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Scared but Resilient, Stoneman Douglas Students Return to Class Scared but Resilient, Stoneman Douglas Students Return to Class
(about 3 hours later)
PARKLAND, Fla. — Some students dreaded this moment. Some felt ready and defiant. Others just wanted to reunite with friends and be together again. PARKLAND, Fla. — Brooke Harrison, 14, was still in a deep sleep when her mother knocked on her door and hugged her awake at 6:45 Wednesday morning. “You need to get up,” she told her daughter. “You don’t want to be late for school today.”
On Wednesday, the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High were making an emotional return to the classroom, stepping inside the school where 17 people were killed and thousands of other lives in this South Florida suburb were irrevocably altered two weeks ago. It was the first day of class for Brooke and her classmates at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School since a mass shooting that killed 17 and forever upended thousands of lives across this South Florida suburb two weeks ago.
It was the first day of school since a former student armed with a semiautomatic rifle went on a shooting spree on a campus that is now guarded like a fortress. It had been two weeks of nightmares, funerals, flashbacks, vigils and grief counseling since the attack. But Brooke felt ready.
For many, the day offered a chance for the student body to show its strength and unity after two weeks of nightmares, funerals, flashbacks, hospital visits, candlelit vigils and grief counseling. Many planned to wear burgundy T-shirts emblazoned with slogans like Douglas Strong and #MSDStrong. She had watched gunfire explode through her Honors English class that Feb. 14 afternoon as she and her classmates worked on an essay about hardship and education. Three students from her class alone were killed. She had heard their last breaths, crawled through glass and put pressure on a wounded student’s torso before escaping through the school parking lot and running as fast as she could to reach her home in a subdivision lined by coconut palms.
But the return was disquieting. It meant they were actually going to sit in the classrooms where they had hidden during the shooting, and to linger in the courtyards where they had first heard the thunderclap of gunshots. They dreaded confronting so many empty seats, or seeing the art project that a slain friend would never finish. Now, like many other Stoneman Douglas High students, Brooke just wanted to return to a routine. She wanted to see her friends and reclaim her school, which is ringed by police officers and garlanded by fading memorial flowers.
“I’m scared to go back,” Madison Lackey, 14, said. She was nervous, and she worried she would cry when she walked through the courtyard where she would sometimes eat lunch with Alaina Petty, who was killed in her classroom. Others said they dreaded confronting so many empty seats, or seeing the art project that a slain friend would never finish.
Even to get onto the vast school campus again, students and their parents had to thread their way past heavily armed police officers and television cameras and pass through an exterior fence that is now decorated with banners of grief and condolence and garlanded with fading memorial flowers. “I just hope she’s going to be O.K. being there all day,” Brooke’s mother, Denise, said as she made coffee, toast and bacon for breakfast. “That it’s not traumatic to be there.”
As they approached the school, the students walked past a phalanx of police officers from nearby cities and teachers from their old middle and elementary schools who waved signs of support. But first, Brooke needed her mother to help unknot a pair of gray Nikes.
“I have no strength,” she said as she walked into the kitchen, smiling and still wearing the same burgundy Stoneman Douglas shirt from the day before.
The bloodied shoes that Brooke had worn the day of the shooting had been taken away as evidence. Her favorite sweater was also seized. Her black backpack now has a bullet hole in the bottom, from one of the AR-15 rifle rounds that filled their English class with a choking haze and killed Alex Schacter, Alyssa Alhadeff and Alaina before their eyes there in room 1216.
So on Wednesday, Brooke went back to school carrying little more than her phone and a small bracelet made by students that said “ALAINA.”
The shortened school day started with 4th period, the class where everything had shattered. For 30 minutes, the students reunited with the classmates and teachers who had huddled with them in closets and corners. They spent 24 minutes in each of their other classes and were done by 11:40 a.m.
There were extra counselors and therapy dogs on hand, and it will be days — if not weeks — before students return to their regular lessons. The school’s principal, Ty Thompson, said on Twitter that the focus of the week would be on healing, and classes are being dismissed at 11:40 a.m. for the rest of the week in an effort to let the students acclimate to being back.
“There is no need for backpacks,” he wrote. “Come ready to start the healing process and #RECLAIM THE NEST.”
Back at home that morning, it was 7:23 a.m. Time for Brooke to go.
“Are we ready?” Ms. Harrison asked.
“Yeah.”
As they skimmed through the neighborhood in a white Hyundai SUV, past driveway basketball hoops, cyclists and joggers, Ms. Harrison remembered how she had driven the same route two weeks earlier to find Brooke after the shooting.
Many parents had exchanged frantic text messages with their children as they hid in their classrooms, but Brooke’s class was one of the first to be attacked. When she and her friends poured out of the school, they grabbed cellphones from strangers and broke the news to their parents. Brooke’s mother found her shaken near their subdivision.
On Wednesday, as traffic around the school slowed to a crawl, Brooke and her mother passed heavily armed police officers and television cameras. Students hopped out of their parents’ cars and walked through a colonnade of police officers from nearby cities and teachers from their old middle and elementary schools who waved signs of support.
“Welcome back, welcome back,” one sheriff’s deputy said.“Welcome back, welcome back,” one sheriff’s deputy said.
The school has said it would have extra counselors to meet with students, and it will be days — if not weeks — before students return to their regular lessons. The school’s principal, Ty Thompson, said on Twitter that the focus of the week would be on healing, and classes are being dismissed at 11:40 for the rest of the week in an effort to let the students acclimate to being back. “I feel like I’m on an episode of C.S.I.,” Brooke said.
“There is no need for backpacks,” he wrote. “Come ready to start the healing process and #RECLAIM THE NEST” “How is this our school?” her mother asked. “How is this happening?”
The night before they headed back, many of the young survivors took to Twitter and Facebook and other social media channels where they have been fomenting a new movement for tougher gun laws. They shared poems, words of inspiration and even said they were revved up about waking early. Ms. Harrison’s voice trembled. “This is unbelievable. It’s making me sad.”
“I’ve never anticipated a 6 a.m. alarm more in my entire life,” wrote Cameron Kasky, 17. “Mom, please don’t cry.”
They pulled into a circular driveway and quickly hugged, kissed and said I love you. And Brooke threaded her way past a sheriff’s officer and through the front gage, blending into the river of burgundy T-shirts making their way back in.