School to reopen in stages:
The high school campus will remain closed through Wednesday, and students won’t return at all this week.
Superintendent Robert Runcie said the district’s goal is to bring teachers back by the end of the week and have students return on Monday, Feb. 26.
Before every football game at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, players charge the field only after stopping to touch their maroon eagle mascot, an enduring symbol of luck but also indomitable strength.
Who is Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School? The answers are easy, numerous and spirited, and hardly defined by Wednesday’s massacre of 17 teens and adults. Ask students and faculty to describe school spirit, pride and whether the lunch lady is cool, and anecdotes about Stoneman Douglas do not revisit the victims and the terror, the survival and the ache.
The stories, instead, describe the chill astronomy teacher, Kyle Jeter, and his weather-balloon experiments. They describe Stoneman’s greatest export, 2008 graduate Anthony Rizzo, now first baseman for the Chicago Cubs. And they describe Gloriajean, the kind lunch lady who volunteered to decorate the cafeteria tables two weeks ago for the Sadie Hawkins Dance.
The anecdotes come fast and breathless. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, built in 1990, is defined by something more than tragedy. It’s defined by more than its 2,972 students, its 94 percent graduation rate and its 23-to-1 student-teacher ratio.
“Our mascot the Eagle, for me, has always meant diversity and openness,” says David Hogg, 17, an aspiring broadcast journalist whose dream job is a segment producer on “60 Minutes.” “We accept people for who they are, because you can be anybody here.”
A writer for Stoneman Douglas’ student newspaper, Eagle Eye, Hogg has emerged as the cameraready voice of the student body by filming student reactions during the school lockdown. Hogg also films documentaries for the video club. A recent example: Project Aquila, named after the eagle-shaped constellation, a mission to send a school-made weather balloon “to the edge of space.” (The balloon didn’t make it that far: it crash-landed in the Bahamas, Jeter says.)
Jeter, Hogg’s teacher, is also responsible for Marjory’s Garden, a 15,000-square-foot herb and vegetable garden framed in benches and shade. Opened in 2016, the garden allows students to test scientific principles like soil chemistry and green energy, and vegetables that are sold on campus are reinvested back into the garden, Hogg says.
“We need a garden so students have a peaceful, tranquil place,” says Jeter, 46, a Stoneman Douglas astronomy teacher since 1994, who collaborates with Hogg on many science projects, including a new observatory.
For Emma Gonzalez, 18, Stoneman Douglas can be defined by its Humans of New York-style Instagram account, Humans of MSD, 94 portraits (and counting) that chronicle campus life through random students and staff. (There’s even a parody account, Robots of MSD, featuring interviews with on-campus computers about what they really think of students.)
Gonzalez, recently profiled for Humans of MSD, describes shaving her head two weeks before school began in September.
“People asked me, ‘Are you taking a feminist stand’? No, I wasn’t. It’s Florida. Hair is just an extra sweater I’m forced to wear,” Gonzalez recalls with a laugh. “I even made a Powerpoint presentation to convince my parents to let me shave my head, and it worked. Humans of MSD is cool because it makes everyone feel that there’s something special about them, that they could have 15 minutes of fame.”
Gonzalez, who spoke at an anti-gun rally Saturday in downtown Fort Lauderdale, is part of Stoneman’s Newspaper Club and the Gay-Straight Alliance. She finds camaraderie on campus where most students do: the central courtyard. This was where her friend Ryan Deitch, who has “very bright red hair,” wore a lime-green suit to Homecoming so he could resemble a leprechaun. Here are impromptu rounds of musical chairs. The Ladies of Destiny step team choreographs dances to fit every ethnicity on campus, from Bollywood to Korean hip-hop. When the Stoneman Douglas Eagle Regiment Marching Band won state championships in November, the brass and woodwind sections marched shoulder-toshoulder through the courtyard, a massive pep rally filled with confetti, pride and another inflatable eagle mascot. This spring, the marching band will perform at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Pep rallies? Also common, especially when the baseball team won the state championship in 2016. Flatout silliness? Sure, if you count the time in December seniors played cornhole while dressed in banana costumes.
There are class clowns, of course, but not many. For 20 years, Elliot Bonner has been Stoneman’s assistant baseball and football coach and occasional security guard, and labels students “driven, really smart and really into the school spirit of sports, clubs and activities.”
“We’re like any other community, and we have our 10 percent of students that don’t want to do anything,” Bonner says. “I think I’ve only had 25 kids misbehave ever.”
Between semesters, students, gripped by wanderlust, travel internationally. A lot. The Stoneman Douglas yearbook shows one senior climbing into underground caves in Israel. Other post cards include a quinceañera party near Paris’ Arc de Triomphe. Another photo: a tour of an ancient Greek island city preserved in volcanic ash.
Another yearbook page recounts the Anthony Rizzo Walk-Off, a 5K march for cancer hosted in Parkland every year since Rizzo was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma while an 18-year-old senior at Stoneman Douglas.
For Lauren Newman, a 17-year-old planning to major in biomedical sciences, Stoneman can be defined by its cliques: the math nerds, the jocks, the journalism students, the poets, the leadership kids. (As copresident of the Math Honors Society and co-editorin-chief of Eagle Eye, Newman says she belongs to two cliques.). She does not visit the Emo Gazebo, a pavilion in the courtyard where awkward teens, comic-con enthusiasts and the blackeyeliner set assemble at lunchtime.
School spirit comes alive often, Newman says. To raise money for last year’s senior class prom, students were invited to buy and hand-paint their personalized parking space. She’s reminded of her ambition daily by the message inscribed on Stoneman Douglas’ entrance wall, above the red gates: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
“No matter where you go at MSD, it’s impossible to escape the Eagle pride that is shown on every wall and every T-shirt,” says Newman, of Parkland.
For Felicia Burgin, an English teacher and senior education adviser, the school should be defined by the “kindness and warmth” of its students.
“These kids have grown up in a very warm community, and they have received a lot of positivity in their lives, and they radiate that,” says Burgin, of Coconut Creek. “They’re world-conscious children, which is what makes Stoneman strong.”