"Lessons Learned" is a series of publications that are a brief recounting of actual school emergencies and crises. This "Lessons Learned" issue examines the incidence of student walkout demonstrations and the various ways in which administrators, school staff, law enforcement, and the community at large can help keep youths safe, while still supporting their desire for self-expression. The experiences described are part of a long history of political demonstrations in an urban and ethnically diverse area. However, protest demonstrations can happen anywhere, and for any number of reasons. It is therefore important for all school safety teams to undergo the planning process for responding to this type of event (e.g., meeting with community partners, developing protocols and procedures) and to ensure response efforts are documented in a district's school safety plan. The district described has learned to respond to these types of protests by honoring students' desire for expression, while still ensuring that students are kept safe and within the guardianship from the school. The district has also developed ways to mitigate the desire for students to initiate a protest demonstration by providing them with alternate forums for expression. Over time, it has established a balance between promoting political expression and freedom of speech with the need for loyalty to the institutional framework of education. (Contains 1 footnote.) [For Volume 2, Issue 6 of this series, see ED504386.]