I entered high school at a time when zero-tolerance policies were in vogue.
Their appeal is obvious: enforcing a zero-tolerance policy leaves no room for debate. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but my hands are tied” is a buttery midsection in a tight situation: they slip an administrator or teacher out of murky, granular grays and into the healing binary of yay or nay. They outsource consideration for a shrugging deference to a matrix of consequences.
As a rising ninth grader in August 2000, my understanding of this concept lacked that depth. Rarely did I get in trouble; during elementary school, I had a magic touch for being adjacent to conflicts but always seizing a stick of unsalted just in time. Thus, for me, the nature—and danger—of zero-tolerance required explanation.
One of the families in our original Elk Grove neighborhood sent their oldest to my future high school. One year before I promoted over, their daughter Nicole* was jumped during a passing period. The assailant then pinned her to the ground, slapping her repeatedly. Nicole had to fight the girl off and, in the process, scratched her attacker’s face. Once security restored order and administrators got involved, the attacker received a five-day suspension.
So did Nicole. They were “mutual combatants” during that “fight” since the attacker’s face bled, too. Both were subject to the zero-tolerance penalty for fighting. Both forfeited five days of school.
When I questioned the illogic of this and demanded to know what a person is supposed to do when aggressively confronted, the advice offered was to not fight back. I remember one response clearly: “If you lay your hands on someone for any reason, you will be suspended.”
Ever the rule follower, I built this explicit warning from the adults in my life into an axiom. They maintained the system; they knew what was right. I vowed to never respond with physical force, no matter what happened. With mercy, I would never be tested.
In the winter of my junior year, I was mugged on campus during lunch.
[[ I always stress over using that word and whether it applies. Quoting the dictionary feels amateur, but it reminds me that the term is accurate. Per dictionary.com, to mug is “to assault or menace, especially with the intention of robbery”. This means I was indeed mugged. ]]
That quarter, I ate lunch by the theater with several of the guys whom I eventually landed with in Gas Leak Corner. Our spot was within a few feet of the quad. It was quiet and shaded.
On the day in question, a quartet eating from plastic lunch bags ballooned by a dozen more. A group of students surrounded us. We had the brick wall of the theater behind us. The throng moved closer until we were flat against that wall. I don’t remember what precisely was said, but I do remember when one insisted we give them our money.
I carried no cash, which I’m sure I said, but he didn’t believe me. One of the students with him stepped forward and shoved his hands into the pockets of my jeans. There was nothing but an ID card in there, but he didn’t know that, so his fingers probed, groping around in search of hidden bills.
They did the same thing to the other three, the group working in tandem. I remember one of us clinging tightly to his wallet, verbally objecting to their “request”, but some of what happened is foggy. I don’t, for instance, remember how the incident ended. Did they get his money? Did the bell rescue us with a ring? Did they just walk away? I can’t remember.
What I do remember is how it felt with that guy’s hands in my pockets, inches from my groin, and touching me with blatant disregard for my existence: I felt violated, and I felt angry. When I got to sixth period, I exploded to a friend about what had happened. That’s how the school found out: my teacher reported what I said, surely bothered because the mellow kid acing the class looked ready to murder someone.
Although my livid reaction surfaced before class, how was I while a stranger rifled through my jeans? I was a silent statue. My hands sat still at my sides. Every instinct implored me to act, to grab his wrists and yank them out of my pants, to shove his body back into his friends, or to even punch him in the face. But I did nothing. Nothing. I didn’t even raise my voice. I just let the guy do it.
I’ve never felt smaller. Writing about it now, I barely feel the anger that chased me to class—just shame and embarrassment for my sixteen-year-old self.
That whole time the guy had his hands searching around my thighs, I was terrified. But not of what was happening. Not at all.
I was afraid I might lose control and actually push the guy away. At no point did I worry what the surrounding dozen might do if I did. My only concern was that I might be suspended if I made contact. I let someone violate me in broad daylight because that shame was preferable to breaking an unjust rule and being punished for it.
That’s who I was in 2003.
*****
On Wednesday, March 14, 2018, high school students across the United States walked out of their classes. Their impetus for action grew from gun violence on an American school campus.
Unfortunately, that description offers insufficient identification to be meaningful. You might know the incident, but you might need clarification about which specific one induced action that day. Understandable: according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, as of this writing, there have been 1449 such events since January 1, 2014, with 1252 of those having occurred since the start of 2018—don’t let an already-horrific 144.9 per year average fool you. It’s almost 209. That’s three every two days.
