Where politicians stumble, students find voices

Welcome a new wave of student activism in Connecticut and across the country, a boiling over of empathy and outrage. Wednesday morning hundreds of thousands of high school students are expected to walk out of their classes for 17 minutes. The time represents the number of students and staff shot to death exactly a month earlier at the Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School in Parkland, Fla.

The massacre in a high school ignited outrage among teens in a way that earlier tragedies, such as the mass shooting of 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School five years ago did not. Perhaps their age is a factor — a 17-year-old senior would have been just 12 back then; perhaps action has built up from seemingly endless mass shootings — in churches, a movie theater, a concert, a nightclub. Certainly social media added even more immediacy to the Parkland shooting.

The national walkout will be to honor the Parkland victims and to protest gun violence. Most of the teens are too young to vote, but know their voices ought to be heard.

This is not their grandparents’ sort of civil disobedience of the ’60s.

This time students are cooperating with, not rebelling against, school authority. Many — but not all — superintendents and principals are scheduling a free time around the walkout so learning is not disrupted (though activism is a form of learning) and students who don’t want to participate won’t feel pressured.

It will not be like a fire drill or an excuse to escape classes. The high school students will give meaning to the walkout in various ways, such as reading bios of those slain at Parkland.

The rebellion is against an intractable Congress that fails time after time of mass shootings to enact any meaningful legislation to stop the slaughter. Students are outraged with the “thoughts and prayers” pablum put forth as an acceptable do-nothing reaction.

While most high school administrators are enabling the walkout for the sake of student safety, others take a less enlightened approach. In Wallingford, for example, the schools superintendent said students who walk out will be disciplined. That is the wrong lesson.

Several universities in the state support the value of student engagement in the democratic process. They issued statements to prospective students, some through tweets, that participating in peaceful protests would not affect their admission.

The walkout Wednesday, born of empathy and outrage, is the first coast-to-coast coordinated student action.

It will be followed by a nationwide March for our Lives rallies in Washington, D.C., and other cities to protest gun violence.

Another national school walkout, initiated by a Ridgefield High School student, is scheduled for April 20, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre.

May the new student activists compel action so Columbine and Parkland are bookends to school shootings, never to happen again.