The East Ramapo School district has seen its fair share of protests over the years. In 1975, when the budget was not passed, students marched to the central administration office, according to Stacy Gutner. As a participant, Gutner remembers it well.

“Basically, it started at Ramapo High. Spring Valley’s students came over to Ramapo and we gathered on the football field and then marched down to the administration building,” said Gutner. “I was a marcher in all my glory.”

In the end, the budget was passed. Nearly 30 years later, for Class of 2013 graduate, Olivia Castor, it was that type of pride in the community that inspired her to stage a similar walkout in May 2013.

See transcript here.

“To show not just the school board – because the school board knew we were unhappy – but to show the politicians in New York State and Governor Cuomo that we will not settle for what’s going on down here in East Ramapo,” said Castor.

Not always a student in the district, she had been attending Hawthorne Christian Academy, a private school in New Jersey for several years. When she switched to public school in 10th grade, she felt that that the district itself had more opportunities than private school.

“[The] East Ramapo School District itself had more clubs, more extracurriculars, and more AP classes than a private school had,” said Castor. “So I figured that by switching from the private school to the public school, I was going to be able to get into better colleges and a better high school experience.”

When she started 10th grade, a wide variety of classes were offered, such as child psychology, business classes, and AP calculus. However, by the time senior year rolled around, the school had drastically changed with a majority of the electives cut.

“They ended up cutting a lot of the electives like the personal finance class was cut; the business class was cut; the infant/toddler class was cut,” said Castor. “So cross country is no longer offered; winter cheerleading is no longer offered; they had separate teams for the soccer, it’s no longer like that – it is combined.”

Wanting to have their voices heard, Castor and a large group of students went to a board meeting in spring 2013. When it was the students’ turn to speak, the board had abruptly called for an unscheduled executive session behind closed doors and when they came back an hour later, they moved the students’ comments portion to the end of the meeting. Unable to quell the students’ and parents’ shouts, the board just left the room.

It was at this time that Castor and the other students knew they had to do something drastic.

Planning the walkout
After exploring the other options, they began to plan a walkout at both the Spring Valley and East Ramapo high schools. Contrary to popular belief, the walkout had been planned over the course of several months.

“Where are we going to walk out? How many people are physically going to walk out? When can we walk out? So we basically narrowed it down to a period of time…where we could do the walk out,” Castor explained. “The way it was scheduled to work out is that both Spring Valley and Ramapo were scheduled to walk out at the same time.”

When the student protesters finally decided on a date, May 29, 2013, and a place to meet, Memorial Park, they were ready. The student organizers even had a mission statement, explaining to participants why they were walking out, a listing of approved cheers and a set of rules. The weekend before the protest, they began tweeting about the walkout, using the codename “funeral,” to rally their peers to participate. They also notified the local news organizations of what was going to happen.

Students and adults feared the possible repercussions of doing the walkout. A school safety officer called another student the night before and asked him about the walkout. He denied having known anything about the protest, but told the coalition, “Watch out – they know,” according to Castor.

“[When] Wednesday rolled around…you could tell something was going down. The atmosphere in Spring Valley…was something is about to happen,” said Castor. “I ended up in the principal’s office and they basically wanted to know what was going on and who was involved. I was, like, ‘I’m not telling you.’”

When it was time, Castor and the students began to walk out of Spring Valley. Despite having done careful planning, they found they didn’t need to – the police were actually helping the protestors.

“The president of the Spring Valley NAACP and other members had been successful in alerting the police to the fact that there was going to be a walkout. There were mounted police, helicopters, cop cars and motorcycles. So they ended up shutting down [Route] 59 for us and shutting down portions of the road for us,” said Castor.

Castor and the members of the Coalition were surprised, for not only were the adults cooperating, but the students were as well. Planning for only a maximum of 200 students, the protestors had printed only 150 flyers. Over 500 students had showed up, according to Castor’s estimates.

“It was the first time that we had a student-run nonviolent movement between the two high schools with such a magnitude and orchestrated so well. It had gone off without a hitch,” Castor reminisced.

“Every time at a District protest, something had happened. Whenever the adults would organize, they never had such numbers; they never had such power; they never had the media the way we had it. It was just amazing.”

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