Wantagh High School stands with Parkland

A walkout, and 17 minutes of silence

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The first students to leave Wantagh High School on March 14, National Walkout Day, carried a yellow and black banner that read, “Wantagh Stands with Parkland.” Silently, they headed to the football field, followed by students holding signs with the names and photos of the 17 victims of the Feb. 14 mass shooting in Parkland, Fla.

“I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in my life,” said senior Samantha Walsh, who is also the reigning Miss Wantagh.

For Walsh, and the group of Wantagh students who organized their classmates’ participation in the walkout to remember the Parkland victims, the event was personal.

A group of the survivors at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who themselves are organizing a national movement in April to protest stricter gun laws, are members of that school’s International Thespian Society. Club participants appear in school shows and conduct community service.

Walsh and Lindsay Whiteman are president and vice president, respectively, of Wantagh High’s ITS. Their director, Heather Naughton, approached her students in the days after the Florida shooting to let them know that there were survivors who were fellow thespians. “We so related,” Lindsay said.

“We were all taken back by it,” Walsh added.

The Wantagh students decided to act. To receive approval for their plan, Walsh, Whiteman and several members of the high school student government assembled a packet explaining what they were doing to support school safety and why.

They met with their principal and superintendent, who Walsh said were “100 percent supportive of our idea, and said they’d work with us to make this happen.”

“We explained that it wasn’t political, but about school safety and commemorating the lives lost,” Walsh said in a phone interview on March 13.

The organizers went around to all homerooms in the 950-student high school, handing out fliers and instructions for the walkout. All students were asked to wear red — one of Stoneman Douglas’s school colors — and walk out through the back doors by the girls’ locker room. Seventeen minutes of silence were to follow.

They also asked fellow students to sign letters that would be sent to Parkland, or write letters on their own, to let the surviving students know “we stand with them and support them in this time.” They also made posters to hang up around the school, and in senior social studies classes they let students know how they can register to vote when they turn 18, “so they can use their voices” that way, Whiteman said.

In addition to Walsh and Whiteman, members of the student government involved in the planning of the walkout included Roxana Cardoza, Olivia Zukowski, Mike Hennig, Caitlin Jaeggli, Ben Schablin, Annie Browne, Katie Gifford and Kyleigh Watson.

Wantagh joined dozens of high schools from across Nassau County in the March 14 movement, from Valley Stream to Long Beach, Bellmore-Merrick, Seaford, Glen Head and Oyster Bay, as well as at universities like Hofstra.

The group Women’s March Youth Empower acted as a national organizer of the walkout, which took place not only in the United States, but also at schools in Europe and Australia.

School districts are prohibited by law from advocating for political positions, so district officials said they could not condone the walkout. At the same time, many said they supported their students. A number of school districts, such as the Valley Stream Central High and Lynbrook school districts, held school-sponsored memorial services in remembrance of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas victims. Others held assemblies. One took part in a lockdown drill in the hour before 10 a.m. to emphasize the importance of school safety. Still others allowed students to walk out, without fear of punishment. There were reports of a handful of Long Island districts that treated the walkout as a cut.

Nassau police said ahead of the walkout that security was stepped up at high schools across the county but offered no further details.