When you came into the building in the morning, you would sit in the bleachers in the gym until about seven minutes before the first class. Normally it was just a time where you’d catch up on homework or say hello to friends. Kind of, you chitchat a little bit as long as you weren’t, you know, being disruptive.
But one day, with everybody sitting in the bleachers in sections, there were some kids in one section of the gym that for some reason or another just started throwing pennies onto the floor. Which, okay, looking at it with an adult’s eye, was something that shouldn’t have been allowed. But things went back and forth with this group of students and one of the teachers who was on duty that day to supervise things, I remember her last name being [teacher name], Ms [teacher name] was trying to get some of these students to stop. Then things got heated. And they started yelling at Ms [teacher name]. Then there was a response, because they wouldn’t stop cutting up, that everybody was to be held back when the bell would normally dismiss us to go to our locker and get out to first period class.
So we were in this tense freeze for two or three minutes. Then people relented, we were released, we got to class, but the rumor mill had started. And it’s not impossible that something was said that may have been offensive to one party or the other. But the rumor mill had gone through, and then all of a sudden by fifth or sixth period that day, the word had spread that there was going to be a walkout at the end of sixth period class going into seventh.
And again, I’m never gonna truly know what was said that sparked it, who started it, because the main students that were involved in the original altercation, they weren’t in my circle. We were a big enough school that you had circles, and different socioeconomic classes, different academic classes. Even, you know, three or four elementary schools feeding into our junior high.
So being what it is, people just start milling around at the main hallway. Which, given the design of the school being mostly ‘50s construction, you just had a mass of people in one area and then the administrators trying to maintain order and remind us to — and I remember one, because — one teacher I could specifically hear saying, “Make the right choice.”
But this was a one-time thing. And between privacy, and again, not really knowing the circle of students that were really involved in getting it started, I don’t know what the repercussions were, but it did kind of end that day. There weren’t any additional walkouts or protests. I don’t remember this even being brought up at school board meetings or in the local paper. For that matter, my dad was actually on the school board that year and he never asked me about it. So it’s possible that things were handled in a manner that didn’t get escalated the way other incidents might have been in similar places.