The particular inspiration for the students’ demonstration of solidarity occurred on February 14, 2018. A former student entered the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School campus with an assault rifle, killing seventeen and injuring seventeen others. This massacre in Parkland, Florida, is the deadliest high school shooting in United States history.
Understandably, the impact of the tragedy in Parkland stretched far beyond the state of Florida.
“My relationship with this shooting…was filtered through social media,” notes Rylee Williams, a 2018 graduate and one of my students in Calculus BC that year. “The videos of the scene, the live updates, the subsequent outrage—all as Tweets or Instagram posts. It felt like a uniquely Gen Z experience.”
Although the March 14 protest’s origins were a national youth organization, the way it found our Northern California student community followed an organic path.
“My friends and I learned of the walkout through social media [where] specific plans began to circulate,” says Rylee. “[We] were eager to feel like we could act on something tangible.”
The walkout aimed to amplify young voices clamoring for reform to existing firearm laws. Among their movement’s calls were several explicit edicts to Congress, including a ban on assault weapons, universal background checks on prospective buyers, and legislation that would facilitate disarming owners who display warning signs of violence (Andone). But this demonstration also wanted to honor those slain in Parkland and rally behind the incensed community left behind.
With a sizable student crowd planning to participate in the protest, word reached the staff rather quickly. In the weeks leading up to the 14th, the walkout was a regular point of discussion after school and during lunch. By virtue of teaching predominantly AP classes in recent years, my students tend to exercise caution about adhering to rules; especially for seniors, one infraction can short-circuit numerous opportunities. Thus, a particular undercurrent surfaced in many of the discussions I had with students regarding their involvement:
What consequences would those who walked out face?
An assigned Saturday School loomed as the most likely outcome, presuming the treatment of a walkout as truancy and owing to many of those participants being first-time class-cutters. But the student handbook also offered an alternate interpretation of their activism as “Willful Defiance or Disruption of School Activities [E.C. 48900(k)(1)]” which, through uncharitable eyes, could have been deemed to warrant a home suspension.
Threat or no, Rylee remained undeterred.
“I did not take the decision to violate campus policy and walk off-campus lightly, but I did make it easily,” she recalls. For her, it was never “a choice [she] had to second guess.”
But Rylee’s conviction was far from universal. Several students shared her indignation, but they wavered when the potential for punishment surfaced. They wanted to participate but without any risk of penalty.
They were in luck: roughly one week out, the situation’s outlook changed dramatically. Our school’s original Wednesday schedule was modified to include an Advocacy period during the intended walkout window. An alternate protest plan, to be held on school grounds under close supervision, then came to light. Instead of a wave-making walkout, students could congregate inside school grounds and observe the moment there.
Rylee viewed this alternative as “a watered-down, seemingly school-sanctioned version” of the students’ intended activities.
“We heard of plans for a ‘moment of silence’ to be held at the same time as our walkout—in the quad on school property,” she says. “We were pissed.”
On the surface, her response to what sounds like a sensible, well-intentioned gesture of unity might seem like an overreaction. But her reasoning was compelling.
“This was an attempt by the school administration to keep us from physically walking out of campus, dividing our strength in numbers.”
In her eyes, the gesture provided further evidence of misplaced priorities.
“I felt that they cared more about perceptions than the reality of their students’ well-being,” she says. “I never expected them to explicitly support a walkout, but this seemed like deliberate co-optation.”
She wasn’t alone in her frustration: I, too, was bothered by that decision.
My reaction, if we’re being honest, surprised me at the time. I’ve written before about my complicated relationship with large-scale activism, and the late 2010s were a time when I supported the sentiment behind many demonstrations but tended to pick apart their arguments and approaches. Skepticism toward the walkout would have been par for my course.
But gun violence, particularly at schools, tends to cut through even my most cynical layers. With a personal connection to Columbine (among other shootings), on-campus gun violence is an emotional taser to my chest. While violence of Parkland’s magnitude breaks my brain on its own, its setting being a high school meant its victims could have been my colleagues or my students. That sobering thought blows a fuse on my emotional regulator; it’s why every source I’ve read for this piece has left me in tears.
I also felt invested in those dialogues about the walkout. I heard the urgency in students’ voices; their righteous fury and, in some cases, palpable fears lent me extra motivation to examine my philosophy toward it.
