What began as a modest community on the social media platform quickly grew into the political juggernaut Moms Demand Action, the nation’s largest grassroots gun control group and a primary foe of the National Rifle Association and their allies in Washington, D.C. 

After fighting in the political trenches for more than a decade, Watts plans to retire this year after a long-fought win: Last year, President Joe Biden signed into law the first new federal gun rules in nearly three decades. 

But the mass shootings haven’t stopped. On Wednesday, students nationwide marched out of their schools to demand additional gun control measures after a shooter killed six people — including three 9-year-olds — March 27 at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville. This week, Tennessee House Republicans three Democratic state representatives who led a protest on the House Floor in response to the shooting and in solidarity with the hundreds of demonstrators, many of them young people, who packed the Tennessee Capitol.

The Nashville shooting has become the latest partisan flashpoint at the center of the country’s divisive political discourse. As students in Nashville and nationwide flood the streets to demand additional gun control measures, Republicans have latched onto the tragedy, which was carried out by a 28-year-old transgender shooter, with anti-trans rhetoric. 

In an interview with The 74, Watts — who now lives in California and whose children are grown — said the GOP’s response to the Nashville shooting follows a long history of leaning on “straw men” to avoid an honest dialogue about gun violence. She also offered insight into the power of mom-led advocacy and advice for parents advocating for changes in their own communities.

The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

This week it’s students who are walking out of school and hitting the streets protesting after the recent school shooting in Nashville. But we’ve been here before. What, if anything, is different this time? What factors have made this shooting in Nashville so politically galvanizing? 

I think it’s different every time. There’s this idea that somehow there’s going to be a tragedy and everything is going to change overnight. And it didn’t happen after Columbine, it didn’t happen after the Sandy Hook school shooting, it didn’t happen last summer [after mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas]. But that doesn’t mean that things aren’t changing. 

The system is not set up in this country for overnight change. The system is set up for people to get involved in democracy and that means that you do what I call the unglamorous heavy lifting of grassroots activism, and that forces incremental change. 

I have seen over the last decade incremental change lead to a revolution. There’s been a seismic shift in American politics. Back in 2012, a quarter of all Democrats in Congress had an A rating from the NRA. Today, not one does. They’re proud of their Fs. 

And we had 15 Republicans support the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that passed last summer. So things are changing and I believe that after every national shooting tragedy, when people start to pay attention, you’re seeing change.

The NRA is incredibly weak. They really didn’t have a seat at the table when the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed. The fact that we have a 90% track record of stopping the NRA’s agenda every year, those things are only enabled by all of the change that has happened and added up over the last decade. 

When you ask what’s different this time, I think it’s that there are even more people who are filled with rage over this situation, who know we don’t have to live like this. We sure as hell shouldn’t die like this. The more people who use their voices and vote on this issue, the faster we get to a place where our country isn’t run by the gun industry. 

President Biden signed the first federal gun control measures in nearly three decades — yet these shootings keep happening. What do you see were the effects of the law that has been signed, and what more needs to be done to solve the problem? 

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was a very important, critical step forward, but it was just one first step on a much longer journey. 

We need to have background checks on all gun sales at a federal level, we need a Red Flag law, we need to make sure that domestic abusers can’t get guns, including stalkers. There’s so much that needs to be done, and we’ve done it really at a state-by-state level. 

Blue states in this country now have pretty strong gun laws, whereas red states don’t. We’re only as safe as the closest state with the weakest gun laws, so we need much more to happen at a federal level. But in order to do that we have to have a Congress that will make that happen. 

The idea that shootings were going to stop after the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed is not realistic, but I want to be clear that it is meaningful. It takes a multifaceted approach to looking at gun violence as a complex issue. It isn’t just mass shootings or school shootings, that’s about 1% of the gun violence in this country. It’s also domestic violence and gun suicide and community gun violence. 

