Middle school students pushed past a “wall of teachers” this past Friday to walk out and protest their school board’s ban on a musical composition honoring Stonewall veteran Marsha P. Johnson, issued earlier in the week. Administrators had placed the school under a “cautionary lock and hold” that day to prevent the walkout.
In a message to parents, Riverside Middle School in Watertown, Wisconsin, said on Friday morning that there was “a rumor that impacts student safety outside of the building,” referring to a planned walkout, so they placed the school under lock and hold, a measure in which teachers lock their classroom doors, usually in response to a threat like a shooter.
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The school also said that the Watertown Police Department was sending officers to increase surveillance of students in order to ensure their “safety.”
Last Tuesday, the district’s school board voted nearly unanimously to ban the high school’s wind symphony from playing “Mother of a Revolution!” a composition without lyrics that was written by gay and Black composer Omar Thomas in honor of Johnson, who played a key role in the Stonewall Uprising in 1969. The acrimonious school board meeting devolved into chaos and shouting as many of the conservative school board members argued against the students who showed up to support the composition.
“This is a perfect example of what everyone here ran on, which was ending indoctrination in the classrooms and radical curriculum,” said Board Vice President Sam Ouweneel at the meeting.
“Political violence is not something we praise with music or song,” said board member Christina DeGrave.
The wind symphony had been working on what is considered a technically complex piece all year and was going to play it for the community at the school’s spring concert this evening, before the board voted to ban it.
The decision led to a walkout protest at Watertown High School last week, with hundreds of students marching out with signs and chanting.
“We were protesting with signs like this,” one student showed WISN 12 News. “This is my sign. It says, ‘It’s just music.’ Let them play.”
“They were dismissive, they were argumentative, they were combative, they were toxic, and they shut the kids down,” parent Jessica Thomm, who participated in the rally, said of the school board members.
That walkout happened on Thursday. The middle school’s walkout was planned for Friday at 10:30 a.m., TMJ 4 reports.
Despite the lock and hold, some students still walked out of the school.
“We forced our way through pretty much a wall of teachers,” student organizer Allie Roberts said. “I’m a band student myself and I know that I personally would be really upset to have spent 7 months working on a piece just to have it taken away a few days before the concert.”
She said that the middle school students were inspired by the high school walkout.
Another student, Camila Sievenlise, described the scene with more detail: “There was a lock and hold drill. Because of something violent. So then after 30 minutes, they let us out.”
“They let us out, and at the front door, we had to have a pass to leave, but then everyone escaped from the door over there and ran out while people were like we all tried to get a walkout and nobody…. It didn’t work because they wouldn’t let us out. So all of a sudden, everyone ran out with their signs and their face paint and everything and started protesting.”
The school board, though, is standing by its decision, saying that the composition would “tend to indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view.”
The statement includes perhaps the most violent retelling of the events of Stonewall possible, without mentioning what inspired the uprising. Nobody was killed at Stonewall.
“According to the composer, the piece, ‘A Mother of a Revolution’ was commissioned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, a six-day riot which included the beating of police officers and attempting to burn down a building with human beings trapped inside,” the statement continued. “Based on the teachers’ description, the lesson was intended to persuade students toward emotional alignment with the events of the stonewall riot.”
“The Watertown School Board remains committed to providing academic education free from indoctrination.”
Despite the school board’s claim that its only issue with children learning that Stonewall happened is that it was a violent event – apparently, unlike any other event taught in history classes in the district – students said they believe the real issue is that Stonewall is an important part of LGBTQ+ history.
“Personally, for me, I have very various friends who are in the LGBTQ community, and I am one of them as well,” student Rosalie Draeger told WMTV 15 News. “There’s been discrimination for years, there’s been violence against gay people, there’s plenty of people who have died just because they were trans or if they were interested in the same sex, and that’s not okay.”
Those suspicions are not without foundation. The school board vice president, Ouweneel, had said prior to last week’s meeting that Johnson was “a cross-dressing prostitute who threw a brick at a police officer.”
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