Like Rylee, I arrived at my support for their activism quickly. I wanted the participants to exorcise some of their mounting outrage. A walkout would be highly visible but peaceful; it would harken back to grassroots efforts in more “radical” times in our country’s history. It would also speak directly to the issue at hand: young people felt neither safe at school nor heard on that issue. Leaving campus made sense. Leaving campus suited this occasion.
All of that aside, though, I think what won me over was that Rylee and her friends—top students and Challenge Day leaders, among my favorite people I saw each day—were among the ones driven to act. These students, with potential awards, scholarships, and college acceptances on the line, had something to lose. And yet they were undaunted by the inevitable consequences.
This is why I was frustrated when I perceived the demonstration as co-opted. Transforming the purposefully rebellious action of exiting into something managed and within campus undercut its message. Rylee and her peers wanted to make their statement by standing up and defiantly leaving class, so to invite “action” but limit it to a neutered, supervised version defanged the entire operation. Demanding action because you don’t feel safe on campus from a designated square of supervised space on campus sends mixed signals.
While Rylee recognized the humble nature of her intended demonstration, she viewed these modified plans through a similar lens.
“Revolutionary actions were meant to be disruptive,” she says. “A protest that remained within the limits of what made administration comfortable would never be…impactful.”
That was what I held onto as well: the walkout needed to disrupt to broadcast its message. The news media doesn’t pick up stories about school-sanctioned moments of silence in the quad, and the push to compel meaningful change demanded attention-grabbing action performed collectively across the country.
In the wake of the administration’s decisions, all parties involved had choices to make.
*****
On the morning of March 14, 2018, everything set in motion. Our bell schedule shifted to accommodate the invented Advocacy period, and announcements were made about the event in the quad. Classroom clocks ticked forward toward a fulcrum moment of decision.
“I was very eager to make a statement against our country’s government and our school’s administration,” remembers Rylee, “but I’ll admit that the day of felt…anticlimactic.”
When 10:00 am arrived, several students in my senior Advocacy class rose from their desks and headed out. A few caught my eye, almost as if they believed I would stand in their way, but all I did was make a note on the seating chart that they’d left. I did not and could not know their intended destinations: were they heading toward the exits or the existing activity in the quad?
Odds are, it was the latter.
“The vast majority of students stayed in the quad while the group of us insistent on a true walkout headed toward the front office,” notes Rylee. “There were maybe 20 of us from a school of over 2000.”
As they faced the office, they hesitated, unsure of what they would encounter inside. Would someone block their path? What would they do if someone did? Conviction is persuasive, but no district office would permit it as grounds for initiating contact with the school resource officer or a member of the administration. To simply walk out sounds straightforward, but larger issues compounded that simplicity than one might have expected.
According to Rylee, that small contingent “lingered awkwardly by the office for a few minutes,” all of them frustrated by the sanctioned activities in the quad she calls a “tiptoe-out”. But, after “subtly working up [their] nerve” to move, “eventually [someone] led the way through the doors and out…to the staff parking lot.”
Because I was inside a classroom on the other side of campus, I can only speculate about the simultaneous events happening a few hundred feet apart. With a large contingent inside the school emboldened by a provided microphone and a facing-no-consequences crowd, I imagine that the group’s presence boomed through the open space. Hundreds reportedly left their Advocacy classes for that event, and if you ignore the surrounding fences, I’d guess it had all the appearances of a moving demonstration.
Composed and few in number, the small group assembled just beyond the office struck a less imposing form. But that did not mean the humble demonstration lacked power. Although there were “a few moments of disorganized excitement” initially, soon an ideal speaker emerged.
Biola Obatolu, a junior still one year away from starring in the spring musical The Pajama Game, provided that leadership.
“Biola’s voice brought clarity to our small but mighty group,” says Rylee. “I remember the steady power in her voice. She was the perfect person to speak [to] our frustrations and demands.”
Biola herself confesses she “can’t remember everything” from her address, but the thrust of her words at that moment still remains.
“I remember the environment…and how passionate we all felt about participating,” recalls Biola. “I remember that I had made a few comments about the innocent lives that were lost and how our government continued to fail at implementing…policies to protect us in our places of education, work, worship, [and] leisure. It feels like nowhere is safe.”
At the end of her speech, she moved away from the fear and violence that inspired it to commend the gesture that had united them.
