I Was a Parkland Teacher. Listen to Our Stories and Keep the Promise of Never Again.

By Ivy Schamis, The Washington Post

04 February 20

re we going to die today?”

That was the last question a student ever asked me in my classroom at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. I taught about the Holocaust in room 1214, a fact that was obvious from just one glance around it. The back of the room was adorned with a yellow banner that read: “We will never forget,” donated to the class by a Holocaust survivor. The walls were lined with a painting of barbed wire that students had done the year before.

Minutes earlier, the room had been full of laughter and sweets from our class Valentine’s Day celebration. Now, after a burst of gunfire that had come in from the hallway, it was lined with shards of glass, and we were huddled together, trying to stay as quiet as possible. I didn’t know it yet, but two of my beloved students — Nick Dworet and Helena Ramsay — lay dead on the floor. One student, Aalayah Eastmond, lay terrified under Nick’s body. Four more were wounded, one gravely.

I tried to hold my voice steady as I answered: “No, we’re not dying today.”

The truth was that I didn’t know if the shooter would come back, nor did I realize that for Nick and Helena, my answer was so tragically wrong. I was the teacher, I was supposed to have the answers, but I didn’t have any that day. All we could do was lay low, stay quiet and hope the shooter didn’t return.

The class and I waited for what felt like hours but must have been only minutes. I watched the door the whole time. It was locked, but the glass window above the doorknob had been shot out with an AR-15. Anyone could reach in, unlock it and enter. I waited for a hand to appear through the cracked glass, knowing that if I saw it, that was the end.

While I waited, I made a deal with myself: I decided that if the gunman entered the room, I would stand up and say, “We love you.” I hoped, maybe, that saying those words would make it harder for him to shoot the kids after shooting me. After years of teaching about what to do when you face bullies, I wanted to practice what I’d preached. I didn’t want my last moment on earth to be filled with hate.

That moment never came. When a hand finally did reach through the broken glass to unlock the door, it was the SWAT team coming to save us.

It’s been only two years since that terrible day, but everything about our lives has changed. My former students, from Aalayah Eastmond to Emma González to Delaney Tarr, have gone from high school kids to heroic activists. All of my surviving students graduated. Then I decided to move away from Parkland and its daily reminders of tragedy. I became more aware of the gun violence epidemic that ravages our cities and homes and places of worship, killing 100 Americans every day and wounding hundreds more. And now, after years of telling other people’s stories in the classroom, I’m telling my own as a part of National Gun Violence Survivors Week.

I’m doing so because that question — “Are we going to die today?” — still echoes inside my head. For most of us, on most days, the answer to that question is no. But in today’s America, the answer could be yes at any time, in any place. I don’t know when that day will come for me, but I do know that it came far too soon for Nick and Helena, and for Alyssa, Scott, Martin, Aaron, Jaime, Chris, Luke, Cara, Gina, Joaquin, Alaina, Meadow, Alex, Carmen and Peter on Feb. 14, 2018. And I know that between this day and my last, I have the opportunity and responsibility to tell my story — because they cannot tell theirs.

In America, we often repeat the slogans I taught in my classroom — “We will never forget”; “never again” — but we rarely live them. So what I ask of you today is this: Listen to stories like ours, think about them, and demand change to stop the gun violence crisis in America. Remember Helena and Nick and the 15 others who died in the school I love, and please — for once — let’s do everything we can to keep our promise of “never again.”