Orange County School Board member Angie Gallo joined hundreds of others Saturday on final tours of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School building in South Florida where 14 students and three staff members were gunned down in 2018.
“It was heart-wrenching. It was heartbreaking,” Gallo said.
Gallo’s tour was led by Max Schachter, whose 14-year-old son, Alex Schachter, was killed in the mass shooting at the Parkland school. He said he wanted school and state leaders from around Florida, and the country, to visit the site “and understand the failures and the lessons learned.”
The Broward County school district announced last month that the fenced-off building — preserved as evidence to be used in the shooter’s trial — will be torn down at the end of the 2023-24 school year. The rest of the school is in use.
The district likely will erect a memorial on the site, where 17 were killed and another 17 were injured, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported. Parkland community members have been pushing for the building’s demolition, the paper said.
This summer, victims’ family members and members of Congress toured the site, too, with Schachter asking on social media for them to visit, the Sun Sentinel reported. “I want YOU to understand what happened that day. Work with me to prevent this from happening again,” he wrote.
Gallo said the tour of the three-story building reinforced the value of the safety measures put in place or enhanced since the Valentine’s Day 2018 shooting, which has included armed officers stationed at schools, “hardened” campuses and new “threat assessment” efforts.
Better training and coordination with law enforcement should also make sure that the lapses that day in South Florida do not get repeated, Gallo added.
Those changes, she hopes, are some small comfort to the parents like Schacter, who in their grief have pushed for changes ever since their children died. “All the work they’re doing absolutely has made our schools safer and stronger, and that’s a blessing,” she said.
The tour prompted a few safety questions — ones she declined to state publicly — that she’ll discuss with Orange County Public Schools staff and also underscored her belief the state could do more to stop gun violence.
Gallo is part of the group Prevent Gun Violence Florida, which wants the Florida Legislature to ban “all semiautomatic assault weapons and large capacity feeding devices.”
Nicolas Cruz, a former student now serving a life sentence for the massacre at the Parkland school, used a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 semi-automatic rifle in the shooting.
“We could do something about this,” Gallo said.
Her tour included school board members from Osceola and Citrus counties, Alberto Carvalho, the former Miami-Dade County superintendent who now leads Los Angeles schools, and school officials from as far away as Utah and Oregon, she said. It was one of many held Saturday.
The walk through the building, following the route of the shooter, was “gut-wrenching,” she added.
Inside the classrooms, they saw evidence of what had been a regular school day overlaid with a reminder that it was a holiday typically celebrated with hearts, candy and cards. Though some teachers and students’ personal items had been removed, the classrooms she saw still seemed “locked in time.”
Gallo spotted classwork, shoes, a Victoria’s Secret bag and an old Valentine’s Day balloon. There were blood stains on the floor and bullet holes in a door.
“It’s not something that I’ll ever forget,” she said. “Being a mom, my heart just hurt.”
WPLG-TV reported that Saturday was the last day for people to tour the building. People from 25 states, including school board members, superintendents and national Parent Teacher Association members, went on the tour to see how they could make schools safer, the station reported.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
