Students Walk Out Over Gun Violence That Is Close to Home

Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at a protest by middle-school students in Brooklyn. We’ll also find out about a settlement in a defamation lawsuit about a TV series on the Central Park Five case.

Credit…Dave Sanders for The New York Times

More than 100 middle school students in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, are expected to take part in a walkout this morning.

It will not be a walkout in the usual sense of the word. Their school, the Launch Expeditionary Learning Charter School, is encouraging them to join a protest against gun violence in partnership with Save Our Streets Brooklyn, a community organization.

The students have studied gun violence in recent months. In language arts classes, they read the young-adult novel “Give a Boy a Gun.” In math, they worked out statistics on gun violence. In science, they looked at whether gun violence met the definition of an epidemic.

“The essential question was, Is gun violence considered a health crisis in the U.S.?” said Janeé Wright, a science teacher at the school. “They had their question in the back of their minds through all of this.”