Newtown students and educators took part in an October 20 to 21 Student Gun Violence Summit in Washington, DC, that led to the creation and ratification of a Students’ Bill of Rights for Safer Communities. Newtown Federation of Teachers President Tom Kuroski said the summit felt historical.

Along with Mr Kuroski, Head O’ Meadow Elementary School teacher Abbey Clements and Newtown students Jordan Gomes and Bear Nikitchyuk also attended the summit.

According to a release for the event, students at the summit engaged in conversations on the topics of gun violence, the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, and mental health support needs. Students worked in small groups to work on policies, proposals, and needs assessments to create the Students’ Bill of Rights for Safer Communities. It aims to protect students and teachers and prevent gun violence by offering solutions to the many issues students see in and out of school that give way to gun violence. Some of the key demands of the student-created bill are establishing school safety committees, encouraging all school personnel to foster meaningful relationships with students, and supporting marginalized communities by recognizing systemic and institutional oppressions and remedying those inequities, according to the release.

The summit was sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT); the National Education Association; Guns Down; Students for Change; Everytown for Gun Safety; Students Demand Action; Giffords, the Brady Campaign; and Our Lives, Our Vote, according to the release.

Bear, who is a freshman at Fairchild Wheeler Interdistrict Multi-Magnet Campus in Bridgeport, said, “It’s a document made by students and educators that will hopefully be a template for what Congress can do.” He also hopes the bill will be “used, and used effectively.”

“It was amazing. It really was so good. I am so excited,” said Ms Clements on October 22. The summit was still fresh in her mind, and she said she knows the “amazing, brilliant, thoughtful” students who took part in the summit will return to their own communities, where they will continue to share the message.

Students, chaperones, and educators traveled to the area on October 19, according to Ms Clements. On October 20, the summit began at Dunbar High School in Washington, DC. It was a full day of panel discussions and breakout sessions. Students worked in groups to share ideas for the bill on community strategies, school strategies, legislative strategies, and mental health strategies, Ms Clements explained.

“They had such good ideas,” she said, adding the educators helped students find compromises, and the bill was finalized by noon on October 21.

Ms Clements was one of the moderators on a panel called “The Faces of Gun Violence.”

Bear and Ms Clements traveled to the summit together. Bear reflected on October 23 that since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, there has been movement to change gun legislation.

“It hasn’t been going so well, so this might have been the push that we needed,” he said.

Bear also shared that he applied to attend the summit after his mother, Erin Nikitchyuk, learned about it through social media. Bear, who was a Sandy Hook School student on 12/14, said he was running attendance at Sandy Hook School when the shooter entered the building. Ms Clements, who taught at the school at the time, pulled Bear into her room.

“We are making progress. It may not be soon, but it is going to happen,” Bear said.

Reflecting on his 35 years of experience as an educator, Mr Kuroski said on October 24 that attending the summit was “probably one of the top five experiences I have had an as educator.”

Mr Kuroski was a moderator for a group focused on school safety and security. The students he worked with were spontaneous and energetic, and they shared a range of perspectives on gun violence. Students from inner city schools and suburban schools had different ideas on how to secure school safety — as campuses across the country are designed differently — and create safer homes, and Mr Kuroski described an atmosphere of collaboration.

The AFT and AFT Connecticut reached out to Mr Kuroski, who serves as co-chair of an AFT gun violence national committee, to have him participate in the summit. Mr Kuroski also served on an Educator Advisory Board for the summit.

“Our unfortunate experience and the lessons we learned from it are being used to make America safer than it was,” Mr Kuroski said. He added that he and others are trying to take their experience and use it as a vehicle of change that “I think the students clearly think is necessary.”

Jordan, a sophomore at Newtown High School, said she attended the event as a member of the Jr Newtown Action Alliance (Jr NAA), and she served on a Student Advisory Board for the summit.

“I learned the most about strategies for mental health that students would like to see in schools and about how we could go about enacting those strategies,” Jordan said in an e-mail on October 24. “I also learned a lot about legislation, both that we are looking to pass and that has already been passed.”

The highlight of her trip was meeting others that are passionate about activism, Jordan said.

“Newtown residents should know two things. One, their voice matters. Using it for good is the only way we can actually make the change we push for,” Jordan shared. “Two, understanding both sides and making this a bipartisan issue is very important. Labeling gun control as a ‘liberal/democrat’ problem solves nothing, and neither does putting all those who do not support gun control into the ‘republican/conservative’ box. We have to work together across party lines to enact change that will keep us safe.”

When the summit came to an end, Ms Clements said the students were hugging one another “and they did not want to leave.”

“Young activists are fired up. They are knowledgeable, and they are determined to change the face of gun violence in this country,” Ms Clements said, adding that the youth activists are inspiring.

Ms Clements said the narrative around youth activism should be that adults need to listen and join them.

Mr Kuroski hopes the Students’ Bill of Rights is presented to legislators around the country.

Below is the full Students’ Bill of Rights for Safer Communities, as published on the Student Gun Violence Summit website, studentgunviolencesummit.com.

Students’ Bill of Rights for Safer Communities

We, the students standing against gun violence in America, come together to address that this gun violence is destructive, intersectional, and preventable. In coming together to address how gun violence pervades our schools, homes, and communities, we deem that institutions, leaders, and policy makers across the country have an imperative to adopt comprehensive measures to prevent this unnecessary violence. Together we must…

1. Establish a school safety committee whose meetings are open to the public at every school equally composed of students, parents, and faculty.

2. Provide immediate access to qualified counselors in safe spaces for students of all demographics at all levels of education.

3. Encourage all school personnel to foster positive relationships at all levels of education.

4. Provide professional development around mental health awareness and interventions for students, parents, and faculty.

5. Require cultural competency and de-escalation trainings each quarter for law enforcement provided by the local police department in conjunction with equity training organizations and companies.

6. Implement equitable funding to traditionally under-resourced schools specifically allocated for after school programs open to students and youth under 25 in the community year-round.

7. Support marginalized communities by educating and recognizing systemic and institutional oppressions, as well as implement programs that remedy the inequities for those marginalized communities.

8. Allocate sufficient funding for mental health programs, including, but not limited to, school-based safety and security initiatives; violence intervention programs; health care services, including counseling and mental health evaluations, to be provided by a trained racially and culturally diverse team of mental health professionals.

9. Reduce the stigma surrounding mental health and illness by educating students and faculty on mental health; establishing support networks such as peer counseling; creating pathways for anonymous reporting, identification, and intervention of at-risk youth based on mental health and Alternative Childhood Experiences (ACE) evaluations.

10. Require all gun dealers, sellers, and owners to report stolen guns; prohibit the sale under the National Firearms Act (NFA) of semi-automatic military-style weapons that fire velocity rounds, bump stocks, and other accessories that alter the original firing capacity of a firearm.

11. Require universal background checks before all gun purchases; eliminate loopholes by connecting local, state, and federal databases of prohibited purchasers; require a minimum mandatory waiting period of ten days to purchase a firearm; and raise the age to purchase a firearm from 18 to 21, with exceptions for responsible training, like military service.

12. Promote responsible gun ownership by requiring safe storage policies and modeling gun licensing after drivers’ licensing (i.e. application, testing, etc.).

13. Invest in reducing gun violence by funding Centers for Disease Control (CDC) research.

14. Ensure people who pose a heightened risk to community safety, such as domestic abusers, don’t have access to guns by allowing extreme risk protection orders where family members, law enforcement, mental health professionals, educators, intimate partners, and former intimate partners can petition the court to disarm the abuser.