“I also said…how vital it is for us, especially as young people, to use our voices and demand change.”
Following Biola’s lead, Rylee recalls several others speaking up as well, and the group hung a poster they had made on the wall around photos of those who died in Parkland. Then, seventeen minutes after they had arrived—one minute for each victim—the group returned to school through the same front office they had just exited.
“Overall, it was brief: we gathered…[but] soon it was time to head back to ‘normalcy’,” recalls Rylee.
Upon entering the office, they “were greeted with red truancy slips” but no verbal reprimands. Rylee and the others signed their names to a provided sheet and returned to class.
“Did we solve the gun violence epidemic? Obviously not,” she admits. “But it nonetheless felt like something we needed to do. Our bodies had been treated as expendable shields to protect the gun industry. Our opinions had been dismissed as naive and uninformed. The adults in charge had failed us. We needed to do something…to remind ourselves that we were still important, autonomous, and valuable human beings.”
I find a familiar comfort in Rylee’s conclusion. A demonstration that fails to fulcrum powerful change is not necessarily a failure. Although both Rylee and I wish the walkout had landed a larger legislative impact that addressed the underlying issues that paved the path to Parkland, the gesture delivered a powerful message to its participants: sidelined or not by the adults in power, they and their voices mattered too.
The Reverse Boycott in Oakland last year—under far less serious circumstances, obviously—saw me arrive at a similar conclusion:
The experience concentrates a dynamic emotional spectrum into a single moment…It offers this powerful reminder that we are all greater together than apart. That our respective nothingness can transform into something transcendent if we join our hands and voices.
Rylee captures the concept more succinctly: “It was a symbolic act with symbolic impacts and symbolic consequences.”
Her assessment, though, begs one lingering question. Our campus had surmounted schedule changes and facilitated a supervised on-campus demonstration to discourage students from leaving. These moves revealed just how seriously those in charge took the walkout. Thus, one surely expected Rylee and her peers to have the book thrown at them.
So what happened to her regarding that red truancy slip? What consequences did she face for her protest participation?
“We never heard from the administration again about that day,” says Rylee.
“Never.”
*****
Reconciling the conflicting demands of instruction, evaluation, and discipline with compassion and empathy will always be a struggle for me as a teacher. There’s a ceiling on the support I can offer; I’m left straddling hypocrisy every day.
The walkout cast me in a similarly awkward position. My unwavering support of both the protestors’ cause and their intended actions placed me at a professional crossroads. I wanted to help, but what “help” looked like in this situation was not clear.
A few days before the walkout, a student asked me, point blank, whether I would mark her truant if she walked out of class. I said yes without hesitation.
“I have to,” I said. “That’s my responsibility.”
Understandably, this frustrated the student. It also frustrated a trio of alumni I reached out to for insight. All of them insisted that my adherence to that responsibility made me an obstacle to a meaningful protest. I was standing in the way. Which…yes. I know. That was my entire point.
I considered opposition my duty.
At some schools, staff members and administrators walked out with their student body, like-minded interest in the cause obviously present. Although I agree with the sentiment—I, too, support not being gunned down while teaching about tangent lines—I would argue that all of those adults who left were in the wrong.
Culpability is a tricky subject, but broadly, we adults were at fault. We had failed the students at Douglas High School, and we had failed every student gun violence reached, whether directly harmed in an attack or shaken by fear of an impending one. We didn’t pass stricter firearm laws, we didn’t institute stronger security measures, and we didn’t respond to the tragedy in Parkland with swift action. Rylee and her peers couldn’t do that; we needed to do that for them. The problem remained unsolved by us, which ushered in the grave reality that it could still affect them.
The cost of adulthood’s privilege is responsibility, and this was a movement of young people whom we hadn’t served responsibly. This gave future adults an opportunity to seize the mic and demand the change their elders failed to instill. This was the time for those who couldn’t enact change to make a scene because we hadn’t.
And, naturally, adults co-opted it. We shifted bells, we endorsed alternatives, and we supervised the thing. We rolled their thing into our thing and made participation easy. Good teachers should design surmountable challenges for their students because facing them induces growth. Eliminating obstacles creates less mess but also less learning. Students could have learned a lot while choosing to walk out over the threat of discipline, but they never had to, not with a nerfed “protest” available. Good intentions likely motivated this, but it just as likely robbed hundreds of students of a difficult, instructive decision.
