Student activists plan D.C. summit, tour

The Road to Change has an additional dozen stops across the country and the state, ending on Election Day in Parkland, where Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students started the movement. Another group of students from the school is helping put together a gun-control summit in Washington, D.C.

The new tour dates, including one in Miami on Oct. 27 and in Parkland on Nov. 6, have been added onto the Road to Change tour that saw high school students from Stoneman Douglas spend their summer break on multiple bus tours, one around the country and another around Florida, encouraging people to register to vote and show up to the polls.

The tour has been put together by the students who organized March for Our Lives, and like previous dates, the upcoming ones all take place at college campuses — the Miami stop is at Florida International University. The only exception is the Parkland date, with a location yet to be announced.

The Washington, D.C., Student Gun Violence Summit is co-sponsored by a separate group of Stoneman Douglas students, Students for Change. The two-day summit, set to take place Oct. 20-21, will feature some of the most prominent gun control groups in the country: Everytown for Gun Safety (along with the affiliated group Students Demand Action), the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Guns Down America and Giffords, the organization founded by former congresswoman and gun violence survivor Gabrielle Giffords. The country’s two largest teachers’ unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, also will attend.

The point of the summit is to look at all sorts of plans for combatting gun violence, and come up with a “students bills of rights” that all the organizations and student activists across the country can support.