Faith Collins
Online Editor
Last school year, February 14 marked a devastating day for America, and especially the people of Parkland, Florida. Six months after an active shooter walked onto their campus, taking 17 lives and ruining what was supposed to be a day filled with love, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School started a completely new school year. Going back to school, many students still fear for their safety and claim the tragedy will be in their thoughts forever.
Starting a new school year isn’t exactly what every student looks forward to during the summer. It was especially troubling for these high school students whose lives would never be the same after the loss of numerous innocent classmates. This subject also makes our students think of how they would feel if they were in their place.
“I still think about Parkland and the 17 students who lost their lives, and I’m also thinking about gun policies and moving forward. I want to help them. We are a generation that witnessed [Parkland], now we have to go off and influence our government. We’re going to be the new policymakers. We’re going to be the new generation that replaces [the people in office]. I hope that we always think about Parkland. I would not know how to feel if I were a Parkland victim,” senior Amaya Larralde said.
Larralde recalls the day she heard the news from Florida, and the emotions she felt when listening to the news on television.
“I remember looking at the news and I was sitting with my mom, brother, and sister, and crying after seeing the 17 students on the screen. I don’t know why it touched me a lot, but I knew that this was so wrong that these kids won’t have a full year with a graduation anymore because someone else chose that for them,” Larralde said.
Numerous school districts have established policies on security in an attempt to decrease the likelihood of shootings like Parkland and Columbine from happening again. For example, NEISD implemented a clear backpack policy starting in the fall.
“Personally, I think [the policy]’s a step in the right direction, but I don’t feel like it’s enough. Just because a backpack is clear doesn’t stop someone from grabbing a gun and coming to school,” Larralde said.
Now that school shootings like Parkland and Columbine are becoming more common in American society, junior Jonas Meza feels that schools should take certain measures such as watching facial cues of visitors and students, and being more aware of the way people around us are behaving.
Meza describes how he would feel if he were in any of the Stoneman Douglas student’s shoes this school year.
“I’d be [hesitant] because I would think that everything would be a school shooting,” Meza said.
Even though the shooting took place in Florida, it reached the lives of many other people across the nation, especially students.
“It was a horrible, horrible tragedy that happened. It didn’t just shake that town, it shook the entire nation and started so many protests, uprisings, and a lot of outbursts that I think helped the community,” senior Sawyer Murphy said.
Along with the protests, many students felt as though there wasn’t enough being done to prevent these tragedies.
“[Schools] should be more invested in how our mentality is of each one of our students. It shouldn’t be ‘don’t bring guns to school’, we should get a more in depth perspective of what’s going on inside the minds of the students,” Murphy said.
Murphy continued to share her thoughts on the school system’s approach toward creating a safer environment for students.
“I think they’ve tried, but I don’t think they’ve tried in the right ways.There are other measures you can take to prevent these kinds of tragedies.You don’t chop down a tree by hacking at the leaves, you have to start at the root, and the root is what’s going on inside of the lives of the kids who commit these crimes,” Murphy said.
As evident in the graphic on page one, there were numerous different attempts to incorporate security policies in schools across the nation. In one example, a school in Tennessee installed bullet proof glass in their front office for security measures. Policies as such are proceeding to be implemented in various other schools since the tragic event earlier this year.