Watch: Lower East Side Students Join #NeverAgain Walkout

LOWER EAST SIDE, NY — Students from Bard High School Early College joined thousands of students around the city and the country on Wednesday morning in a tribute to the 17 victims of the Parkland, Fla. school shooting last month.

Nearly all of the 550 students at the Lower East Side high school, located at 525 E. Houston St., quietly filed out of their classrooms on Wednesday morning to stand in solidarity with the victims of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 students and employees of the schools died exactly a month ago.

Students at Bard organized the walkout as part of a nationwide series of walkouts on Wednesday in the broader movement for gun reform launched by the teenage survivors of the shooting.

Students there wanted to both mourn the Parkland deaths and show the country that they're ready to take action, said Maya Brady-Ngugi, a senior who organized the walkout at Bard.

"We wanted to say that we're going to move to act to ensure that our state and our nation have stricter gun control laws and that students can do that, and we can be civically engaged," Brady-Ngugi said.

New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman joined the students for the walkout, quietly standing with the hundreds of teens on Wednesday morning.

The Bard students assembled on a school sports field, where they read the 17 names of the Parkland victims and observed a minute of silence for each.

Ori Shaham, a junior at Bard Early College, said his best friend is a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. She sent him two texts as the massacre was unfolding, he said — one read, "There's a school shooter in my school," and the other said, "I love you."

"She's totally fine. But a girl in her AP psychology class was killed, and two other kids in her band were killed, and countless faces that she sees in the hallway every day were killed," Shaham said Wednesday. "I wanted to share this today because it made me realize how close this is, this problem of gun violence, is to everyone's life."

You can watch the walkout at Bard here:

You can read about the thousands of other New York City students who participated in Wednesday's walkout here.

This post has been updated with additional information.

Image credit: Ciara McCarthy / Patch