A spokeswoman for South Carolina’s biggest school district explained Friday why the district marked students as having cut class if they attended the Wednesday walk-out.
Approximately 1,000 students from Greenville County Schools will be marked as having cut class during the gun control protests Wednesday, according to information obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The district schools around 77,000 students, reported The Associated Press.
“Walking out of a secure building at a highly publicized, designated time to call for greater gun control seemed to us to provide an easy target for someone in an unstable frame of mind,” Greenville County Schools spokeswoman Teri Brinkman told TheDCNF. “To have such an event occur at 34 locations across our district (middle and high school sites) stretched both district and law enforcement resources too thin for our comfort.”
About 200 of the students to be disciplined attend J.L. Mann Academy while another 180 go to Maudlin High School. The Greenville district discouraged students from participating in the walk-out and forbade news media from reporting on the event.
“In addition to those who physically walked out of our buildings, many thousands of our students took part in signing notes or banners, remembering the victims, writing to legislators, or performing acts of kindness in remembrance of those who were lost,” Brinkman noted, directing TheDCNF to examples on the district’s website.
The spokeswoman explained that the district received mixed feedback on giving students who cut class a warning. Some individuals thought the school should have encouraged participation, while others thought the school should have “physically restrained” students from attending. Brinkman noted that the warning would not impact students permanent records. Opinion also split on whether or not political debate should take place during school and whether or not the school actively prevented student participation in the walk-out.
Students from thousands of schools nationwide took part in the protests. A California high school placed a history teacher on leave after she asked her class whether the administration would allow a pro-life walk-out. Students from a Chicago high school trashed a Walmart during the protest. (RELATED: Simeon Career Academy Students Trash Walmart For Gun Control Walk-Out [VIDEO])
The tearing down of an American flag by Tennessee high school students comprised another viral video from the Wednesday walk-out.
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