You asked what’s happened since the law was passed. The fact that we have stepped up background checks through the FBI through the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, 119 buyers under the age of 21 have been blocked from gun sales because they were deemed too dangerous to have access to guns. Prosecutions have increased for unlicensed gun sellers. There are new gun trafficking penalties that now have been used in at least 30 cases across the country. Millions of new dollars have flowed into mental health services for children in schools and into community violence intervention programs. 

President Biden said after the Nashville school shooting that he on the issue without Congress at this point. What is your response to this admission? 

I think that was a little more nuanced. I think he was basically saying that if we want holistic solutions for gun safety it really does have to be passed by Congress. I also want to be clear that the Biden-Harris administration has done more on this issue than any other administration in our nation’s history. 

Right now, the House is controlled by gun lobby lackeys. They’re not only opposed to passing good gun safety laws, they’re actually attacking federal law enforcement and they’re pushing gun extremists’ laws that would put us at risk. Just hours after the shooting in Nashville, a House committee scheduled a vote on legislation that would make it easier to buy really dangerous assault weapons that have arm braces. It’s the same device that the shooter in Tennessee had. 

So you know, I want to be clear that we’re making progress. If you’d asked me a year ago that we would have passed the first gun safety bill in 30 years that expanded background checks and funded state Red Flag laws and helps close what we call , I would not have believed you. 

So it is possible, and I think it’s inevitable, that our lawmakers at a federal level will eventually take action on this issue because their constituents are demanding it. There was a reason that Mitch McConnell whipped the votes on the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and that’s because he saw polling that showed the Republican Party would be decimated if they did not act after Buffalo and Uvalde. That trend, especially when you see shootings like what just happened in Nashville, will only continue. 

We’re seeing more and more gunfire on school grounds in this country and we know why. It’s because there’s unfettered, easy access to guns.

The Nashville tragedy was carried out by a person who was reportedly transgender. As such, many Republican lawmakers and pundits have blamed the shooting on the suspect’s gender identity — rather than on guns. In what ways are you working to counter efforts to divert the focus from firearms to other social issues?

We see these same straw men after every single shooting tragedy in this country. Republicans always want to make it about anything but what data shows is causing our uniquely American crisis, which is easy access to guns. You know, other nations have mental illness, they have access to video games, they have divorced parents. 

The reason we have a 26-times higher gun homicide rate is that we give people easy access to guns. You know, the vast majority of mass shootings in this country have been by straight white men. And at no point have they said that that is a crisis, that we should really look at straight white men. It’s clear that that is just a way for them to divert attention because what they don’t want to talk about is the fact that too many guns and too few gun laws have given us the highest rate of gun homicides and suicides among all high-income countries. 

Gun politics have long been divisive and you’ve found yourself the subject of sharp political critiques and, most alarmingly, death threats. There’s evidence of the country growing increasingly divided, and with that an uptick in political violence. In what ways have you experienced this change firsthand? 

When I started Moms Demand Action, I was sort of living in a bubble. I was a white suburban mom and I got off the sidelines because I was afraid my kids weren’t safe in their schools. Then when you come to this issue, what you realize is that it is much more complex and much more holistic than that. 

I was really shocked that we were having rallies and marches in those early days in Indiana and we were surrounded by men who were carrying loaded long guns in public. I was just shocked that that was legal. And in fact, open carry is legal in over 40 states in this country. To me it was a signal that something is very wrong. 

The more and more we pushed on gun extremists, the more they pushed back by behaving that way and we saw them starting to open carry in stores which is why we started corporate campaigns to change their gun policies. What we were starting to see were the seeds of gun extremism. They felt like a right not utilized and expressed in public was a right they didn’t have, and the NRA actually pushed back on this idea. In 2014 they came out and ‘downright weird,’  and said it was not something that you do in normal society. And then just days later, they had to change their position because gun extremists in Texas were burning their NRA membership cards. 

Every state has its own version of the NRA but it’s often to the right of the NRA and much more extreme. When I lived in Colorado, they’re called the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners. They believe any gun law whatsoever is an infringement on the Second Amendment. So the NRA tends to be pulled to the right by these extremists. I mean, in 1999, the NRA opposed guns in schools and supported closing the background check loophole. And certainly that’s a far cry from where they are today. 

