High school students across the country staged walkouts Wednesday in protest of Donald Trump’s surprising presidential victory.
Students in Oakland, Berkeley and San Jose, California marched out of their classrooms alongside their teachers and into the streets.
At Berkeley High School, hundreds of students spilled from the steps of the university’s bell tower and into campus. Some cried, others held each other, and all attempted to make sense of Trump’s stunning upset. In a video posted to Twitter, students can be heard chanting “Not Our President.”
“The protests are warranted and they’re going to be a good thing,” one student shouted into a megaphone. “Please, let’s just have a conversation right now.”
From Iowa to Seattle, similar protests spread across the country. At Theodore Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa, the school choir sang John Mayer’s “Waiting on The World to Change,” as hundreds of students looked on. After a peaceful but vocal protest, students were lead back into their classrooms by school officials and teachers.
Trump’s stunning victory and the 2016 campaign could serve as an invaluable civics lesson for high school students, most of whom would have been too young to cast ballots on Tuesday.
