Bozeman High School students join global climate strike
BOZEMAN, Mont. — Bozeman High School students walked out of school a little early Friday afternoon in protest.
Fridays for Future is a youth-led and organized global climate strike movement, and Bozeman High School students joined in.
Students marched from the school to the Gallatin County Courthouse, chanting their message: “We are unstoppable. Another world is possible.”
Four Bozeman High School students organized the event. The Gallatin Valley hub for the youth movement group against climate change, the Sunrise Movement, helped facilitate the high schoolers’ protest.
Bozeman High School Principal Dan Mills was there supporting his students.
Bozeman High School junior Ellie Cornish was one of the students who helped organize the event. She stood on the courthouse steps and spoke to the crowd.
"This climate crisis is shattering our dreams as we speak, and we can't stand by and let it happen,” Cornish said. “We should not blame our individual selves for the issues that the government and the generations before us have created. The thing that will actually cause change is our government’s policies toward climate change.”
Community members joined students in front of the courthouse. It included members of the Bozeman City Commission, who also spoke out for climate action. They were unified in their message that legislative action is needed in Montana to address climate change.
“We are banding together to try and make change, but it’s like rowing into a waterfall,” Bozeman Deputy Mayor Terry Cunningham said. said. “That waterfall is thick, and it is powerful, and it’s self-serving, and we need you to push us through the waterfall.”
