Forest Grove.

Forest Grove highschool students staged a walkout a couple days ago over a banner that briefly hung stating "Build the wall" an obvious reference to Donald Trump's clearly thought out policies on immigration and international relations. The students were later joined by other high schools in solidarity.

Now the school for their part did act swiftly to take the sign down, and apparently has punished those responsible, so I am not criticizing them on this part, yet. A complaint I saw a lot of was people asking why there was protest if the school acted appropriately? These people usually answer their own questions and blame teens for being stupid or something, however they are only partly right, teens are generally pretty stupid, but unfortunately for their detractors they weren't being so at this particular moment.

Forest Grove has a history of some unpleasant racial incidents, including a case of a teacher who chose to shout racial slurs at a student at one point, and the administrations history of addressing this stuff has been less than ideal, so the protest, though it was started by the banner being up, is more about the school having an atmosphere that encourages, or at least doesn't discourage, racist behavior. It's something that could be said about most schools and institutions in America and while that is changing little by little, it is still pretty unacceptable to a lot of people. Bringing attention and pressure to the problem is the most effective, possibly the only effective, tactic available to teenagers and I hope it catches on. Even though to really see change every high school would have to have walkouts staged almost every day, I don't see that as necessarily a bad thing.