Oakland High School Students Walk Out of Class, Demanding End to Gun Violence

On an overcast Friday at noon, students spilled onto the blacktop outside of Coliseum College Prep Academy, a public middle and high school in east Oakland. Instead of heading to lunch, they carried oversized posterboards with a simple block-letter message: “WE DESERVE TO LIVE.”

The high schoolers joined a nationwide walkout with Students Demand Action, a grassroots organization focused on ending gun violence.

The protest was organized in response to the fatal shooting of two children at a Minneapolis Catholic school in late August.

For Coliseum College Prep junior Alexander Ibarra, 15, Friday’s walkout felt like a deja vu moment — because it was.

Ibarra remembers spearheading his middle school’s awareness march when he was 11 years old, after the shooting deaths of 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas.

“I don’t feel like anything has changed nationally,” Ibarra said. “We are simply asking to put a federal ban on assault weapons because we don’t believe that anyone needs the access to assault rifles except for the military.”

Ibarra’s classmate, 16-year-old Enemesio Ayala, said that the students’ call to prevent gun violence wasn’t just about school shootings.

“I’ve been affected by gun violence with my family,” Ayala, who co-organized the 2022 protest with Ibarra and other students, said. “Even walking, sometimes you gotta be cautious of how you’re walking and who you’re walking with because you never really know.”

Oakland, and Alameda County at large, has long grappled with higher-than-average gun violence rates — a December 2024 report by then-District Attorney Pamela Price concluded that gun violence was the leading cause of death among Alameda’s children and young people under the age of 24.

Ayala added that he thinks the federal government needs to do a better job of cracking down on people who purchase guns illegally, and should ban the distribution of automatic assault rifles.

Nelson Perez, a 17-year-old Coliseum College Prep senior, said his little sister is a fifth grader at the elementary school across the street. He always has a plan in case things take a turn for the worse.

“As soon as I hear a gunshot, to run towards my sister’s school,” Perez said, of the worst-case scenario. “I really don’t think this is an environment and mindset we should have. We should have a mindset of achieving our goals.”

Coliseum College Prep administrator Michael Jenkins said he feels the country is still “on ground-zero” in terms of progress toward adequate gun safety laws, but he is proud nonetheless that his students wish “to be the spark plug or the catalyst to actually drum up the action that they want.”

Jenkins also spoke of the gun violence plaguing Oakland and pointed to the fact that many students don’t feel safe stepping outside of their own homes.

“What the students are feeling is real,” Jenkins said. “There is a clear need to curtail gun violence — inside and outside the school.”