Beaverton Students Stage Largest Walkout in Years Amid Silence and Inaction from District

By late morning on December 8th, the rain in Beaverton, Oregon was coming down hard, flood-warning hard. But at 10 a.m., students poured out from their classrooms anyway, chanting through the wind and cold as they led the largest district-wide walkout Beaverton has seen in years.

Their demand was simple: Beaverton School District (BSD) must finally create a real, proactive response plan for ICE activity near schools.

Students say they've spent months sending emails, signing petitions, testifying at board meetings, and sounding the alarm. BSD’s response? A vague eight-step “communication plan” that, according to students, does basically nothing.

So they walked. 

While I attended the walkout organized by students at Beaverton High School (BHS), by the end of the day, every high school in the district had walked out, along with at least one middle school. Before BHS students walked out, they assembled in the lobby and began chanting and marching together down the hallways, “students reclaimed the school while the admin and principal watched helplessly,” tells me a student.

By the Students, For the Students

At BHS, the students first rallied in the school’s courtyard, an area that was locked down to the public, with some staff forming a perimeter to prevent anyone who isn’t staff or a student from entering. Even from the sidewalk, you could hear the chants echoing across campus.

But around 10:30 a.m., organizers made a decision the school didn’t authorize, and they marched off campus together.

Hundreds of students took to the streets and marched over ten minutes through the downpour to the Beaverton City Library to ensure the district couldn’t control or defang the protest. The school had claimed it was coordinating with “student leaders,” but none of the actual organizers had ever met these alleged representatives, and none of their peers knew who they were referring to. 

“We interpreted that as them trying to make the protest toothless,” one student said. “So we went somewhere we couldn’t be ignored.”

And they weren’t. As soaked BHS students gathered, chanting and sharing stories, a new sound rose in the distance—another wave of student voices. Within minutes, over a hundred students from ACMA (Arts & Communications Magnet Academy) marched in, adding their own walkout to the crowd.

By this point, umbrellas were useless, but the weather did not slow them down. 

“BSD Has Ignored Us for Months”

BHS is one of the very diverse schools in the region: about 46% Latino, 40% white (with many ‘white’ students coming from Arab immigrant families). Over the past year, BSD families have endured repeated ICE harassment, and students say the district’s inaction is not just disappointing, but dangerous.

A recently graduated BSD alum described months of attempted collaboration:

“We’ve been talking with BSD and sending emails urging them to take action. Hillsboro and Portland already have community plans. They can text community rapid response teams and get people mobilized to have a community presence, around the schools, bus stops, for arrival and dismissal times. The community has already been setting this up on our own daily. We just need BSD’s allowance to help them and work together.”

Instead, students say BSD has pretended everything is fine.

“BSD sent out an email today about the walkout,” one student said, “but they can’t alert families when ICE is near their kids? It’s a joke.”

Another added:

“Students can’t even attend after-school events because they’re scared of ICE getting them.”

A district staffer who overheard our conversation shook their head:

“You know, at my school, staff ride buses and watch bus stops to protect students. BSD should absolutely be doing this. It’s crazy they’re not.”

Behind the chants and megaphones are families trying to survive daily fear. One BHS student, a first-generation Mexican American whose family has been directly impacted by ICE, told me why he walked:

“A couple weeks ago, my uncle was on his way to work. ICE agents came out of a 7-Eleven, saw him, and pulled him over. No one knew he was taken until a coworker found his empty car in the street. He was taken to Tacoma and deported to Mexico a few days later.”

The student lived with his uncle and his dad. Now it’s just the two of them.

“My dad is too scared to go to work or even leave the house at all. We started doing grocery delivery because going anywhere is just too big of a risk.”

When I asked why he joined the walkout, he said:

“BSD has very bad ICE policies and doesn’t seem to care about student safety. We’re here to prove students have a voice. Most of us aren’t old enough to vote, but we can still make change.”

