On Monday October 15^th, over 200 students walked out of the building after 5^th hour in an impromptu memorial service for Senior Patrick Gurshke who was killed after being struck by a car on Friday October 12^th. The students walked from RB to the site of Gurshke’s accident on Maple Avenue in Brookfield. There, the students created a memorial on a street light, leaving letters and flowers.

Assistant Principal John Passarella said, “We were approached by students asking permission to leave. It is against school policy to leave during school hours, so I tried to persuade them to visit the site after school. The administration predicted that it would be around thirty students who would try to leave. We were overwhelmed when we realized how many students were actually leaving the building.”

Using Skyward and telephones, school administration began contacting parents due to inform them that their child was leaving school without permission.  Passarella noted that he and the other administrators were concerned that students might get injured because they were walking to the memorial in the streets.

Passarella spoke with students in lunch.  An early plan that he and the other administrators suggested was to ask students to gather in the commons rather than walking outside so that they could grieve together in the building rather than leaving school property.

Passarella said, “When I was outside and saw how many students were walking out, I asked my supervisor for permission to monitor them while they walked. In no way was I condoning the walk out by walking with them. I did not want another student to get hit by a car. I walked with them as a safety precaution.”

Funeral and wake services for Patrick had been set purposefully by the Gurschke family to take place after school hours so that students and staff would not have to miss school to attend.

While students who left the building were not given detentions or other administrative consequences for walking out, they were recorded as “unexcused” absences in Skyward.  Issues such as making up class work were left to the discretion of individual teachers.