FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Eric Franzblau started by asking the school for permission. It was denied, he said.
The Plantation High School sophomore continued organizing anyway. He made group chats and circulated fliers with peace signs and Black solidarity fists overlaying Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ face.
“Join the walkout this Thursday, Feb. 23 to protest Ron DeSantis during your eighth period and tell a friend!!” they read.
School administrators threatened to suspend him, he said.
On Thursday, Franzblau and some of his high school classmates walked out of their eighth-period class onto the school’s track field to protest DeSantis’ recent efforts to remake education.
The high school joined universities across the state, including the New College of Florida, University of Central Florida, University of South Florida, the University of Florida, Florida State University, and Florida International University, where Franzblau’s older sister, Maria, who is trans, helped organize the walkout.
They rallied against the state’s moves to require colleges to report data about students seeking treatment for gender dysphoria, ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and place the New College of Florida under conservative leadership.
And, particularly at Plantation High, which is majority Black, they protested DeSantis’ rejection of the Advanced Placement African American studies course.
A spokesperson for Broward County Public Schools did not confirm or deny whether any students were threatened with disciplinary action before the walkout.
“The walkout was not a school-sponsored activity,” Broward County Public Schools said in a statement Friday on behalf of Plantation High School, in response to questions about the protest. “The school was notified that it was taking place. Around 150 students participated by walking out to the school’s football field for approximately 15 minutes and then returned to class peacefully.”
Originally, Franzblau had doubts about organizing a protest at his school.
Dream Defenders, a nonprofit prison abolition and civil rights group to which Franzblau belongs, had planned the statewide day of action Thursday in collaboration with a few other Florida organizations, according to CJ Staples, the group’s lead organizer for Broward County.
At a group meeting, a sign-up sheet was passed around, but Franzblau didn’t put his name down.
“I was incredibly nervous,” he said. He didn’t want to get in trouble.
He spoke to some of the group members, who told him that he should ask for permission from the school first. Then he talked to a classmate from his statistics class.
“He was like, ‘yeah dude, we should totally have this protest, do a walkout,’” Franzblau said. “‘People need to know at this school that we’re not going to be silent.’”
So he made up his mind.
On Feb. 15, Franzblau was in his aerospace class when the school principal, Parinaz Bristol, walked in. Seizing the opportunity, he asked if he could talk to her.
According to his account of events, he told her about the day of action and asked for permission to stage the walkout. She said no.
“She was like, ‘you can’t do that, it’s too political, we can’t sanction that for our campus,’” he said.
Bristol offered alternatives, he said, like speaking at a school board meeting or registering people to vote.
But Franzblau continued to plan the walkout anyway. He posted on his Instagram story about it that night. The next day, he brought fliers to school.
Over the course of the next week, word spread, and the walkout began to gain momentum, Franzblau said. He created a group chat with classmates. So many people joined, it became unwieldy, so he made a separate one.
On Feb. 21, two days before the protest, the school resource officer pulled Franzblau out of class and escorted him to the principal’s office, he said. Once there, administrators told him he couldn’t disseminate information about the protest because it wasn’t a school-sanctioned event.
Franzblau had used the school name and logo in his messaging, which administrators told him he couldn’t do. He agreed to remove them.
Administrators also threatened to suspend him, Franzblau said, but he wasn’t surprised.
“By that point, I had fully expected to get suspended and I was ready to,” he said.
While Franzblau was in the office, a school administrator called his father and told him what his son had been planning, while voicing concerns over students’ safety.
After they finished speaking, Franzblau’s father asked if his son was still there. Then he told him, “I’m proud of you.”
Franzblau had already filled in his parents, Daniel and Scarlett Franzblau, before the phone call. His mother had helped him print out fliers.
“I think this type of protest is absolutely needed,” Daniel Franzblau told The South Florida Sun Sentinel on Saturday. The “mild” disruption of a walkout, he said, “is drawing attention to a needed point.”
Franzblau’s mother, Scarlett, agreed.
“I think it’s important for kids to feel that they have a voice, that they have a say,” she said, calling it “good trouble.”
Other ways of taking action, like the alternatives the school had suggested, are important, she said, but so was her son’s protest.
“It shouldn’t be either or,” she said. “You either do a walkout, write a paper, do an opinion piece or whatever. No, I think you should do everything.”
The next day, one day before the walkout, a school resource officer again pulled Franzblau out of class to the principal’s office. This time, he said, he was prepared to be told he was suspended.
Instead, he said, the principal told him that he could either hold the walkout in the first or last 15 minutes of the school’s eighth period.
Franzblau texted his friends, who said he should accept the offer. Reluctantly, he agreed to the first 15 minutes.
“Initially I took the 15-minute guideline as a loss,” Franzblau said. “A 15-minute protest, what really is that?”
Later, though, he began to see it as a small victory.
“Because I was so adamant, that’s how I got the 15 minutes,” he said. “They had to cave in.”
The same day, Bristol sent out an email and a robocall to parents.
“We have been made aware that a student-coordinated walkout might take place at our school tomorrow, Thursday, February 23rd, regarding recent state education decisions,” the email read. “I want to emphasize that this potential walkout is not a school-sponsored activity. While we support student activism, we must maintain safe and secure learning environments for all students and staff. We encourage students to remain in class. Any student leaving campus without authorization or violating school rules will face appropriate disciplinary consequences.”
The walkout had never required students to leave campus, Franzblau said. The track field, where students were supposed to convene, is part of the school grounds.
Still, the day of the protest, many of Franzblau’s classmates worried they were going to be suspended. Some of them bailed.
The eighth-period bell rang, and Franzblau walked out to the track. At first, he only saw one other person. Then he saw the rest: a sea of students streamed onto the track field, supervised by school administrators and security officers.
On the other side of the school fence, they were joined by Staples and other Dream Defenders activists. Staples tossed his megaphone over the fence. Franzblau gave a speech, then his friend from statistics class. The students chanted “Hey ho, hey ho, Ronny D has got to go,” “we say gay,” and “we say trans.”
After 15 minutes, they went back inside.
The school district did not respond to questions over whether the students who walked out Thursday would face disciplinary consequences.
Plantation High School was the only high school to participate in the statewide day of action, as far as Staples knows.
He wasn’t surprised by that fact, or by the pushback Franzblau received, saying Florida schools are in a “unique situation” right now.
“It doesn’t even matter if your principal believes in what you’re doing or not,” he said. “She had to do what she did, because we’ve seen that any administrator, any faculty member that goes against the rule of DeSantis is punished.”
But the pushback, Staples added, is also the entire point.
“It’s not about getting permission,” he said. “You don’t get permission. A sanctioned protest is just a party. The whole idea is you’re doing this thing that they don’t want you to do.”
So far, Franzblau said, he has not been disciplined. He attended school on Friday. To his surprise, he was not called into the principal’s office.
