More than 300 stunned and jittery students at Noel Community Arts School listened and asked questions Wednesday about how a Donald Trump presidency could influence their lives during an all-school assembly called by school leaders.
The gathering was needed to quell worries and to galvanize the students, including the 60 percent who are Latino, said principal Deborah Blair-Minter.
“We wanted to take the negative emotions they were having and change it,” Blair-Minter said. “We wanted them to consider how they could take something like this and change their lives.”
Other students across the Front Range walked out of classrooms to protest the election of Trump, who has threatened to deport immigrants in the country illegally. Students at Boulder High School left classes about 9 a.m. to protest the election results. They lined a fence bordering a soccer field, chanting and waving signs at cars passing on Arapahoe Avenue.
None of the students taking part in the protest would face discipline, said Briggs Gamblin, a Boulder Valley School District spokesman. “They are exercising their First Amendment rights. The district is neither advocating it nor prohibiting it. But students need to know any work they miss because of the protests, it is on them to make it up.”
Colorado Springs School District 11 officials reported that Palmer High School near downtown was put on a precautionary lockdown because of a protest near the school.
Several students at Martin Luther King Jr. Early College in Denver also walked out of class and headed to the former campus for Montbello High School, which now houses several schools, including Noel Community Arts School.
The assembly at Noel helped calm 15-year-old Christopher Martinez, who became anxious about his future when Trump won the needed electoral votes to become president early Wednesday.
“Last night, I couldn’t sleep well,” said Martinez, who spoke through an interpreter. His parents arrived in Colorado a year ago under a tourist visa.
Martinez said he fears his family, as well as others, will be sent back to Mexico, where many left their homes and belongings to come to America to start new lives.
“If we are deported we will lose everything,” Martinez said. “Many risked their lives to come here, to build better lives for ourselves. I want to tell people we are not all terrorists, we just want the best for ourselves.”
Ninth-grade teacher Stephanie Cohen said the election badly jolted her students, who realized they could be targeted by racism.
But the assembly helped get them engaged politically as a group and gave them a purpose, Cohen said.
“Even though this is a very dark time, this has forced them to come together and rely on each other and maybe change things,” she said.