At about a dozen high schools across the city Tuesday, Chicago Public Schools students held walkouts to demand aldermen vote in favor of a cease-fire resolution scheduled for the City Council on Wednesday. After a contentious delay last week, the vote is expected to be heated.
Co-sponsored by Ald. Rossana Rodriguez, 33rd, and Ald. Daniel La Spata, 1st, the resolution, demands President Joe Biden and the U.S. Congress “call for and facilitate a permanent cease-fire to end the ongoing violence in Gaza; call for humanitarian assistance including medicine, food and water, to be sent into the impacted region; and the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.”
About 300 students spilled out of Lane Tech High School at noon, gathering for speeches before marching across a grassy expanse in front of Chicago’s largest high school.
Sophomore Niani Darden said she was moved by the turnout — the largest mobilization of students at the school that she’s seen. “Obviously there’s a problem and we’re actually acknowledging it,” she said.
“I think the thing that’s really important is that a lot of us think that we don’t really make a difference, because we’re in Chicago and we’re very far from the Gaza Strip. But we definitely can,” Darden said of the students’ demand that aldermen support the cease-fire resolution in City Council Wednesday.
Several dozen students gathered outside Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, holding red and green cardboard signs.
They marched, circling the campus as they chanted “Free Palestine.” Other students peered through the windows of their classrooms as the group passed by.
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Eisha Aly, speaking through a megaphone, offered statistics about the conflict. “We’ve seen bloody, wounded children,” the 18-year-old said. “Palestinians live in constant fear of being killed.”
At Jones College Prep in the South Loop, students fixed keffiyehs on one another in the lobby as they prepared to head out the doors for a walkout around 2 p.m.
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Alexander Huynh, a senior at Jones College Prep, said she was happy to walk out of her study hall period early.
“I’m out here because what’s happening is wrong,” said Huynh, who turns 18 next week. “There’s a genocide going on and we need to stop it. There needs to be awareness about this.”
“Us students, young people — we pay attention,” Huynh said.
More than 20 students from Curie High School marched to Jones College Prep, chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as they joined forces before heading together to City Hall in hundreds.
Ald. Ruth Cruz, 33rd, who represents Chicago Academy High School, supports the resolution calling for a cease-fire.
Ald. Debra Silverstein, 50th, the council’s lone Jewish member, has pushed for changes big and small in support of Israel, including lobbying for the removal of support for a U.N. cease-fire resolution opposed by the federal government.
At a City Hall news conference Tuesday, Silverstein shared support for an opposing resolution sponsored by Ald. Raymond Lopez, 15th, calling only for the release of hostages held by Hamas.
Outside City Hall, hundreds of high schoolers participating in the walkout marched down LaSalle Street. Roughly 250 protesters entered the building and held an hourlong sit-in on its lower level.
Lukas Sheves, an 18-year-old senior at Jones College Prep, said the student-led demonstration speaks to the power young people possess in holding adults in office accountable.
“It tells them that they need to start paying more attention,” Sheves said outside City Hall.
“I think people forget that Chicago is made up of so many different groups and we have the largest diaspora outside of Palestine of Palestinians in America. We can’t just not acknowledge what Palestinians have been experiencing for over 75 years. And that is why we need to have protests like this. That is why we need to stand up like this.”
More than 26,000 people have died since Israeli airstrikes intensified in the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7, according to Gaza health authorities and Associated Press reporting. Children are bearing “ghastly wounds of war,” James Elder, a spokesperson for UNICEF, a United Nations program that provides humanitarian aid to children worldwide, told journalists in December.
According to a December UNICEF briefing, at least 1,000 children in Gaza have lost one or both of their legs and “deaths of youngsters from disease will likely surpass those from bombardment in the absence of a ceasefire.” Without food, water, shelter and sanitation in Gaza, a rampant combination of “soaring malnutrition” and diarrhea may prove deadly, UNICEF said. “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in November.
Ahead of the walkout, CPS sent families an email that the district was working with principals at schools where walkouts were planned to ensure “students can express their First Amendment rights safely” and to provide materials to guide classroom discussions about the war.”
At a Monday news conference, the Chicago Teachers Union joined other labor unions in calling for a cease-fire.
But the union advised teachers that “Chicago Board of Education employees must remain in their assigned divisions or classes during any student-taken civic action unless school leadership determines that staff member supervision might be necessary to ensure the safety and well-being of students,” according to an email sent to union members and obtained by the Tribune.
Tribune reporter Alysa Guffey contributed.