Iowa City students mark Sandy Hook anniversary with walkout

IOWA CITY - It's about persistence, Olivia Lusala said, as she and other student activists walked out of classes at City High School in Iowa City on Friday, six years after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary.

'This is still happening far too often,” Lusala, 17, said. 'We walked out for the first time in February, and not much has happened.”

Around her, her peers chanted the names of the 20 first-grade students and six educators killed by a lone gunman in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012.

More than 100 students left City High around 2:30 p.m. Friday, marching toward the Ped Mall.

The event was organized by Students Against School Shootings, the same group that has marked school shootings and demanded gun control with protests and vigils throughout the year.

They have marched together since the aftermath of the Feb. 14 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., that left 17 students and staff members dead.

The walkout Friday was planned 'as a proactive step against our state's lack of gun safety legislation,” organizers said on the walkout's Facebook event page.

The nature of the activism group is often reactive, said Drew Owen, 16, as they generally organize events in response to shootings at U.S. schools. This year, 23 shootings have taken place at a school, according to a Washington Post database.

'It's been six years since the Sandy Hook shooting, and nothing has changed since then - in our state or in the country,” Owen said. 'We wanted to express our feelings about that.”

The gun-control group Everytown, started in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, says 2018 has been one of the most successful years ever for the movement, with candidates who ran as advocates of gun control winning midterm elections and 20 states passing laws that regulate firearms in some way or aim to reduce gun violence.

In its annual year-in-review memo released earlier this week, Everytown said 150 of the 196 candidates endorsed by its political arm, the Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund, in the midterm elections won seats. It also said that it has reached a record number of young voters, part of a mobilization that occurred after the Parkland shooting.

In Iowa, a House bill banning bump stocks was introduced during the 2018 legislative session, but it never came up for debate.

In messages sent Friday to families in the Iowa City Community School District, administrators said they respect the students' rights to peacefully protest and to free speech, though they encouraged students to alert their parents of their participation.

Students who participated were given an unexcused absence, according to the messages, but parents can excuse the absence.

'When a collective group, like our student body, takes interest in national politics to help make a difference in the world, we support them and want to work with them to do so in a positive and meaningful manner,” the message said. 'School is a great place for our students to learn about proper civil discourse, and our teachers are poised to be mentors on these topics.”

In Newtown on Friday, students at Sandy Hook were sent home after police say the school received a threat.

Students were dismissed by late morning, officials said, but police were confident they were not in danger and the threat may have been a hoax.

'We are confident that everyone is going to be safe but we always have to investigate every threat,” said police Lt. Aaron Bahamonde.

Following the December 2012 tragedy, students were moved to a temporary school in nearby Monroe. The original Sandy Hook Elementary School was razed 2013, months after the massacre.

Students now attend classes in a new building opened in the fall of 2016 on the same site as the Sandy Hook shooting.

The Washington Post and Tribune News Service contributed to this story.

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