High school students can learn leadership skills through extracurricular activities like theater and sports. DP Leadership students Lukas Ginder (12), Valeria Tiburcio Romo (12), and Aiden Myers (12) put these skills to the test when they organized the Dec. 1 school-wide walkout in support of fair pay for SBUnified teachers.

The SBUnified teachers’ work-to-contract had been in place for a little over two weeks when Ginder, Tiburcio Romo, and Myers made the decision to hold a walkout after many students had already experienced difficulties due to the shift in teacher involvement.

“A lot of our student-led activities are amazing, but we obviously can’t do that without the help of teachers, because they need to be there to supervise and all that, and it [has] also affected the relationships teachers had with students,” Tiburcio Romo said.

The personal impact the work-to-contract had on Myers pushed his desire to take action.

“It’s just really unfortunate, because, you know, it’s my senior year, it’s a bunch of other people’s senior year, and we’re all just trying to have the best year possible,” Myers said. “And the district is kind of limiting that. So that’s why I felt I kind of wanted to act on it.”

Ginder first shared the idea to hold a walkout after he found out that a PGP he had been planning as activities director would need to be canceled due to a lack of supervisors.

“I stood up on a desk in front of like five people in the classroom,” Ginder said. “And I was like, in a joking way, ‘we should do a walkout’ … And in the end, I thought about it more … and we were all talking [and were like], you know what, you’re right. We should do a walkout. This is what the school needs. This is what the teachers and the teachers association need and [we] should just do it.”

The leadership students then spread the news of the protest through word of mouth and social media.

Ginder shared that “the biggest, hardest part” was getting other students to take it seriously, with many students seeing it as an opportunity to ditch school. He hopes that adults will also take it seriously and recognize that the purpose of the walkout is truly to support teachers.

“We don’t want to nag at anyone or try and disrupt school hours or class hours or learning, but [get] as many people as we can to help stand up and walk for the teachers,” Ginder said.

The leadership students hope that their efforts will gain the attention of district officials.

“We want people to see that It’s not just the teachers who are feeling the effect of unfair wages, but also the students,” Tiburcio Romo said.