Area students are offended by suggestions by the province's education minister that teachers put them up to Friday's walk out.
In a release, Lisa Thompson called the walkouts a "stunt" and accused teachers of "enabling students to skip classes." She also said in the release, "even when students are in class, too many teachers are choosing to use students as a captive audience for their union's political agenda".
Student senator for Walkerton District Community School, Moira Robertson, said she's angry.
"The comment made it sound as though [we] as youth are unable to make these decisions on our own and we could only possibly have organized 100,000 of us to walk out yesterday if we had some kind of persuasion from teachers," she said.
The teachers were aware the protests were being planned, as Robertson put it, "because they don't live under rocks." But, she said at no time did they make comments during class.
"They obviously could not stop us but they also couldn't encourage us and they didn't. There was no encouragement from teachers. It was all done on student time, after hours, during our lunch breaks," said Robertson.
She said she spent a lot of time communicating with other organizers across the province on social media and also in meetings.
"There were meetings with me and other students organizers... at my school and I also worked with some students from [Sacred Heart High Schoo] in Walkerton, so there were meetings that happened there. There were a lot of phone calls. There were a lot of emails that were sent out to media. There were obviously meetings that I had to have with administrators."
Some school boards sent notes home to parents advising them of the pending student action but Robertson said her school did not, with the exception of students in Grades 7 and 8 who wanted to participate. She said they had to get permission slips from parents to leave class.