Garfield students hang banner overlooking rally at City Hall.
  • Goldy | The Stranger
  • Garfield students hang banner overlooking rally at City Hall.

Organizers of today's march and rally of Garfield High School students couldn't have hoped for a better outcome. Several hundred students walked out of school around 12:30 pm to protest continued cuts in education funding, and marched to a rally in the city hall plaza. It was a large, enthusiastic, and diverse crowd—"The most diverse Garfield event I've ever been to," one student told me—and well behaved almost to a fault. Every time a student strayed into the street, others would call for them to stay on sidewalk, and bike cops had to repeatedly yell at students to continue crossing against the crosswalk light. It made for slow going.

Students, parents, teachers, and administrators should be proud.

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn talks with Garfield High School student protesters during a rally in the City Hall plaza.
  • Goldy | The Stranger
  • Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn talks with Garfield High School student protesters during a rally in the City Hall plaza.

"Fund our future!" the protesters chanted as they occupied city hall plaza, a demand that, really, no generation of students should ever have to make—in a civil society, this is the sort of thing that one generation just does for those that follow. But in this selfish era of budget austerity and ever lower taxes, high school students must now march to demand the same educational opportunities today's budget writers enjoyed in their own youth.

On the bright side, thanks to the general lack of leadership in Olympia and the inspiration of the Occupy movement, it looks like a new generation of activists are being created to assure that their own children don't need to wage the same sort of fight for basic education funding.