The protesters could have been the ugly students trying to keep the false sense of “equality” that COVID achieved for them.
More likely, just a virtue signal. Covid froze all the current narratives in place for kids. They went from “Mental health is the most important thing” to “You mental health is irrelevant, just obey the mandates”. Now it is time to unfreeze the mental health narrative but it cannot conflict with the Covid mandates.
I’m seeing some FB chatter about bullying which I find ironic because bullying was encouraged by the schools and used against kids who didn’t follow the mandates.