly in Vermont.
“We live in a state that’s too commonly mistaken as a progressive haven, yet easy access to firearms gives armed white extremists and dangerous people the means to threaten, intimidate and force Black, Indigenous and other people of color out of our state and out of our communities,” she said. “Vermont is not one of the whitest states in the country by accident.”
