Student Walkout

I am proud of the eighth-grade students who walked out of Marine View School in protest of possible cancellation of extracurricular field trips. According to my daughter, several of the adults who learned of the walkout were personally moved by the action, which they viewed as support for the teachers’ cause, not as a protest against the teachers as one might interpret from the Times article.

For Principal Robert Vouga, the district’s management representative on campus, to dismiss the event as something brought on by “a nice warm day” is insulting to students who out of conviction did something risky. Such students should be given extra social-science credit for taking part in this traditional American form of protest, the strike, and not be penalized with after-school detention, although I must admit that Vouga’s punishment of activists is part of our American heritage’s dark side.

GARY HOFFMAN

Huntington Beach