A student-organized protest that had been planned at Southeast High School on Wednesday afternoon was forestalled by the high school’s principal, Eric Yarbrough, who met with the group and explained his concerns about the timing and safety.
Two Southeast students earlier this week posted their plans to hold a walkout at 2:35 p.m. Wednesday afternoon on Instagram, Yarbrough said in an impromptu interview with The Alamance News at the high school on Wednesday afternoon.
Calling themselves “voicesofsoutheast,” the two student organizers had intended to protest “and bring attention to our school community’s perspective” on immigration enforcement operations recently conducted in North Carolina and throughout the country by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
Though other N.C. public school students – mainly in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Wake, and Durham public school systems – have recently staged walkouts to protest ICE operations, Yarbrough said this was the first time he’d gotten wind of one planned at Southeast. He has served as principal since the newest high school opened along N.C. Highway 119 in Mebane in August 2023.
Yarbrough learned of the planned walkout late Monday night. “It was totally out of left field for me,” he said in the interview, adding that he messaged the group through Instagram, asking to meet, to which they reluctantly agreed.
On Tuesday, Yarbrough met with the two student organizers to discuss his concerns. The walkout was not school-sanctioned; nor was he contacted in advance by the student organizers, he said in the interview. The students are not identified in their Instagram post.
Top of mind was that students returned on Monday from their two-week Christmas break and are reviewing their fall-semester coursework to prepare to take “teacher-made” exams on Friday, the principal explained.
“I said, ‘your teachers have planned lessons to help you prepare for your final exams, and they count for 20 percent of your grade,’” Yarbrough recalled in the interview.
Teacher-made exams will be followed by the weeklong state end-of-course (EOC) testing period that begins Monday, January 12.
Yarbrough also acknowledged his duty to minimize disruptions to instruction, while not running afoul of students’ constitutional right to stage a walkout or hold some other type of protest.
The U.S. Supreme Court established in 1969, in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District (where seven students had worn black armbands as a symbolic protest against the Vietnam War), that K-12 students’ freedom of speech is guaranteed under the First Amendment, and any school policies that govern student speech must be content-neutral.
Several subsequent U.S. Supreme Court rulings placed limits on profanity, school-sponsored protests, and speech advocating the use of illegal drugs, but Tinker remains the most frequently-applied standard, according to multiple experts in constitutional law.
Yarbrough said he’d told the student organizers that he’d prefer not to be caught off guard should they plan to stage a walkout at some point in the future. “I explained that, ‘if they do something, it needed to be planned out; it’s a worthwhile learning experience for students.’”
“I would like to provide some parameters so it’s less of a disruption,” the principal said. “We have safety protocols for when you’re inside the building, but when you walk outside on the front lawn [or elsewhere on campus], we don’t have those same safety parameters.”
Yarbrough said he first learned of the group, “voicesof-southeast,” this week and doesn’t know how many students are in it.
In outlining the purpose of the walkout, the student organizers at Southeast wrote on Instagram: “This issue is deeply important because the United States should not remain silent in the face of actions that dehumanize our citizens, neighbors, and friends. As students, it can be easy to overlook the diversity around us because it has been a constant throughout our education.
“However, this diversity did not always exist and was not achieved without struggle,” the Southeast High School students wrote. “Many of us have grown up benefiting from inclusive schools without realizing the historical efforts that made them possible. That is why it is essential to actively protect and preserve diversity within our schools and across the nation as a whole.”
In their post, the Southeast High School students said signs would be provided on the day of the walkout and encouraged others “to stand with us in this protest against the violation of human rights and tolerance of violence carried out under the justification that ‘they came here illegally.’ No legal status excuses the dehumanization, suffering, or harm inflicted upon individuals and families.”
While two students at Southeast had urged all ABSS students to protest alongside them, the school system’s administration said Tuesday that it was unaware of any walkouts plann-ed for other schools.
ABSS students last walked out en masse in March 2018, as part of a nationwide protest against gun violence that marked the one-month anniversary of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018.
The nationwide protest lasted 17 minutes, symbolizing the 17 people who had been fatally shot at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
Approximately 200 students at Graham High School participated in that protest; and students also staged protests at the other ABSS high schools in conjunction with the nationwide “March for Our Lives” protest in March 2018.
