Teacher longs for her classroom

Social studies teacher Ivy Schamis was wrapping up a lesson on the Holocaust for her 30 students when death left the pages of their work and confronted the class at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

“We heard, ‘Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!,’ right outside of the door,” Schamis said Friday of her first- floor classroom.

Bullets from Nikolas Cruz’s AR-15 flew through the glass panel of the classroom door “and hit six students, two of them ... fatally wounded,” Schamis said Friday. “At the time it was so chaotic, I think we didn’t know that Helena [Ramsay] and Nick [Dworet] were killed.”

But Schamis said the gunfire and blood that scarred her classroom and everyone inside will not change her passion for teaching.

“I want to go back in there badly,” Schamis said. “I love my class and I love my classroom.”

Authorities were not letting faculty back in the school, she and English teacher Darren Levine said. Friday afteroon, the colleagues were leaning on one another, coping together as they tried to explain what everyone connected to the school has endured.

“It’s unbelievable,” Levine said. “We can’t wrap our heads around this.”

Schamis said, “How about a 19-year-old not being able to get an AR-15? A mentally ill or mentally well person, I don’t care who you are, should not have an AR-15.

“We’re learning how to eradicate hate in a Holocaust class and this comes into our classroom? It was ironic.”

Levine, a 2002 graduate of the school, has taught there for a decade. He said, “A person doesn’t need to have an AR-15. Nobody goes hunting with that kind of weapon. They go hunting for people with that weapon.”

He added, “We can demand action all we want. There have been more than dozens of occasions where people demand action and no action has been taken. I hope we see action. But all we continue to see is these kinds of events. It doesn’t make sense.”