On the morning of February 28th, Brooke Harrison was in a deep sleep when her mother knocked on her door and hugged her awake at 6:45am. “You need to get up,” she told her daughter. “You don’t want to be late for school today.”
It would be the first day of class for Harrison and her classmates at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School since a mass shooting that killed 17 and forever upended thousands of lives across the South Florida Suburb. Two weeks of nightmares, funerals, flashbacks, vigils and grief counseling since the attack.
Harrison watched gunfire explode through her Honor English class that Valentine’s Day afternoon. Three students from her classroom were gunned-down. She heard their last breaths. She crawled through glass. She put pressure on the wounded. She escaped.
But now, like many other Stoneman Douglas High students, Harrison wanted to return to a routine…see her friends, reclaim her school. But this time her routine was different. The bloodied shoes that she had worn the day of the shooting her taken as evidence, her favorite sweatshirt also seized. The backpack that she carried each day to and from school now had a bullet in the bottom from one of the AR-15 rifle rounds that filled her English class…the same round that killed Alex Schachter, Alyssa Alhadef, and Alaina before her eyes.
The shortened school day began with fourth period, the class where everything had shattered. For 30 minutes, students reunited with the classmates and teachers who had huddled them in closets and corners. The students spent 24 minutes in each of their classes and were done by 11:40 am. 96% of the student body returned.
The school principal, Ty Thompson, said on Twitter that the focus of the week would be on healing, and that a classes were to be shorted to let students acclimate to returning to the school that now doubled as a crime scene.
“There is no need for backpacks” he wrote. “Come ready to start the healing process and #RECLAIM THE NEST.”
Scared but resilient, the students of Stoneman Douglas High are back in school.