Political Repression in the Schools

Beyond ICE, students say BSD has become increasingly hostile toward political organizing, especially around immigrant rights and Palestine.

Organizers with the Revolutionary Student Front (RSF) told me:

“We’ve had to hold secret meetings because admin comes down on student activism. One member was called into the principal’s office and interrogated leading up to the walkout. They told us we couldn’t meet on campus for political organizing and tried to stop the walkout from happening.”

Last year, a teacher was reprimanded and accused of “antisemitism” after displaying a student-made Palestinian flag. “There’s a long pattern of intimidation,” one organizer said.

According to students, BSD seems more focused on avoiding controversy than protecting students.

Consequences for the high schoolers who participated in the walkouts still remain unclear, but by that evening some parents at Cedar Park Middle School reported their children had already been suspended for leaving campus, even though prior to the walkout, they told students they would be given unexcused absences if they chose to participate and didn’t have a parent or guardian call in to excuse them.

The Breaking Point

The tipping point came the week before Thanksgiving break. “ICE agents were parked between the portables and the main school during passing period,” a student said. “All in ski masks. Assault rifles visible in the car. Hundreds of students walk through there every day. BSD has an eight-step protocol, but none of it includes a lockdown. Someone with guns looking to kidnap students, that’s obviously a lockdown scenario.”

Instead, students say, the district responded by harassing organizers and student activists.

Making Global Connections

During the walkout, one student took the megaphone and linked ICE violence to U.S. police militarization and Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

“Down at the ICE facility in Portland, they repeatedly brutalize protesters, and some of the chemical munitions they use were developed by Israel to use on the Palestinian people.” 

The crowd erupted in a unified “shame!”

“Most major American police departments have an exchange program with the Israeli military and police. The Israeli military practices and masters brutalizing, killing, and torturing the Palestinian people, and then it gets brought to the United States to be used against all of us, especially people of color! ICE are using these tactics on immigrants and protesters every single day. In order to really defeat ICE, we have to defeat fascism everywhere. Which includes the Israeli military,” they continued.

The student expanded, “ICE is a bludgeon of the capitalist class to keep workers divided and docile. Latino, Black, Asian, white, they want us focused on hating each other instead of our mutual enemy.”

Some students said another reason they chose to protest at the library was because military recruiters hosted an event there aimed at immigrant youth.

“They hold the threat of deportation over people’s heads to get them to kill for the U.S. war machine.”

Students repeatedly emphasized their role in a longer tradition of youth-led resistance, and expressed that they were protesting BSD, but also reclaiming their political agency. 

“The capitalist class tries to build apathy, amongst the youth, they try to get us to be apolitical and hopeless, we have to realize we have the ability to create change.”

Pointing to the history of youth and activism, one of the students expanded: 

“The youth are one of the biggest revolutionary forces. Just look at history. Students for a Democratic Society, eventually, became militant cells of the Weather Underground. The Black Panther Party started organizing on university campuses in Oakland, and then they became, what was at one point, the revolutionary vanguard of America, you know, before COINTELPRO. We need to follow that tradition of bringing youth into the movement. We also believe students represent a special role, since we can take risks that other people cannot. Especially high school students. We don’t have jobs and families yet, we can do a lot more than others might be comfortable with.” 

Another student put it simply:

“Our government shouldn’t be run by old white men.”

Students were clear in what they demand: a real proactive protocol to respond to ICE that actually keeps the students and their families safe, automatic lockdown and lockout when armed agents are near campus, direct collaboration with rapid response networks, transparent communication with families, and an end to political intimidation of student activists. 

Until then, students say they will keep walking. 

“I am certainly let down by the cowardice of the admin and many other traitors to the struggle who focus on building their portfolio and clout chasing instead of being in the trenches of the class struggle. I am dissapointed, but not surprised. I know we can’t rely on a bourgeoisie state and its institutions to protect us. We must build a movement fully outside of it that is impossible to be neutered by revisionists and opportunists. We’ve shown our community and our district that we have power, and we’re not stopping.”