They’ve lost control of their Frankenstein, and gun extremism is now this recruiting tool. It’s an organizing principle, it’s a fundraising tactic all for the right wing. I mean, guns excite the right-wing base about things that have nothing to do with guns. And so it is getting young white men through the door, it is radicalizing them, these groups often play in conspiracy theories. Again, some of those were originated and propagated by the NRA. 

The goal is to stoke fear, recruit new members and sell guns. Those fringe gun extremists that our volunteers were facing in those early days started showing up at state houses and anytime a statue was being removed and even threatening lawmakers and police officers and fellow citizens.

We’ve tracked armed demonstrations since 2020 and found that they’re six times more likely to be violent or destructive than demonstrations where people are not armed. It seems pretty intuitive, but the data bears this out. 

So to answer your question: Yes, I think gun extremism is on the rise and is a very dangerous threat to democracy.

Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles deleted a recent family Christmas card from social media after you criticized the photo, which featured the lawmaker and his family wielding guns. Republican lawmakers have faced similar criticism in recent years for posting similar family portraits. Why do you think it’s important to highlight these images? Are you concerned that the attention may ultimately play into their hands? 

I think it’s fascinating when these gun extremists back down, like deleting the photo. I think it’s really important to point out that this is the culture that’s killing us. 

This idea of unfettered access to guns and treating them like toys, like putting them in the hands of children. Both of my grandfathers were World War II veterans. They were responsible gun owners, they had the highest amount of respect for those guns and in a million years would not have posed with them like they were toys as opposed to tools meant to kill things. 

It’s really important that we shine a light. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and that’s certainly the case when it comes to gun extremism because people see this behavior. The vast majority of Americans — regardless of whether they’re gun owners or not, regardless of whether they’re Republicans or Democrats — they support common sense gun laws. And I think that seeing that kind of gun extremism is a turnoff to most Americans and they know that’s not who they want making our policies. 

You began your advocacy after the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 with a Facebook group. What is it about grassroots, mom-led advocacy — based on the idea behind Mothers Against Drunk Driving — that makes it a particularly effective gun control advocacy approach? 

Bigger picture, women are the secret sauce to advocacy in this country and frankly, in the world. If you go back to when women were first allowed to be activists in America, which was Prohibition … they [men in power] could never really put that genie back in the bottle. Once women got off the sidelines, they wanted to use their voices on issues that they cared about. 

We are often given the task of caring for our families and our communities. All the way from Prohibition up to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, it’s really been women and mothers forcing change in this country and using the power available to them. We are the majority of the voting population, we’re the majority of the population — period.  So when we use our voices and our votes, we can affect change. 

I often go back to something that feminist author Soraya Chemaly said. She wrote and she featured Moms Demand Action in there and she and I had a conversation about this and she said, ‘You know, 80% of the lawmakers in this country are men and men are inherently afraid of their mothers.’ 

The lawmakers in this country are either very, very excited to see us show up — hundreds or even thousands of us at a time in our red shirts — or they’re very, very afraid. So that can be a powerful coalition. 

Given your success in taking that Facebook group and turning your advocacy into the size of the organization that you did, I’m curious what lessons you learned about American politics and policymaking? What advice do you have for other mothers and other women who are working to inspire change in their own communities? 

I don’t think that men are as afraid to fail in public because that’s sort of seen as brave and courageous, where I think women feel like there’s blowback when they’re not perfect, or if they fail. 

If I had waited until I knew everything there was to know about gun violence or organizing, I still wouldn’t have started Moms Demand Action. I think it’s important to birth your ideas into the world. The very worst thing that can happen is that you fail and that you learn from that failure and you try something again. 