But then, students still walked out. They righteously turned their noses toward the adults’ thing because the walkout was supposed to be their chance to demand change. They acted in opposition to adult supervision because adult supervision still permitted Parkland. Disruption was the point: they weren’t going to do what the adults said was okay because that wasn’t working. They were ready to suffer the consequences for that stance.
And the adults, adding one more error, gave them none. They lost a piece of paper; they opted not to follow up. They treated a walkout defined by violation as anything but a violation. This is to say: they condoned the walkout. They ruled that leaving was okay after all. They annexed it into their tiptoe-out.
They missed the point. They rolled out a red carpet to people who wanted their steps to be arduous. Students like Rylee signed up for a Spartan Race only to find the barbed wire wrapped in gentle linens. Nerfing the walkout wasn’t advocacy but doubling down on the inherent contradiction: they changed the rules so kids could protest, but not so they could be safer at school.
I was not going to make the same mistake. Although I cheered them on, I wanted to see them punished because that was the only way to ensure their efforts couldn’t be co-opted. Adults needed to offer reluctant consequences to lend weight to their actions. We needed to be early-game video game bosses, obstacles to push past and gain experience from. Our role was to empower them by opposing them, to let our rigid adherence reinforce the broken system they demanded change from. Our gentle opposition was a crucial ingredient.
I’m proud of those students who left for making the choice they did. I’m proud of Rylee for it. Her decision meant something because it felt like it had stakes. But the operative words there are “felt like” because nothing happened afterward.
The absence of punishment sounded like a gift. I suspect it was anything but.
*****
Although I stand fully behind everything I’ve just written, I also recognize that what I’ve written produces intense cognitive dissonance.
Unequivocally, I admire Rylee’s decision to leave campus. I swell with pride over her refusal to participate in a point-missing performative demonstration. I respect the hell out of her conviction in the face of consequences with unknown severity. Her cause carries my total support. And, not to be ignored, she will always simultaneously be a former student who averaged 98% on two years of AP Calculus exams, whose performance as Anne of Green Gables moved me, and whose gifted figurines sit atop my bedroom dresser to this day. Rylee is someone I think the world of, a person I wish nothing but success and happiness for with my fullest heart.
I believe with that same heart that Rylee should have faced discipline for her decision to walk out. It bothers me to this day that she did not.
Why? Why does that decision—one that benefited someone I have immense affection for—still feel like a grave personal affront?
I suspected for a time that everything came down to one sincerely held belief: what a person sacrifices reveals what they value. For me, sacrifice is how I measure meaning. There’s an exchange when a person chooses one thing over another; there’s precise accounting in that choice of what matters more and, thus, means the most.
My admiration for the walkout centered on this idea. Leaving campus as they did required breaking the rules, and breaking the rules necessitated consequences. When Rylee marched through the office on March 14, 2018, she knowingly violated campus policy, defying those in power, ignoring supervised alternatives, and accepting that this decision would cost her something. That act revealed her values: demanding change mattered more than the sting of a suspension, the tedium of a detention, or the forfeiture of an award. When the inevitable punishment arrived, she would sacrifice by paying the bill but forever have receipts for her actions. “I sat through four Saturday schools and lost Wildcat Elite,” she could say, “But that was all worth it.”
The absence of discipline muddles that accounting. Without formal consequences, how would Rylee measure her conviction? What was sacrificed? In her own words: “A protest that remained within the limits of what made administration comfortable would never be an impactful protest.” We both wanted this protest to be impactful, so it needed to draw consternation. But when the administrative team chose not to punish the walkout, they folded the walkout into the watered-down event happening in the quad. Pivoting away from punishment undermined the power of her decision; it robbed Rylee of an opportunity to sacrifice meaningfully for a cause.
It’s at this point, though, that I catch a whiff of a familiar scent. Maybe you can smell it, too. It’s naivety. It’s a false binary.
It’s zero tolerance.
The problem with zero-tolerance policies is that they override nuance. Defensively wounding a sucker puncher results in the same punishment as throwing a sucker punch. But those two actions are not equivalent. Whether they both qualify as mutual combat is a matter of semantics, but there’s definitely a difference. They are not the same thing. Yet none of that subtle shading factors in.
