Hundreds of Boston Latin Academy (BLA) students walked out of classes on Tuesday this week as part of the Students Demand Action national protest day against gun violence. The action was led in part locally by two Dorchester sophomores.

As the clock struck noon, hundreds of students poured out of BLA, located on Townsend Street in Roxbury, as part of the movement, but they didn’t just leave it at that. In an adjacent field, they put their pens to work and filled out hundreds of advocacy postcards addressed to US Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania) demanding legislative action on gun reform.

The effort was the brainchild of Dorchester’s Clare Ablett and Lola Roberts, and Roslindale’s Eva Chapuran, also a sophomore at BLA.

Dorchester resident Elise Walker, left, fills out a postcard with her friend Melinda Field during the walkout on Tuesday.

“We put this together and got the word out and we had to ask if just having a walkout was enough,” said Roberts outside the school. “The answer was that, no, a walkout was not enough. We’ve created postcards and we’re having students fill them out after they leave the school and we’ll be mailing them to the two US senators. If we can mail enough postcards, maybe just one will get through and make a difference in the mindset of one of those senators in some way.”

Ablett said the organizers and the student body wanted to show that they do care about gun violence in their schools and in their neighborhoods.

“It is on our minds,” she said. “I think kids are talking about it. We see the news and read the news and know what’s going on. We wanted to come together to say we care about this. It’s not isolated. We care, and especially about schools. Schools should be safe and sometimes they don’t feel safe.”

Hundreds of students walked out of Boston Latin Academy (BLA) on Tuesday afternoon to demand action on gun regulation. Seth Daniel photos

She said they did some research to find out who might be the best to address the postcards to and came up with Collins and Toomey. She said they looked at some of their comments in newspaper articles and their record for voting on gun regulatory issues.

“We felt they were the two people we could make a difference with,” Ablett said.