I had this great reverence for lawmakers before I started Moms Demand Action and I assumed they were very smart and committed and concerned and kind and unfortunately what you learn is that too many of them are not and they really don’t want to listen to what you have to say. But if you are an activist who is all of those things — concerned, committed, compassionate, curious — you would make a great lawmaker. I’m very proud of the fact that hundreds of our volunteers have decided to take a leap from not just shaping policy but to actually making it and running for office and winning. 

In this last electoral cycle, in November, 140 of our volunteers ran for office and won at all levels of government. We have volunteers who are now members of Congress. I think that’s a really important lesson, too, which is that women make great lawmakers. 

After more than a decade in this work, at the end of this year you plan to retire. What motivated that decision and what’s next for you?

I’ve been a full-time volunteer, it’ll be 11 years at the end of this year, and that’s a long time to do this work. But also, I’ve asked myself that question because I think it’s important for a founder’s role to be finite. I never imagined I would spend the rest of my life doing this work. I’m so honored and so proud to have sort of lit the spark, but it really is up to other new and emerging leaders to keep that going. 

This movement needs to last into perpetuity and so, by stepping back, I think I enable other leaders to step forward. I’ll still be a volunteer for Moms Demand Action, I’ll just be doing it as a California Moms Demand Action volunteer. We have leaders who are ready to step up inside the organization and outside the organization, and I think that’s really exciting. 

As for me, for what’s next, I obviously will always care about this issue and it will be very important to me and I will use my voice in different ways. Something I’m really passionate about is empowering women in all different ways, but particularly running for office. 

I don’t have an answer for you on specifically what’s next. I will be with Moms Demand Action through the end of the year, I will certainly rest a little bit and I’m going to be teaching at USC starting in January and, other than that, I’ll figure out what’s next when the time comes. 

Corey Wise, who served the district for 26 years in various capacities, was ousted during a special meeting Feb. 4 that barred public comment and came after the four members reportedly conferred on their own to strategize his removal. 

A day before, some 1,500 employees staged a sickout in protest of what was to come, forcing the state’s third-largest school district to close its doors.

“People are out of sorts right now,” teachers union President Kevin DiPasquale told The 74. “The way our former superintendent was fired without due process or any type of performance evaluation really has shaken the community and our staff. Employees feel like they could be next.”

Students were equally upset, walking out of school en masse Feb. 7, saying the board valued politics more than education.

“I get that Corey is beloved,” board President Mike Peterson said at the Feb. 4 meeting. “I will stipulate that. But just because a leader is loved and respected doesn’t mean he has the skills, the vision and capabilities to lead this large district.”

The battle in predominantly white, affluent Douglas County mirrors those being fought in , some with very different demographics. As conservative parents have become organized during the pandemic, they are pushing back against what they see as government overreach, opposing COVID-related protocols and targeting the teaching of race and gender-related topics.

Other are beginning to rise up to counter those views.

Board member Elizabeth Hanson, who broke down in tears defending Wise at the board meeting, said the eyes of the state and nation are on Douglas County.

“This decision was not about performance in any way,” she said. “This is politics in its ugliest and purest and most destructive form. This is an attack on public education and I hope that it is something that will wake up our community, our state and our country. There are very calculated efforts that are happening right now and only the people have the power to stop that.”

Many community members are now considering a possible recall effort. A similar, successful push in , in which three board members were removed last week, might serve as a playbook. The strategy seems to be gaining momentum: Ballotpedia, a nonprofit, nonpartisan online political encyclopedia counted , up from 29 a year earlier. 

Neither Peterson nor the three other newly elected board members agreed to be interviewed. The slate, backed by , won election running on an anti-mask, anti-critical race theory platform. The phrase refers to a college-level academic framework but has become a catchall for any subject dealing with race or systemic racism in the K-12 setting.

Wise’s critics on the board said he did not have the leadership skills necessary to enact their vision, though they didn’t articulate what that is. 

Wise, whose base salary was $247,500, told the board Feb. 4 that he recognized the division in the community and welcomed the chance to address members’ concerns about his performance. 

“I love this district,” he said. “I love this county. It’s been my home. I have been working my tail off — as has all the staff.” 

