A Year After Parkland, Teachers Union and Students Fighting Gun Violence…Together.
By: Mei-Ling Ho-Shing and Randi Weingarten
One year ago, our world broke open.
One year ago, each of us was stopped still in our tracks, faced with an unimaginable (yet at the same time all-too-predictable) tragedy. We lost friends and members, and the sense of security and possibility that schools seek to instill in every student.
In the days following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I visited the grieving Parkland, Fla., community to listen to the educators, parents and students explain what they needed to make sense of this tragedy and heal. Our extraordinary members — the teachers and paraprofessional staff of MSD — implored us to listen to the students and help them transform this experience into something empowering.
In the midst of their own trauma, as they faced their own fears, grief and ambivalence about returning to school, our educators asked their union to help them do what they do every day: move forward and find a way to create opportunity and positive growth for our kids. (And yes, Mei-Ling and her friends have repeatedly asked us to call them youth or students, but sometimes adults are slow to learn!)
Mei-Ling was among the first students I met in Parkland, and I was astonished by the clarity of her voice and her natural ability to connect the dots between mass shooting in schools, violence in our communities and the failure of adults to address this problem in a holistic way. Alongside her fellow students, who ultimately formed the Student Gun Violence Summit steering committee, Mei-Ling helped me find a path out of the darkness of those early days, as she and her friends challenged us to both get behind their leadership and help clear obstacles as they carved a new path forward.
When I first met Randi, I was taken aback by this tiny woman who seemed totally comfortable jumping into any conversation and asking “What do you need? What can we do?”
It’s easy to feel powerless against a wealthy gun lobby and a society that reveres gun culture. It’s easy to feel disheartened by a media that swarms around a school shooting but fails to cover the everyday shootings happening in the neighborhoods where many of us live.
Working with Randi and her union, we students partnered with our educators to break through in new and powerful ways, and we believe meaningful change is within reach.
Together, we organized the Student Gun Violence Summit last October, where we brought together nearly 200 students from around the United States to create a Student Bill of Rights. We laid out real action items to help stem the gun violence epidemic: red-flag laws that allow educators and law enforcement to intervene when they see someone at risk of harming themselves or others; safe-storage laws to prevent access to guns, since we know most school shootings happen with firearms acquired at home; and community schools that offer students wraparound services like mental health support and counseling. Interventions like these might have stopped the shooter in Parkland, and we know they can stop future attacks.
We aren’t waiting for the next school shooting tragedy or the next gun violence incident that’s big enough to make it onto the news. If the tragedy at our school woke the world up to anything, it was that, despite our reputation, students are completely equipped to take action and make change — especially when our lives are at stake. With the help of our teachers, we’re trying to build a world where gun violence doesn’t have to be inevitable.
We’re going to keep lobbying policymakers to stand up to the NRA and pass legislation that makes it harder for the wrong people to get their hands on guns, including stronger background checks and higher purchasing ages. We’re also going to keep asking our school boards, our city councils, our mayors, our state legislatures and our governors for the resources our public schools need so they’re secure, and have mental health professionals and other supports available for any students who need them. Whether it’s in response to gun violence or something else, teachers so often step in as counselors, crisis managers and confidants, and when they do, we want them to have the support they need so they can support their students.
One year ago, we lost so much, but we also found a kind of unprecedented solidarity. While we are separated by decades in age, miles in geography and every possible superficial difference you can ascribe to us, in the wake of the horror in Parkland, we recognized in one another our shared determination to do everything we can to keep America’s schools and communities safe from gun violence. And we learned that we have to do it together.
The memories of our classmates and colleagues lost last February will forever be a blessing to us, and we look forward to a day when this anniversary is a reminder of just how far we’ve come in making gun violence a distant relic of American history.
Randi Weingarten is president of the American Federation of Teachers. Mei-Ling Ho-Shing is a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
