The students at Excel Academy in West Baltimore don’t fear school shootings.
In a city where bullets pop most everywhere else — when they’re walking home from school, riding a city bus, hanging out with friends, sitting on their porches, even just taking out the trash — their alternative public high school, with its brick walls and metal detector at the door, is one of the only places they feel safe.
The students have lost seven schoolmates to gun violence over the last two school years, and can share stories going back years before that about the havoc guns have wrought in their lives.
Like their peers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where a gunman last month shot 17 students and faculty to death, the Excel students have strong thoughts and feelings about the impact of gun violence on their lives, and the changes they want to see locally and nationwide.
And like their peers in Parkland, they want leaders to listen to what they have to say.