Wise’s firing has prompted legal action from community member and attorney Robert Marshall. He for discussing the superintendent’s employment outside a formal board session in violation, he said, of the state’s open meeting laws. He wants the termination vote thrown out.

“It’s the behind-closed-doors deal-making that is exactly what this law was put in place to prevent,” Marshall, a self-described conservative who wants to stop the board from acting similarly in the future, told The 74.

Board members David Ray and Susan Meek said Peterson, the board president, told them that the majority members talked about Wise’s job status amongst themselves and offered the superintendent an opportunity to resign before bringing the issue to the full board. The district is obligated to pay Wise’s salary for 12 more months. 

Wise’s newly hired attorneys on Feb. 18 requested records from the school district and the preservation of evidence The lawyers are interested in board communications around Wise’s termination and topics such as masking, student racial demographics, banning books, the teachers union and the district’s equity policy. 

‘Get Out and Leave’

The board majority has been openly anti-union — as the power grabbers,” conservative board member Kaylee Winegar told Fox News Feb. 7 — and has pledged to revisit the equity plan, which took years to develop and was only just beginning to be implemented.

It was meant to help address the type of racial tension that led to the in recent years, including the former. and central office employees wrote a letter to the board Jan. 25 demanding the equity plan’s preservation. Parents are also concerned.

“I am a mom of some LGBTQ students and a student with special needs,” Tiffany Baker said. “We have to worry about equity.”

The mood in Douglas County schools continued to deteriorate after the Feb. 4 board meeting. Teachers in at least three district schools found fliers on their cars Feb. 16, admonishing them. “Most Teachers Are Good and We Appreciate Them!” it read. “You are Bad! Get Out and Leave!”

“It is shocking to see such high levels of hate being leveled at teachers and staff,” DiPasquale, the union head, said. “They should not have to worry about their safety at schools or in our community.”

The fliers came the same week teachers were informed by the district that someone asked, under the Colorado Open Records Act, for the names of all those who called in sick during the protest. The request, which alarmed many given the heightened tension in the community, has since been rescinded, Meek said.

A similar petition to release teachers’ names in Colorado’s second-largest school district was . That same district, Jefferson County, managed to members a year earlier.

Parents have also said the district should be more concerned with student mental health than political infighting: In addition to the pandemic, Douglas County schools suffered a at one of its charter campuses in 2019 that left one student dead and many more injured. Parents still credit teachers for saving their lives — one mother was visiting campus when shots rang out — and that of their children. 

“Bullying, social-emotional struggles, safety — that’s what we should be focusing on,” said parent Amy Valentine.

Kailani Smile, a 16-year-old junior, was among the students who walked off campus Feb. 7. The past two years have been an enormous challenge, she said: Turmoil at the administrative level has only added more stress. 

“It’s great to see students my age and younger pushing for things like the equity policy,” she said. “But we shouldn’t have to be dealing with this. We are students and should be focusing on our education instead of worrying about our school board.”

‘Things we could have handled better’

The Douglas County School District serves 64,000 students some 30 miles south of Denver. It’s reliably Republican: the U.S. presidential race by a comfortable margin in 2020, though as the prior election.

The county, 90 percent white, is in the nation: The median home value between 2015 and 2019 was $468,700, . The same held true for and , which was $119,730.

But those comfortable statistics have not stopped the chaos that has unfurled in the past few weeks, crystallizing around the superintendent’s removal. Board member David Ray called the barring of public comment on the matter a travesty.

“To take an action on an all-encompassing topic like ‘future direction of the district’ without allowing the public to formally address this is reckless and negligent,” he said. “It goes against decades of practice where this board has always allowed for public comment prior to taking any formal action.”

Board member Winegar, while criticizing Wise for, among other things, enforcing the district’s mask mandate, seemed to concede the move to get rid of him took place outside normal channels.

“Maybe there are some things we could have handled better, to bring in the whole board,” she said. 

