A Texas school district superintendent has threatened to suspend students who join any organized walkouts or protests in the wake of the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida.
Texas superintendent threatens 3-day suspension for students who walk out to protest gun laws
“A school is a place to learn and grow educationally, emotionally and morally. A disruption of the school will not be tolerated.”
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Jen Kirby is a senior foreign and national security reporter at Vox, where she covers global instability.
Curtis Rhodes, superintended of Needville ISD in the Houston area, wrote in a statement posted to Facebook Tuesday that the district “will not allow a student demonstration during school hours for any type of protest or awareness!!”
“Should students choose to do so,” the post read, “they will be suspended from school for 3 days and face all the consequences that come along with an out of school suspension. Life is all about choices and every choice has a consequence whether it be positive or negative.”
The post was taken down shortly after 5 pm on Wednesday.
The school district also sent a letter warning students against protesting to students’ homes, reports the Houston Chronicle.
Students and activists have rallied in the week after a gunman killed 17 at a Florida high school to demand lawmakers take action on gun control. A National School Walkout is planned for March 14, and a March for Our Lives in Washington, DC, and other cities is scheduled for March 24.
Rhodes said he was sensitive to violence in schools but that administrators would discipline students, whether it was “one, fifty, or five hundred students involved.”
“A school is a place to learn and grow educationally, emotionally and morally,” he wrote. “A disruption of the school will not be tolerated.”
Survivors of last week’s shooting in Florida have been vocal in calling for change to current gun laws, joined by other activists and victims of mass shootings.
“We are teenagers who have nothing to lose,” Delaney Tarr, a 17-year-old survivor of the shooting, told Vox in an interview this week. “We don’t have jobs to protect. We don’t have anything that we need to conserve right now. We are just teenagers who were victims, and we are ready to speak out.”
Needville also had its own shooting scare this week: An NBC affiliate in Houston reported Tuesday that a Needville middle school student was arrested for making terroristic threats after he posted a picture of a shotgun on Snapchat that read, “Don’t come to skoo tm @needvill.”
