Community and Philanthropy

Editor’s note: Two weeks before he was killed in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Alex Schachter composed the following free-verse poem, an assignment for a literary fair. His father, Max, recited the poem toward the end of the CNN town hall at the BB&T Center in Sunrise; his brother, Ryan, read the

It had been exactly one week since a gunman had shot and killed 17 students and teachers (and wounded 17 others) at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. But this wasn’t the night to grieve. This was the night to vent. And demand action. The survivors and parents who took the stage at BB&T Center in

By Grace Solomon   We awoke that morning to a day that felt like any other. We hurried through our morning ritual, a routine of tooth-brushing, cereal-pouring, lunch-making and other usual tasks that eventually led us out the front door and on the road to school. For some, it would be for the last time.

Students throughout the tri-county region refused to wait for the National School Walkout in March to make their voices heard in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. In the week following the Feb. 14 attack, high school students from Hialeah Senior High, Western High in Davie, Cypress Bay in

For some Marjory Stoneman Douglas students and families, rage over what happened on Feb. 14 turned into activism for gun control reform. For others, lingering questions and racing thoughts about that day resulted in nightmares and insomnia. And for an untold number of people, the aftershock has yet to reverberate. Perhaps, according to experts, it

Returning to School Jude: When they were calling attendance that first morning, and we didn’t hear the names of the [students] who died, that’s when everyone started getting sad. Ameer: It was a relief and it was sad, seeing everyone. You saw your friends who were there [when the shooting started], you gave hugs. I

We were in our fourth-period creative writing class, Room 1255. Miss Lippel’s class. That classroom was our safe place. We were just that big happy family. We would share and tell our stories; that’s what brought us together. We were all just really, really happy; the day was going to end great. It was Valentine’s

My name was thrown into the hands of the media by [fellow student] David Hogg; he and I were friends before all this. He figured he could use my help in keeping the media’s attention. My first interview was the night after the shooting with [CNN’s] Anderson Cooper, alongside Isabelle Robinson and Lex Michael. Members

I’m running on adrenaline, but I’m on a mission. There is no other time. It’s not too soon to talk about the issues surrounding what happened in Parkland. It’s too late. So I will be relentless in Tallahassee. And I will be relentless in Washington, D.C. There were failures on so many levels. Human failures.

From the moment he first addressed reporters at Marjory Stoneman Douglas on Feb. 14, Scott Israel has been an integral and often-compelling figure in the continuing storyline connected to the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history. At a CNN-organized town hall meeting a week after the shooting, the Broward County sheriff drew several standing

Less than 24 hours after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, Coconut Creek police officer Michael Leonard became the face of Broward County’s first responders when he stood in front of the nation’s news cameras and recounted how he apprehended the person responsible for one of the deadliest school shootings in American history. Since

Like so many others around the country, Howard Dvorkin (pictured) watched the events of Feb. 14 unfold with equal parts shock, anger and despair. It wasn’t just that he and wife Gwen had deep roots in Parkland, ones that, for Dvorkin, stretched over some three decades. Or that several equestrians from Marjory Stoneman Douglas rode