NAPLES, Fla. -- Marjory Stoneman Douglas students are expected to attend a march in downtown Naples Saturday. Four in Your Corners spoke with a student who hopes the march inspires change, because some of her friends were killed in the Parkland shooting.
Collier Students for Change, a group founded by local students after the Parkland shooting, organized the march, in which we're told some Douglas students will also participate.
A bell will be rung 17 times to honor each Parkland victim, and it will ring an 18th time to commemorate every student and teacher who lost their lives to gun violence.
“For me and other students, we’re just so, like, shocked, how ever since Columbine it never was really fixed. So we're trying to address that we need safer schools, not just gun laws. We need safer schools because anyone could get onto Palmetto Ridge right now,” says Kaitlin Sokolich, a student at Palmetto Ridge High School.
She says she lost two of her friends in the Parkland shooting, and she doesn’t want another one of her friends to become a victim of senseless gun violence. “I can say that I lost two of my friends, but I lost multiple other friends as well, because we all lost ourselves with this shooting. Like, we aren’t the same people we were in the beginning of this year. We all kind of lost each other and we need to try to, as a community, get ourselves back into this whole loving community, because the shooting affected everywhere in Florida.”
Just like Kaitlin, many local students will give speeches and will write postcards to politicians demanding that action needs to be taken towards stricter gun laws.
According to the Collier Democratic Party, Naples Mayor Bill Barnett and former Stoneman Douglas principal Mike Kinghorn will give a speech during the rally that will take place right after the march, at 9:45.
The march is set to begin at 9 a.m. It starts and ends at Cambier Park, located at 755 8th Avenue South.
Everyone is welcome to join and is encouraged to make signs. Organizers just ask people to wear orange or any t shirt that shows solidarity to this cause.