Aren’t I guilty of the same thing in this argument? To claim that Rylee’s participation was somehow diminished by the absence of consequences is misguided. For one, all believed there would be consequences when they marched through the front office. That’s principled action right there: she and the others chose to walk out and accept all costs. What they ultimately faced didn’t cut down their courage; they were ready to pay for their choice. Maybe the story relinquishes some romance without righteous resolve and a stinging sentence, but it doesn’t diminish its value. Not at all.
Likewise, my frustration with the administration for letting them off the hook reeks of false dichotomy as well. Those authority figures supported their cause, too. No matter how many decisions I disagreed with, none of them wanted gun violence in schools, either. Asking protestors to sign their names but then losing the list still strikes me as a mistake, but it can be read as a benevolent one. Hell, even the ill-conceived on-campus tiptoe-out can be viewed through this lens: not only did it offer a cathartic moment to many students, but it amplified the impressiveness of those like Rylee, who still walked out and bypassed the activities happening around them.
Nevertheless, I still can’t shake this certainty that Rylee and the others needed consequences! I can debunk so much of my philosophy, I can read Rylee’s words and observe this event’s lasting impact on her, and I can write ten thousand words of drafts centered on this event that prove its repercussions remain relevant, and yet I just can’t erase that instinct.
This fact is deeply tied to my mugging. On that day, I stood with my back against a wall and a stranger’s hands rifling around my groin, and I chose to do nothing. I knew that this asshole violating me in search of a few bucks needed to be opposed, I knew I needed to grab his arms and raise my voice and assert my authority over my body, but I did not. The threat of a five-day home suspension was too significant, so I just let it happen. The consequences terrified me.
What I should have done was grab that kid’s wrist and yank his hand out of my jeans. Once removed, I should have pushed him back into his buddies, yelling, “Get the fuck away from me” and stepping forward to assert my position. When he and his friends inevitably turned on me, I should have pushed and punched and elbowed until security acted and separated us. With order restored, I should have sat across from some vice principal, explained my case, and accepted the five-day suspension I received. And then, while trapped at home for five days, I should have stewed over that punishment and slowly realized that protecting myself was worthy of a suspension.
But I didn’t. Instead of five days of formal consequences, I’ve lived 21 years with symbolic ones. The knowledge that my own body wasn’t worth even that much still haunts me.
That’s what drew me back to the walkout and why I reached out to Rylee for insight. This piece was my penance: it would force me to stare true conviction in the eye. Rylee had walked out without any regard for the consequences. Protecting the safety of her and others’ bodies meant marching through a front-office building identical to the one that had paralyzed me. She demonstrated courage and conviction when something happened 2,990 miles away; I didn’t even lift a finger when a threat was probing around my thighs.
I wanted her to face punishment vicariously because I never did—and that means I never acted. That her lack of punishment might repackage her actions as anything adjacent to my inaction terrified me. She was nothing like I was. She had a spine. She did the right thing.
And I intended to close this piece right there: a celebration of Rylee’s unimpeachable courage cast against the shameful shadows of my cowardice. We would be opposite sides of the same coin. And so I set up my final stanza: I would ask Rylee the same question I had answered so pitifully myself. My query:
If you had faced and received a five-day suspension for walking out that day, would you have still done it?
I felt so confident in her affirmative response that I wrote my ending before I sent her the question. My searing self-rebuke, 21 years in the making, had already been typed when I received her response. I opened it expecting only one word: Yes.
That isn’t what I read.
“I found myself struggling with your question more than I expected to,” said Rylee. “I want it to be a quick ‘yes’, but I immediately tensed up.”
Unlike the peers who joined her on the walkout, Rylee had faced suspension before for an alcohol infraction during her sophomore year.
“That was one of [my] lowest moments. The prospect of reliving that would have been a major deterrent.”
She admitted that her expectation of consequences had factored into her decision. “I figured [they] would be more along the detention [or] Saturday School beat. If a five-day suspension was on the table, that would have raised a lot more hesitation and questions. Would it compromise my college prospects? Would it remove me from senior activities in the spring? Would it somehow compound into an expulsion [since] I had already been suspended?”
Ultimately, Rylee feels confident about where she would have landed in this hypothetical.
“I would no longer have been able to describe my choice as ‘easy’…but I do think, in the end, I would have committed to still walking out. I had grown a lot in the two years since my suspension; I was more confident, I could advocate for myself and others, I saw a future ahead of me, and I had a very strong support system of friends and mentors who I could have leaned on.