The conservative members’ plan was not flawlessly executed: Board member Becky Myers, who won election as part of the slate, at first voted against the superintendent’s dismissal and then hastily changed her answer to a “yes” after being prompted by Peterson, the board president.

The flip-flop incensed board member Hanson, who voted against Wise’s firing.

“If she cannot follow what is happening, it is not your responsibility to bring her up to speed,” Hanson said. “Her vote is ‘no.’”

Amid the board conflicts and the public protests, Peterson seemed to take his mandate to terminate Wise from a different source — the election that swept him and his fellow conservatives into office. 

“I think we heard the voters loud and clear in November,” he said. 

Lead Image: Teachers and their supporters rally outside Douglas County School District’s central office Feb. 3, a day before Superintendent Corey Wise’s ouster. (Courtesy of Kevin DiPasquale)

It will take roughly six months before New York City schools can add remote learning options, Mayor Eric Adams told elected officials Wednesday morning.

The timeline, which effectively means no virtual instruction through the end of the 2021-22 academic year, represents a stark rejection of the concerns of students, parents and teachers worried for the safety of in-person learning as the Omicron variant continues to cause roughly 40,000 new COVID cases per day in the city. 

On Tuesday, thousands of students walked out of class, protesting what they said were unsafe conditions. In the first week of January, over two dozen city and state legislators signed a to Mayor Adams calling for a temporary pivot to remote learning through Jan. 18 to slow the spread of the virus.

Adams’s estimate that it will take about six months for city schools to include virtual options came during a call with officials responding to their request for a virtual option. 

New York state Sen. Jabari Brisport was on the call and is one of the officials who co-signed the letter. 

“At first, the talking point (from the mayor) was that they would get back to us later at a future meeting about the remote option,” Brisport told The 74. “Near the end, when pressed again on a remote option, the pushback was that he wanted to do it the correct way and have as many stakeholders involved as possible, and make sure it works the best for students and teachers and that that process will probably take six months.” 

Adams has repeatedly said that he does not want to close schools or revert to remote learning in face of the current upheaval, but has not said publicly before when a remote option might be viable.

When asked about his statements Wednesday, Adams’s spokesperson Amaris Cockfield told The 74: “Today the mayor held a private question-and-answer session with lawmakers to discuss existing plans to keep children and teachers safe and keep schools open. He’s committed to working together with lawmakers in pursuit of the best outcomes for students and staff.”

Dora Chan, a senior at Brooklyn Technical High School and an organizer of Tuesday’s New York City student walkout, said the mayor’s stance feels “hypocritical.” Adams cited wanting time to engage with stakeholders, she said, but in her mind, the stakeholders have clearly spoken: the students by walking out this week and the teachers by rallying for a temporary remote option.

“We can’t wait six months. Six months is going to be in June,” added Samantha Farrow, another walkout organizer and Stuyvesant High School junior. “The mayor should be more empathetic and should be more timely with these decisions because what’s happening right now is happening right now.”

Studies have generally shown that remote learning has led to compared to in-person instruction. Numerous political leaders have maintained their emphasis on keeping schools open for in-person learning, including President Joe Biden, who announced Wednesday that his administration was sending millions of COVID-19 tests to schools to weather the Omicron surge.

Chan and Farrow acknowledged the flaws of virtual learning, but argue that, temporarily, it’s the only safe choice.

“When people … say remote learning is bad, I totally agree. I’ve been through it,” said Chan, who spent her entire junior year online. “But we’ve reached that point where it’s absolutely necessary to go back to [virtual instruction]. Obviously, we’re hoping that this is just for a bit until we get these COVID cases under control.”

This month, the high schooler said she’s stayed home from school because she lives with her grandparents and does not want to bring COVID home.

Farrow has returned to classrooms, but said the lax virus protocols worry her. Recently, her desk-mate in French class left halfway through the school day after learning their COVID test had come back positive. Farrow only found out about the exposure, she said, because that student texted her directly. On Monday, she said six separate friends told her that they were positive for COVID.

A spokesperson for the New York City Department of Education declined to comment on Adams’s position, telling The 74 that they prefer the mayor’s press office explain his remarks.

