Students at hundreds of schools across Colorado walked out of class around noon Friday to protest the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and the agency leading it. Organizers say more than 200 schools participated, Colorado Public Radio reports.
Student newspaper staff at Englewood High School reported that about 150 students from the school joined the walkout. “I think ICE is bad and what they do is wrong,” the paper quoted one ninth-grader as saying. “I think they shouldn’t be so harmful to people who are from the United States.”
Upon returning to class after the walkout, some students said they were welcomed back into their class, the paper reported.
According to Colorado Public Radio, the event was organized on social media by Colorado Youth Coalition, a student-led protest group co-founded earlier this year by Bre Kennedy, a 16-year-old junior at Grandview High School in Aurora.
“I posted something on Instagram about 20 schools that were participating,” the news organization quoted her as saying. “The post got 200K views on Instagram and absolutely blew up. My Instagram DMs on the Youth Coalition were flooded, and I was able to get so many more schools plugged in and organized.”
In Englewood, police and district safety personnel monitored the walkout, according to the report in the student newspaper.
Will Students Be Punished?
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, while students have a constitutional right to free speech, leaving class or school grounds without permission is not considered a protected form of expression. However, schools must follow specific legal boundaries when applying discipline.
“Schools cannot discipline students for a walkout more harshly than for other unexcused absences,” the ACLU writes.
Nor can schools punish students more or less severely just because school officials disagree or agree with the content of the protest. That is, they must apply discipline equally to all forms of skipping class.
Specifically, in Colorado, students primarily face unexcused absences and potential local school-level disciplinary action for leaving class without permission. Because hundreds of schools across Colorado were involved, specific consequences depend entirely on individual school district policies rather than a single statewide directive.
From the Englewood student paper, there was no report of any follow-up action, and I wouldn’t expect there to be, as federal law protects student privacy.
