CHAMBERSBURG, Pa. – Some 100 students from the 2,300-student Chambersburg Area High School walked out of class on Friday, in protest of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Chambersburg Area School District says the protest involved students in Grades 9-12. All of the students involved in the protest were told ahead of time that if they left campus, they would be marked absent and were not permitted to return to the building, according to school and media reports..
Comments on one radio station’s Facebook page were largely favorable toward students’ expressing their First Amendment rights and living a “civics” lesson, while some said this should have been done after class.
One commenter harkened back to another time of national protest with this post: “My senior class, CASHS 1974, held a walkout in protest of the Vietnam war. We sang and did anti-war chants for about half hour then we went back to class. Did we accomplish anything? Yes. We learned that in the real world, the Constitution we learned about in civics class gave us the right to disagree with our government and that freedom is only maintained when it is exercised. We took our demerits and nobody called the police.”
