RICHMOND, Ind. – Students in Richmond, Indiana are protesting a local high school’s new no-backpacks-in-class rule, with some apparently willing to serve a suspension over it.

“What do we want? Backpacks! What do we need? Backpacks!” shouted dozens of students in front of Richmond Community Schools’ administration building just after 8 a.m. Monday, the Palladium-Item reports.

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“How needs backpacks? We need backpacks!”

School officials got the message – a loud and clear response to RCS Superintendent Todd Terrill’s proclamation last Friday that backpacks are now banned from individual classrooms. Students can still bring them to school, he said, but they must stay in their lockers.

The official reasoning is backpacks pose a safety issue both because students can smuggle weapons, drugs, alcohol or other bad things to class in them and classroom clutter allegedly poses a hazard in an emergency.

“I think it’s kind of ridiculous,” Kathleen Dooley told Fox 28.

“It’s a precaution to kind of sooth people,” she said. “If a kid was gonna bring a knife you could put that in your pocket, you don’t necessarily need a backpack for that.”

About 50 students protesting outside of the RCS administration building said the same, and contend they don’t have time to return to their locker at Richmond High School during the five minutes their schedule allows between classes.

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After about 45 minutes of protesting, school officials warned students they’d be considered truant if they didn’t report to class, and many did.

Principal Rae Woolpy then engaged the roughly 35 remaining students to placate their concerns in hopes they’d go back to class and forget about the new backpack rule.

“Let’s talk,” she said, according to the Pal-Item. “Let’s not scream and yell …. I’m willing to sit and talk with you, but right now, you’re truant to class.”

Woolpy told the protestors to select two representatives from each grade to talk some other time, and allowed them to head back to class with an excused absence if they removed their backpacks, which whittled the group down to a little more than a dozen.

Then, school officials called their parents and 12 who still refused to remove their backpacks were suspended, according to the news site.

“Terrill agreed with the protestors’ claim that the backpack policy probably wouldn’t stop someone determined to sneak a weapon into the school. Even so, he said it would reduce possible clutter in the classroom that could pose a danger in case of an emergency and ‘greatly reduce the possibilities’ of students bringing alcohol, drugs, tobacco or weapons to school,” the Pal-Item reports.

Terrill told the news site he expects the student opposition to die off soon, and made no indication he plans to amend the policy based on students’ objections. He was already mitigating their concerns when he pointed out to the news site that the 12 suspended students represent less than 1 percent of the school’s population.

“In every school that I’ve worked with that’s gone though this, students – once they get used to it – are like, ‘What’s the big deal?’” he said.

Some parents told Fox 28 they support the no-backpacks-in-class policy, though the superintendent insists it’s not a policy, it’s “procedural practices.”

Other Indiana schools, including some in Richmond, already prohibit backpacks in class, though some told the news site the rules are not well enforced.

Richmond High School girls will be allowed to carry a purse no larger than a textbook under the new “procedural practice,” Fox 28 reports.