EDITORIAL: Let students speak. Stop threatening schools.

Cedar Park Middle School students walked out Friday because they are scared — for themselves, for friends and for families facing immigration enforcement. Instead of listening, Texas leaders responded with threats: cut school funding, investigate teachers, punish districts and even hint at arrests. That is not how a confident state handles civic engagement. It is how a government tries to chill speech.

Start with the basics. The First Amendment does not come with an age requirement.

In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Schools can impose limits when speech materially and substantially disrupts learning or tramples others’ rights. But the default is protection, not suppression.

That matters in Texas right now.

The Texas Education Agency’s Feb. 3 guidance warns districts that students “must be marked as absent” for walkouts and that schools risk losing daily attendance funding if they “allow or encourage” students to leave class. It also warns that teachers who facilitate walkouts could face investigation and sanctions, including licensure revocation. Districts, it says, could face state intervention up to a board of managers. :contentReference[oaicite:7]{index=7}

Gov. Greg Abbott has echoed that pressure, saying districts “are not going to be paid for that day” for students who skip class to protest. :contentReference[oaicite:8]{index=8}

Let’s be plain: This is intimidation dressed up as policy.

Schools are being told to keep students safe and keep kids in class, while also being threatened if they do the practical work of safety planning for protests they did not organize. When state officials punish districts for “allowing” walkouts they cannot physically prevent, they are pushing schools toward one option: overreaction.

Parents are right to worry about safety. A large group of middle school students walking near traffic is a risk. But the answer is not to pretend schools can lock doors, physically restrain children, or turn campuses into detention centers. The answer is to plan for safety, communicate clearly, and keep adults focused on supervision, not politics.

Then there is the funding argument.

Texas ties school funding to attendance. That system makes a kind of bureaucratic sense on paper and very little sense in real life. Utility bills do not drop because students are absent for part of a day. Salaries do not shrink when a classroom is short a handful of students. Using attendance as a blunt funding weapon is punitive, and it makes schools vulnerable to political games.

It is also rich coming from a state leadership that has repeatedly warned of “consequences” for districts while public schools are already stretched thin by rising costs, staffing shortages and mandates that do not come with checks attached.

We are not saying every walkout is the best form of civic engagement. Students can protest after school and on weekends. They can write, organize, speak at meetings and vote when they are old enough.

But we are saying this: When young people show up and speak out — especially to defend friends and classmates — the state should not answer with threats.

Texas should stop trying to scare districts into silence. It should stop implying teachers are criminals for prioritizing student safety. And it should stop using funding formulas as a political cudgel.

These students are learning civics in the most American way possible: by exercising their rights. Texas leaders should start acting like they believe in those rights, too.