Ivy Schamis

A TEACHER OF HOPE

Everything in Room 1214, where Ivy Schamis taught a popular elective on the Holocaust, is exactly as it was on February 14th, 2018: books, years of lesson plans, the big yellow “We Will Never Forget” banner gifted to her by a Holocaust survivor. “It was a classroom of hope,” she says. “You would know when you came in.” Now, “it’s a crime scene. We can’t get in there even to this day.”

She was in the middle of a lesson about the 1936 Berlin Olympics; Nick Dworet had just raised his hand to answer a question. “That very second, that’s when the shots rang out,” Schamis says. “He had literally the last words in my class.”

This year, the lessons and the visits from Holocaust survivors feel more urgent than ever. “Many of the survivors feel that they can relate because, you know, we were a target of a hater,” she says. “I think the hashtag Never Again came from the class.”

Now she’s teaching from a portable classroom on the edge of campus. It has flimsy walls, no “hard corners” — the part of the room where you can shelter out of a shooter’s line of sight.

Even so, Schamis says she never considered not returning. She’s taught at Stoneman Douglas for 18 years; her two grown children are graduates: “It helps being at school. It’s a different kind of bond, that we’ve all been through this together. . . . The best thing has been the opportunity to teach the students about resilience.”