Hundreds of Central Oregon high school students walked out of their classrooms Wednesday morning to join a nationwide protest against gun violence.

In Bend at 10 a.m., Summit High School and Mountain View High School students walked outside their schools, while students at Bend High School filled the cafeteria.

Each demonstration lasted 17 minutes to honor the 17 people shot and killed a month ago at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Bend High School students took turns at a microphone to talk about the Parkland victims and offer an overall message of change for gun laws.

Susie Garcia, a Bend High senior, told her classmates how none of them should have to feel afraid to go to school, and the increased fear and police presence at schools across the country should not be the new normal.

“We come to school every day to learn math, not to add up the bodies of students just like us,” Garcia said. “And the bodies end here. Our voices are the voices of a generation that says enough is enough.”

Alandra Johnson, spokeswoman for Bend-La Pine Schools, said the students would not be disciplined or marked absent for only missing 17 minutes of class.

“Our role as a district was to give them the forum that was safe and try to have it not interrupt the education so classes were all still happening,” Johnson said.

Teachers continued to teach during the protests, and some wore orange ribbons and pins in solidarity, according to students.

Lauren Hough, a senior at Bend High, helped organize the walkout and oversaw an Instagram page, “17 Days of Action Bend.” The Instagram page had interest from students at about 20 schools in the region, including other schools in Bend, Redmond and Sisters, Hough said.

Middle schools in the region joined the walkout Wednesday, including Pilot Butte and Cascade middle schools in Bend and Prineville Middle School.

Students at Highland Magnet at Kenwood School in Bend walked to Drake Park and dropped white roses off the bridge over the Deschutes River to memorialize the 17 Parkland victims.

At Bend High, students inside the cafeteria held signs that read, “Fear has no place in schools” and “Keep guns out of school.”

The sea of students protesting was especially poignant at Bend High, where students were threatened in February by a 16-year-old boy who was believed to be planning a shooting, and where a 17-year-old boy committed suicide in 2014 by shooting himself in a classroom.

Toward the end of the protest in the Bend High cafeteria, 18-year-old senior Violet Singer took the stage and passionately addressed her classmates.

Singer, a member of the school’s speech and debate team and a published poet, urged them to not be passive, and to remember they are the future. She asked them to vote, protest and line the streets until the government cannot ignore their voices any longer.

“Right now, I should be in Spanish class memorizing verb conjugations and stressing about tests instead of standing here begging my country’s leaders for my life and the lives of my friends and classmates,” Singer said. “Let children be children. Let us live our lives and seek our education without fear of a bullet to the head.”

The room erupted in a roar of applause, one similar to those heard at schools around the country.

— Reporter: 541-617-7820, kspurr@bendbulletin.com