Megaphones and red-inked cardboard, peeling in the rain—flags atop men atop rusting cars or rooftops—vermillion-tongued poppies stuck up icy gun barrels—riot gear, tear gas, gas stations and corner stores in flame. If one word could encapsulate these fury-damp vignettes, it might be protest. Activism.
Even the concept of a “local school protest” can call to mind unpleasant disruptions, chipped hallway lacquer rattled by a thousand sneaker rumbles. After all, the most gristly images are often the only ones we remember. Violence sells; violence stays.
But students can effectively champion causes they care about, says Rolla High School American History and AP U.S. Government teacher Amanda Jarrett, through much more approachable means than popular perception would have one believe.
“I absolutely think that one of the best things you can do is to educate everyone; not just students, but adults as well. And getting education on a topic is probably the very first thing you need to do before you even start to speak out about it, because, if you don’t know what you’re upset about, how can you protest it?” Jarrett said.
Though Jarrett has encountered no lack of students brimming with revolutionary hopes, she observes that impaired organization often sent their dreams crashing coldly down to earth.
“In my twenty years teaching, there’s been a lot of talk of walk-out protests. I’ve never actually seen students do that. Kids are so spread out that very rarely do you ever have one group of kids protesting. Unless they really have a voice and they’ve really put their platform out there and let people know, ‘This is why we’re doing this,’ then sometimes it just looks like an act of rebellion,” Jarrett said.
However, Jarrett believes that social media may be a modern, accessible conduit for genuine change.
“I know students are big on TikTok and YouTube, where you get three or four-minute little snippets of information. But there are some students who hear something they find interesting in that little snippet of information, and they go and research it, and they make sure that they really understand why people are upset about that particular issue. Then they share that information with others,” Jarret said. “I can definitely see [social media] changing the future. Did you see how an entire country [Nepal] overthrew its government and then voted on their new prime minister using Discord? That’s huge. They organized all of that online. So to think that the online presence isn’t changing the way we do things—what you’re being is naïve if you think that.”
Jarrett stresses the importance of respecting local rules and guidelines to create maximal, lasting impact.
“Right off the bat, if [students] know what legal requirements there are, then they’re just giving themselves one less problem. They have to make sure that they know and understand what is expected of them at the place they are attending. If they’re having some type of protest in the school, they need to make sure that they speak with Dr. Ray at the high school level, and then possibly even Dr. Dare at the superintendent level, to make sure that they’re not putting their education in jeopardy. You just want to make sure that you follow the laws and rules wherever you’re going,” Jarrett said.
In the quiet St. Louis suburb of O’Fallon, Liberty-Wentz High School senior Charles Giraud is doing just that: using social media and education to create civil, knowledge-driven change.
“My school, primarily during my freshman year, had a lot of lockdown drills. It was a very scary experience for me because we probably had about three to five that year. And I was like, ‘Wait a minute, a school shooting could actually happen to me,’ and I didn’t want that to happen anymore. So I did a little bit of research, and I found Students Demand Action, which is a national non-partisan organization that pushes for gun-sense legislation. And I was like, ‘This aligns with my values. This aligns with my world,’” Giraud said. “Primarily, what we do at SDA is educate people on gun-sense legislation. We talk about recent events. For example, we did talk about the murder of Charlie Kirk, and we also talked about the horrible school shooting in Minnesota as well. We like to educate our members on making sure that they understand what our mission is and they understand how to explain it to others so we can have meaningful conversations.”
With 56 students, Giraud’s SDA chapter is now the largest of two Missouri branches. In a politically limited environment, Giraud does his best to make change through a staunchly nonpartisan approach.
“We do still get a lot of school backlash from other students that just have this preconceived notion about what we do and don’t really sit down and listen to what our members have to say about why they partake in our club. So it’s kind of like a constant battle with administration and students,” Giraud, whose school once disallowed his plans to join a nation-wide SDA walkout, said. “It’s a bigger battle with parents as well. Recently, at our club fair day … I got one parent screaming at me, like, ‘I will never support this, I hate the work you’re doing.’ But she didn’t sit down and understand what the organization was. She had a preconceived notion. I was happy that my administration stuck up for me and protected me, though, and escorted her off the school premises.”
RHS senior Paige Stanley is a co-founder of Rolla’s newly-established Turning Point USA chapter. The club is a local branch of deceased media personality Charlie Kirk’s national political organization, which Stanley describes as espousing evangelical right-wing viewpoints, and was founded in reaction to Kirk’s September assassination.
“When Charlie Kirk passed away, it was national headlines. It was everywhere. And it kept popping up that ‘there are ways to start Turning Point with your school’ or ‘in your town,’ and everyone started making Turning Point USA [chapters]. I was very curious about it because Charlie Kirk had been such a huge role model in my life. If you talked to me about this a year ago, I would have never signed up for politics, but this time around, I was like, ‘I would like to see if there’s anything I can do.’ As a high school student, I wanted to take action,” Stanley said.
Stanley applied to start a Turning Point chapter through the organization’s Instagram. She was added to a group chat with four fellow students—junior Evan Poling, Dalton Betts, Max Riegel, and Byron Miller—each of whom had independently reached out to Turning Point headquarters.
“The main problem I really saw in our community was the fact that some people were celebrating the Charlie Kirk incident. I one thousand percent do not support violence. I do not believe that you should cheer when somebody dies, even if you don’t agree with what they say. Because, at the end of the day, [Kirk] never hurt anyone. He was just using freedom of speech,” Stanley said. “We need people who are willing to speak up. People who are specifically coming from a Christian standpoint can biblically lay up on everything that is said. I know that I am and I know that the [other Turning Point founders] are very strong believers, and I believe that we need to step up as Christians to attack these issues and make sure we can speak freely. We’re really hoping to grasp the minds of the younger people. We want to give people the opportunity to feel like they do have a voice, regardless of if they agree with us or not. And we really just want to honor Charlie Kirk and God as much as we can.”
While Stanley sets her sights on growing RHS’s young Turning Point chapter, Giraud makes plans to participate in SDA at the college level and continue educational activism beyond high school.
“This is my child. I started this from the ground up, and it means a lot to me. I hope to leave behind a positive impact,” Giraud said. “We need to keep this momentum going. We keep pushing for change until there’s no more change we can make, and then, from there, we pivot and help someone else.”
