As students protest creeping dictatorship, recrudescent Nazism, and the recent shooting deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents on U.S. soil, at least one campus cop has some thoughts.
At a local school the other day, students said they overheard their on-duty patrolman say a lot of perhaps expectedly spicy stuff, like how high school students don’t know enough to even know what they’re protesting (we’d argue most do) and that they’re wasting everyone’s time (not quite). Protesting has a way of changing public perception, which can lead to tangible progress.
One (other) thing this policeman allegedly said that stands out betrays an uncomfortable truth: that students should protest on their own time and outside of school.
We agree.
The only people hurt by walking out of class — which has been happening since the Vietnam War — are the students. Becoming smart future voters who can change the laws and lawmakers ruining both Texas and the United States demands showing up for instruction. And now Gov. Greg Abbott says he’s going to arrest student walker-outers who are “violent” (as determined by The Man), because that’s totally normal in a functional democracy with First Amendment rights for every citizen.
Kids, and parents, and I hate to say this because I understand that protesting should not be comfy and cozy, but don’t test him. An arrest record will only work against you, and the reward for walking out — maybe a viral social media post? — is not worth the incredibly high academic and professional risk. In other words, be cool, stay in school. There are lots of other ways to express your displeasure with the White House and its gestapo. Write letters, post Reels, call your representatives, volunteer, and march at organized after-school protests.
Fort Worth students appear to be heeding the warnings. Kids at Boswell High School protested Monday afternoon after dismissal, though many are worried they still may be disciplined by their district, Eagle Mountain-Saginaw.
Dallas students? Not so much. Hundreds walked out Tuesday during school hours.
“The law of free speech is more complex than that,” Abbott said recently. “You don’t have freedom of speech to say and act any way you want to, anywhere you want to, anytime you want to. The Supreme Court has been very clear about free speech of students, and that free speech of students does not include leaving the school to go protest.”
Greg Abbott is a terrible governor for many reasons but especially because the First Amendment and the right to free speech and assembly mean nothing to him. An outspoken Trumper, Abbott is taking the decision to protest the government — not murder someone or steal from them or rape them, simply express displeasure with the people in charge — and making that decision his and not ours. Kids who want to protest and fall behind? That’s their right. Threatening them with jail time or worse for their intellectual self-harm is un-American, which is really saying something in our current fascist state.
The kids aren’t going to listen to me, some middle-aged writer-bro whose white, straight, male privilege supersedes whatever middling success he may have experienced in his wretched life. (Not much.) Hopefully, some parental figures out there will realize that allowing their children to protest during class time is counterproductive. Today is not 1967. We now live in a de facto dictatorship, and in Texas, the punishments — expulsion, the clink, worse — are not worth destroying your future or losing your life over. The best thing our kids can do is learn more and learn better and become the kinds of voters we need to turn the country around. Data crunchers say that Abbott is attacking 400,000 potential new voters by the end of this school year. That’s a huge, clearly engaged bloc he’s pissing off, which is good news for nice, empathetic, non-hateful Texans everywhere.
In response to all the student walkouts across the state, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) recently issued guidelines at the behest of Gov. Abbott. Now, teachers will mark students protesting during class time as absent, teachers could lose their licenses for even helping protesting students stay safe, and districts that allow walkouts during class could lose funding or find their boards replaced by managers hand-picked by the state GOP.
Like millions of others across the globe, the students are mainly protesting ICE, whose heavy-handed tactics have resulted in the deaths of several protestors and the deportation and/or detainment of thousands of noncriminal U.S. citizens. Student walkouts have occurred over the past couple of weeks and days at several area schools, including the Young Women’s Leadership Academy, Trimble Technical High School, and Birdville High School. The number of protestors has ranged from a couple dozen at various campuses to around 100 at the predominantly Hispanic Haltom High School. One Buffalo told the Star-Telegram, “We’re protesting ICE today because they kill people and get no punishment at all,” referring to the recent, highly publicized shooting deaths in Minneapolis of Good and Pretti by federal agents.
Students’ speech has been upheld by the courts for decades. In 1969’s Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the Supreme Court ruled that schools could not keep students from protesting the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands. In the Tinker ruling, the court went on to indicate that schools could intervene only if students’ actions created “substantial disruption.”
Again, when The Man is making the determinations, best to err on the side of caution.
This column reflects the opinions of the editorial board and not the Fort Worth Weekly. To submit a column, please email Editor Anthony Mariani at Anthony@FWWeekly.com. He will gently edit it for clarity and concision.