Brisport, himself a former math teacher in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, said he supports Adams’s vision for community input into how best to structure remote learning. But he doesn’t think that plan needs to be mutually exclusive with an immediate, temporary virtual shift.

“I think this is an area where we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” he said. “I would support having an imperfect remote option now, and then having this really well thought-out one in six months.”

In the first week back from holiday break in the nation’s largest school district, the daily attendance rate never topped . On Monday, rates rebounded slightly to 76 percent, but a large share of students remained absent, indicating widespread hesitation over safety conditions.

“A temporary remote option needs to be available to parents while infections continue to rise,” State Sen. Jessica Ramos wrote in a Jan. 6 explaining her letter to the Adams administration calling for temporary virtual learning. “Children are a critical unvaccinated population & families need to be able to make choices without fear of truancy.”

“People are coming to school positive,” said one student, explaining their COVID fears.

Students who walked out of class Tuesday that they were given mandatory detention for their choice to protest.

“As a former teacher,” Brisport said, “if all my students walked out of my classroom citing safety concerns, then I would take that to heart and see if there was something I could do differently as opposed to doubling down, which is not what we’re seeing from the current administration.”

“I think the school experience is gone. People aren’t even showing up.”

“I avoid the cafeteria now.”

NYC students explain why they walked out of class.

Thousands of students from more than 29 New York City public schools abandoned their classes Tuesday walking out into frigid weather, demanding a remote learning option as Omicron surges and they feel unsafe at school.

As COVID cases rise and attendance remains unpredictable, New York City parents, students and teachers uncomfortable with in-person learning took to social media.

From coast to coast, Oakland and Boston students will soon stage their own walkouts.

One student’s reddit post last week described being in school as “beyond control,” detailing a day of absent teachers and “functionally no learning.” Study halls became “superspreader events.” Bathrooms were full of students taking COVID tests. 

Teachers abandoned their classes when notified they had tested positive. Skipping class became “ridiculously easy,” the student wrote.

An anonymous student that their parents are forcing her to go to school despite testing positive for COVID.

Despite last week’s low attendance and 2022 first major snowstorm, Mayor Eric Adams has consistently opposed closing schools or offering a remote learning option.

“We don’t have any more days to waste and the long-term impact of leaving our children home is going to impact us for years to come,” Adams said, stressing schools are “sanctuaries.” 

Students left the conditions they called unsafe in hopes of garnering attention from “policy-makers that can help close down schools temporarily,” organizers said in .

Cruz Warshaw, a Stuyvesant High School Junior behind the walkout, charged it was “ignorant and inconsiderate to put people’s lives at risk for without reason.” 

Three more juniors and seniors from Brooklyn Technical and Stuyvesant High Schools created social media accounts to share walkout plans and information on what they’re asking for — and why: 

Before long, students from more than two dozen of the city’s schools said they would join in. The plan: Leave school at 11:52 a.m. — right before sixth period, around lunchtime for many — and head straight home. 

Right on time and one after the other, Brooklyn Technical High School students did just that.

By lunchtime, the cafeteria in New York’s largest school — by enrollment — looked like this:

Their exit was met with backlash, accusations they simply wanted the day off — and that they were probably all going to hang out. 

This Brooklyn student insisted that wasn’t the case:

However, some participants faced more than online anger. A redacted email from a Brooklyn school official threatened students with mandatory detentions upon their return.

“There are so many people sick and our mayor is not doing enough to protect us … We want the choice to keep our bodies safe,” Felicia, a junior at Bronx High School of Science told The Riverdale Press reporter Sarah Belle Lin during Tuesday’s walkout.

Some of the city’s youngest learners, alongside parents, also joined the .

Many students and parents disagree with offering a remote option and point to its shortcomings, including that . 

While attendance is , it is up 9 percent . 

A few hours after the walkout, New York Schools Chancellor David Banks responded to the protests, asking student leaders to meet with him to work together for safe and open schools.