Features

Column: Berkeley High Beat: BHS Students Rally Against Bush By Rio Bauce

Friday November 11, 2005

“The World Can’t Wait! Drive Out the Bush Regime! The World Can’t Wait! Drive Out the Bush Regime!” was the battle cry of some Bay Area residents last Wednesday. 

On Nov. 2, many Berkeley High students and adults, including teachers, walked out of school after second period to join the San Francisco protest against the Bush administration. 

“I tried to be as supportive as I could of the students’ efforts,” said Berkeley High Principal Jim Slemp. “My goal was to make sure that students were not going to be hassled if they wanted to leave. Also, I tried to make sure that absences were able to be excused. It would be illegal to have the whole school participate in the walkout, but I did the most I could to support the students.” 

While the principal may have approved of the walkout, there were school board members who did not. 

“I want our students in class,” said Berkeley School Board Director John Selawsky. “Being a student is essentially a job. Kids can’t just walk off the job without realizing the consequences.” 

The majority of Berkeley High students who walked out did attend the protest in order to show their disdain for the current administration, but some just skipped school to hang out. 

“I felt that it was important to show how many people cared and that high school students care too,” said sophomore Emma Bloom, 15. “There weren’t just old hippies ... there was a variation of support.” 

At the rally, people came from all walks of life. There were students, adults, homeless people, people of different sexual orientations, and people of all different races. 

However, some students questioned the aim of the rally, as well as teachers’ support of it. 

“My son and his friends showed up after lunch was over, because they said that their teachers had told them that there wasn’t going to be much happening during class,” said BHS parent Laura Menard. “They thought that the kids were being manipulated to get involved with the rally.” 

The protest was relatively peaceful. It began with a line of speakers, such as Cindy Sheehan and Supervisor Chris Daly, rallying up crowds at Civic Center Park in San Francisco. Following this, there was a march with a couple of thousand people. High school kids organized several sit-ins, but were eventually shooed away to avoid getting arrested. 

The only time when the protest got violent was when a person threw a Molotov cocktail at the San Francisco Chronicle office buildings. Immediately, about 50 police officers surrounded the area to see what had happened. 

Bloom said, “The Molotov cocktails diverted attention from the protest. The news was focused more on that than on the protest.” 

The organizers of the rally, The World Can’t Wait, hope to organize millions of people to “express their outrage, to speak the truth, to act with urgency and form an organized political resistance.” While many were excited with how the rally went, some offered advice for next time. 

“I think that it would have been much more effective for the organizers to coordinate with teachers to take their students to the event,” said Berkeley Councilmember Kriss Worthington. “That way the average daily attendance would not go down, and the schools would not lose their money.” 

 

Rio Bauce is a sophomore at Berkeley High School. He can be contacted by e-mail at baucer@gmail.com 

 

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