PARKLAND, Fla. _ Students around South Florida were leaving their classrooms Friday as part of a national protest against gun violence.
At Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the center of activism since 17 students and staffers were shot to death on Feb. 14, a crowd walked to a nearby park. But the crowds in Parkland were not as large as an earlier protest shortly after the shooting.
Student activist David Hogg noted there was a shooting earlier in the day at a high school outside Ocala.
"We have to stop this," he said. "We aren't going to stop this unless we continue to make our voices heard."
Nationally, the In Fort Lauderdale, students seemed undeterred by a scant turnout. Testing at Calvary Christian Academy on Friday wilted an expected crowd of 100 to 200 students to eight kids. But the handful was buoyed by the surprise crowd of about 30 students from Fort Lauderdale High School who made the 40-minute walk to join them.
Ariel Feldman, a Cavalry senior from Tamarac, said student activists demanding change inspired her to organize her own event.
"We do not want to be the mass shooting, the school shooting generation. It's unacceptable that 19 years after Columbine that nothing has been done," she said. "We don't want to die in math class."
Nnenna Onyeonoro held a sign that said "Guns have a safety. Where is my safety?"
The 17-year-old senior from Fort Lauderdale said she wanted change.
"There's so many (students) scared to go to school. It's important to show people we care and we're not going to give up."
In Pembroke Pines, a long line of about 70 students from Pembroke Pines Charter High School were carrying signs and chanting as they marched on Pines Boulevard to City Hall.
Both Broward and Miami-Dade county schools said they allowed the students to walk out to mark the day _ as long as they stayed on campus to ensure everyone's safety.
In Palm Beach County, many of the students said they were under threat of school discipline if they left school grounds.
At West Boca Raton Community High School, about 50 students held a "die-in" on school grounds with some of the "dead" wearing targets pinned onto their backs. They laid down in the courtyard and then marched to a flagpole in front of the school for a 20-minute ceremony before going back in, according to senior Riyanna Roeheig.
"We called out the administration for being outdated and insensitive," she said.
At Atlantic High School in Delray Beach, police escorted a crowd of 70 students off school grounds, intermittently cutting off traffic at the Interstate 95 ramps to let students safely pass.
Earlier in the day, about two dozen teachers at Stoneman Douglas waved signs in front of the school and said they did not want to be armed with guns in order to keep students safe. Some of their signs read: "Arm me with school funding," "Never again," "End school violence," and "Common sense gun laws! Our lives may depend on them!"
Greg Pittman, an American history teacher, said he doesn't want to be the one deciding whether to shoot a student. And semi-automatic guns like the one Nikolas Cruz used in Parkland, shouldn't be available for sale or distribution.
"'The Walking Dead' is not coming tomorrow," he said, referring to a popular TV show about the zombie apocalypse. "We don't need these guns."
Alex Wind, one of the student activists with the #NeverAgain movement, high-fived his protesting teachers just before everyone filed back into school. He called them, "Our heroes!"
A national day of walkouts already was held in March, but Wind shook his head at tat the idea that one walkout day was sufficient. "We're not going to make an impact if we don't walk out as often as we can," he said.
To the idea students are losing valuable time in class, he said, "what's really damaging our education is these Code Red drills and getting shot."
Over at Pine Trails Park, down the street from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, a group of mothers of children too young to walk out were prepared to spend the entire day signing up new voters with representatives from the League of Women Voters and getting anyone interested to sign various petitions.
The "March for Their Lives" started at 7 a.m. with eight boxes of doughnuts, a shopping bag full of snack bars and plenty of liquids. They had a stack of pledges from Parents Promise to Kids, for everyone who wanted to take a pledge, promising to support only those politicians taking a stand against assault rifles' continued sale and distribution. And a petition available for signatures asked for Marjory Stoneman Douglas students to be exempt from end-of-the-year testing.
Sandi Glausen, 40, mother of two children, aged 10 and 8, said she hadn't really thought about gun control before the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Now she was holding up her signed "Promise" pledge for a cellphone picture to be posted on Facebook.
"Should I smile?" she asked organizer Rachel Cunningham, who has two children of her own, ages 8 and 3.
