Meet the Cleveland teens behind the RNC balloon drop

This story originally appeared on YouthRadio.org.

Last night, 125,000 balloons dropped from the rafters of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. About a hundred local teenagers, who took a bus to the arena the Friday before the convention began, blew up each and every one. And that’s no easy feat, says 14-year-old Kiliell Wallace.

Kiliell plays tuba, but he wishes he had the nimble fingers of a guitar player. “It’s the tying that’s really really really hurting us. So yeah, that’s the problem,” he says.

The students were all from the band and chorus at Garfield High School, just outside Cleveland. Their booster club took this job in exchange for a $7,500 donation from the contractor who provided the convention with the massive balloon drop.

They said they were excited to play a role in the convention. But how do they feel about Donald Trump?

“The majority of our school is African-American, so you can only imagine how we’re gonna feel about Donald Trump and how he feels about us,” says 14-year-old Kahlil Tyus.

“Donald Trump is a bully. That’s how I see it. He’s a bully,” says Kahlil’s classmate, Allison Hill, who’s 17-years-old.

As they sit there surrounded by the red white and blue balloons, I can’t find a single student who says they would vote for Trump. They tell me they want the next president to focus on making college affordable and combatting gun violence, police brutality, and racism.

Eighteen-year-old Terez Siggers says police shootings are weighing her down. “I woke up one day, went on Twitter, and this video just went viral. The next morning it was another one. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t–like it’s too much. I don’t want to keep waking up to bad news, I want to wake up to ‘Hey look at this, it’s a beautiful world.’ I’m waking up to another man killed for selling CDs, like I can’t. I don’t want to hear it anymore.”

Terez says she joined choir as a freshman, and that she and her peers make an extra effort to be welcoming and supportive. Amid a lot of laughter and cavorting, she says it’s like they’re all best friends.

If only they’d see that same sort of unifying force coming from the White House, is the sentiment I hear again and again from Terez and her classmates, like Holland Petway.

“What’s most important to me is a president who’s trying to make peace with almost everybody, trying to bring everybody together, because you can’t have peace if everybody doesn’t love each other, so you have to make everybody come together and love each other for you to have peace.”

Most of the high schoolers who made last night’s balloon drop possible are too young to vote. But they care a lot about who wins.