“So, short answer: yes, [but] with anxiety.“
If there’s one lesson I should have learned from going to school during an era of zero-tolerance policies, it’s how ineffective they are. They are a cop-out; they are a cheat code. Zero tolerance ignores rich spectrums and revels in boring binaries.
While working on this piece for eight weeks, my admiration for Rylee grew proportionally with my shame. She was the knight facing the dragon, I the sniveling page quivering in the bushes. We couldn’t have been more different. Yet, when I presented the same scenario that governed my inaction in 2003, she noted nuance. Rylee acknowledged more “selfish” considerations, she spoke to the harshness of home suspension, and she pondered the same sort of questions that froze me against a brick wall.
Yes, Rylee believes she would have walked out, which makes sense: I think she would have too. But there’s something moving about knowing she would have thought twice about that choice. She had made a complicated decision for me seem simple; learning that she might have had doubts gave me the gift of grace.
Just as Rylee conceded a ceiling on the revolutionary power of a walkout early on, so too do I concede that this piece was never going to change the world. Neither she at eighteen nor I now can end gun violence. It isn’t just in schools: it’s everywhere, from concerts and garlic festivals to churches and grocery stores. The problem is not a local one but a national one, and far more powerful voices have to do the talking. No walkout will reverse that reality. No sprawling newsletter essay will make a dent.
Still, on any scale, I’d like to think our small gestures contribute something. One never knows what impact they might have down the road. To boot, I began writing this piece in the hope that I might better understand my perspective on the walkout while further empowering and honoring Rylee’s conviction. I can’t say with certainty whether I achieved those goals, but I do know that, along the way, Rylee’s words empowered me to forgive a frightened version of myself from 21 years ago. I could have never anticipated that kind of impact from this exercise, and yet, it happened.
The walkout was probably never destined to alter the course of history. But it changed those who participated, it changed Rylee, and it has ultimately changed me.
That’s a start.
If I’m not careful, this afterword could end up its own piece entirely. I’ve already received the “Near email length limit” warning from Substack, so this may get truncated. I hope readers care enough to expand their emails.
I first reached out to Rylee regarding this idea on December 1, 2023, but its presence in my mind pre-dates this newsletter. That I felt a duty to oppose individuals like her that I cared about struck me as a distinctly adult viewpoint, although I didn’t explore the origins of that perspective until this piece. Just as the mugging in 2003 has stayed with me throughout the 21 years since, so too has the walkout been an event that surfaces in my thoughts regularly. Revisiting both felt important; I never anticipated that they were this connected until I began writing, making this the most ambitious write-to-learn piece I’ve published.
Gratitude for this piece abounds. Thank you to Michelle Yee for gracing this piece with the awesome decisions image near the piece’s midpoint. Capturing the themes of this was a challenge, but I knew you’d found something the minute I saw that winding path. Thanks as well to Biola Obatolu for responding to an out-of-nowhere request and being patient with my follow-up while I recovered from the flu. I also owe appreciation to R’lyeh Schanning, who helped me articulate my thoughts on this event before it happened in 2018, and to Rafael Basas, who offered invaluable feedback that helped me polish and elevate the final sections. I also got fortunate on several counts, most notably with this month’s Mathletes meet taking place at my alma mater, allowing the artwork at the top to authentically capture the locations of my and Rylee’s decisions.
No person deserves greater recognition than Rylee. My message came out of the blue, and my request demanded deep reflection and remembering. Time and again, she came through, be it for elaboration, for feedback, or for photographs to use for the artwork. I truly did conceive of this piece as an opportunity to celebrate someone I admired for her courage, but her grace, compassion, and vulnerability awed me. I can only hope that what I wrote did justice to her actions and words, both in 2018 and in 2024, because they moved me consistently. The ending of this piece, which offers forgiveness to my former self, could only have come from her. This was my first attempt at collaborating on a piece like this, our two stories weaving around one another and producing something altogether new. As I write in the piece, this newsletter does not change the world, but writing this essay has been a special experience for me. Thank you, Rylee, for sharing so much of this story with me and letting me put it out into the world.
This has been in my head for so long that it will feel odd to be finished with it. I can only hope that this piece says something to those who read it. For all who do, thank you as well.
This was a really interesting read. I appreciate how you explore then nuances of the walk out and how you juxtaposition it alongside your mugging. To me, your piece highlights the value of deeply exploring and talking about topics — such as the walk out and discipline etc — that don’t always have clear solutions.
Thanks :)