NYC high school students walk out of class to protest war in Gaza, city schools’ response
NEW YORK — More than 1,000 New York City high school students walked out of class Friday to protest the Israel-Hamas war — and the response by the nation’s largest school district to the heightened tensions.
Protest plans obtained by the Daily News called for students to stand up during class and start chanting slogans before heading out of their school building, and by mid-afternoon, about 400 protesters had converged on the central offices of the Department of Education in lower Manhattan.
Some students scribbled makeshift signs for a ceasefire on spiral notebooks, while others designed banners for their high schools, such as “Bronx Science Against Apartheid” and “Ceasefire Art & Design 4 Palestine.”
“I think this is a great opportunity for New York students to speak their minds, because a lot of students haven’t been able to do that,” said Sofya, a senior at Edward R. Murrow High School in Midwood, Brooklyn.
“Our teachers unfortunately are not ever bringing up the subject of Palestine in classes,” she added. “It feels … like you’re in this bubble universe where everyone’s blind and doesn’t want to see what’s happening.”
Students called on city schools to support a teacher-led divestment campaign of pension funds from Israel and also for Palestinian history curriculum mandates. They demanded education officials protect students and teachers from disciplinary action and any retaliation for their activism.
In Harlem, a Palestinian-American sophomore named Salem at the City College Academy of the Arts said he thought he was the only student to walk out of the magnet school.
“It’s only me that’s affected,” said Salem. “Whenever I wear a keffiyeh to school, I’m always asked to take it off. But I keep it on.
“This hasn’t just started this year,” he added. “I’ve always expressed myself being Palestinian.”
Schools spokesman Nathaniel Styer warned there could be consequences for student actions.
“Our expectation is that students remain in school,” he said in a statement. “If they leave school before dismissal, they will be marked absent from the classes they missed and could face disciplinary action. Additionally, we expect that our students will voice their opinions respectfully.”
Aubrey, a senior at Central Park East High School in East Harlem, walked out of school as did her cousin who attends Brooklyn Technical High School. While she learns about the conflict in the Middle East, she said her cousin at the specialized Fort Greene high school has not been taught the same topic.
“We’re living in the most segregated school district in the country,” Aubrey said. “In my history classes, we’ve never shied away.
“They know that we’re young, but they know that youth voices are actually voices. So they give us the space to talk about Israel-Palestine, Black Lives Matter,” she added.
Groups including Teachers Unite, Palestinian Youth Movement, NYC Educators for Palestine and a progressive caucus of the United Federation of Teachers put out a toolkit of plans to help students organize the walkouts.
Teachers Unite said 27 schools were part of an organizing group but that more were likely to have participated in Friday’s protest.
The Department of Education said it had gotten no reports on Friday of staff members leading students or participating during school hours, which is against local policy.
The walkout follows similar pro-Palestine protests throughout the school year, the largest of which was in November, when nearly 800 high school students demanded an immediate ceasefire at a march to the main branch of the New York Public Library. Another citywide walkout took place in February.
Chancellor David Banks, while describing himself as a “big believer” in student voices and students standing up for issues important to them, lamented at a Thursday news conference that students have “missed their mark” when they skip class.
“If it just becomes a regular thing, now kids are just walking out of school just to walk out of school,” he said.
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