Credit: Courtesy of wikimedia.com

I felt like a nervous coach watching his gymnasts perform on the balance beam as I listened to the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High talking with the press. They’re going to lose their balance. They’re going to fall on their faces. They’re going to humiliate themselves in front of a national audience. I almost couldn’t watch. I was ready to turn the channel if things got too bad.

With relief and a strange feeling of pride, I watched these young people remain amazingly poised and well spoken under the most difficult of circumstances. Sure, some of them stumbled a bit, spoke awkwardly now and then, lost the thread of what they were saying. But that happens to lots of non-professionals when they have a camera stuck in their faces and are asked to bare their emotions at the same time they have to talk about complex issues. The Parkland students haven’t just held it together. They’ve shone. They’ve pointed the way for the rest of us.

I’m an old high school teacher. I know what kids that age can do. But these folks exceeded my expectations.

The students deserve all the credit in the world, but we should reserve a little extra credit for their schools and teachers as well. The students have been educated in the skills they demonstrated to the nation.

Take David Hogg, a young man who seemed so self confident and practiced, it made sense he was singled out by the right wingnuts as a “crisis actor” flown into the school by the anti-gun crowd to pretend he was a student. He’s the student director of the school’s broadcast journalism program, WMSD-TV. While he was hiding inside a closet with other students during the shooting, he was interviewing them. Other staffers for the student newspaper were also reporting the story while it was in progress, taking photos and videos during the ordeal.

Hogg is also a member of the debate team. The Broward County school district has one of the largest debate programs you’ll find anywhere, with teams in all its middle schools and high schools and dozens of elementary schools. By pure coincidence, the school’s debate team was working on the topic of gun control last November. They had pulled together massive amounts of information on both sides of the issue and worked on speeches. So when the national media descended on the high school after the shooting, these kids were prepared to talk intelligently. They knew their stuff.

I saw two students talking on Bill Maher’s show Friday. When Maher joked about them being “crisis actors,” Cameron Kasky said, “I am an actor.” He and many of the other students we’ve seen regularly are part of the school’s active, ambitious drama program, so they’re used to working in front of audiences. In another coincidence, Kasky was rehearsing for a performance of a 2006 rock musical, “Spring Awakening.” It’s not about guns, but “the musical shows what happens when neglectful adults fail to make the world safe or comprehensible for teen-agers, and the onus that neglect puts on kids to beat their own path forward.” The Tony award-winning writers created the musical as a kind of response to the Columbine massacre.

Journalism. Debate. Drama. Dedicated teachers work ridiculously hard to put programs like that together, out of love for the discipline and for their kids, and students dedicate themselves to these programs heart and soul. I know whereof I speak. I advised the high school yearbook for a number of years. It’s ridiculous how many after school hours and past-midnight deadline sessions I clocked with my students — for, if I remember correctly, an $800 stipend. It drove me crazy. I loved it.

Journalism, debate and drama aren’t on the test. Too often they’re afterthoughts for districts dealing with tight budgets and a “teach to the test” mentality. We’ve seen the benefits of these “extras” as we’ve watched and listened to these serious, poised, articulate students. If the world were a better place and these wonderful young people had a normal, boring school day on February 14, 2018, we wouldn’t know their names and faces. They’d graduate enriched by a strong, varied high school program, during and beyond the school day, given to them by teachers dedicated to their professions and their students.

This article appears in Mar 1-7, 2018.

9 replies on “Let’s Hear It For the Parkland Students. And Their Teachers. And Their School”

  1. The fact is, these talented, brave, patriotic and intelligent young Americans are our only hope. We adults have failed them in many important ways. It is time to listen very closely to their words and insights.

  2. Excellent article! with all the obstacles placed in the way of our district community schools, it is hard to keep in mind all the wonderfully dedicated professional educators and the rich, varied programs they offer. Our public district schools ARE succeeding (at least in areas with local funding support, i.e., wealthier communities), but just imagine what they could do if they ALL had our FULL support.

  3. Thank you, David, for eloquently stating the fact that our public school system is full of dedicated professionals who CARE about kids and learning. I’ve been saying this to everyone I meet, but your audience is much broader than mine and I so appreciate your words. As Linda says above, just imagine the learning that could take place if all public school teachers were valued and paid what they so deserve. No one could talk about failing public schools again, and all of our kids would learn and mature into educated citizens. As President Obama said to them “you are who we’ve been waiting for.”

  4. Thank you David Safier. I am a reporter reading this from my hometown of Parkland and your article has these young adults right: they are smart, articulate and passionate. We have an amazing community and the best parents. No one pressures these students to do what they are doing. We have many super achievers at this school, and many, who given the opportunity – which was supposed to happen after college, are going to make their mark.

    Can you imagine what the 15 students could have done to change our world had it not been for a murderer?

    We are so happy that the survivors are speaking out now. On behalf of all of us.

    Sharon Baron – Editor
    http://www.ParklandTalk.com

  5. Thank you for adding your comments Sharon. You brought a few tears to this retired teacher’s eyes. I know much of the pride I’ve felt watching these young people on the public stage is because I’ve known so many students like them, full of promise, idealism and enthusiasm. And talent.

    My best thoughts and wishes to everyone in your community.

  6. Public school districts work well in affluent areas where the parent communities are highly educated and proactive in holding administrators’ feet to the fire. They work well in areas where, for example, parents know the difference between a true college preparatory education, which includes sufficient time to invest deeply in programs like journalism, debate and drama, and an AP cram program that burns up students’ time preparing for multiple choice tests, what happens locally in schools like Basis and, increasingly, TUSD’s University High School.

    It is sickening reading the musings of “Supporters of Public Schools!” who should be watching our largest local school district (TUSD) and trying to work the very difficult problem of figuring out how to nudge it a little further towards responsible administration of the educations of its 40-something thousand students. What are they doing, rather than blocking the mis-administration and mis-application of funds in a massive, dysfunctional local district? Waxing rhapsodic about Stoneman Douglas, a school that is roughly comparable to Catalina Foothills High School locally, and drawing emotional conclusions about how “Every public school could be that wonderful if it just had more funding!”

    Heads up: TUSD has more per pupil funding that Catalina Foothills does. Figure out how Catalina Foothills manages to have better educational programs and more flexible, appropriate policies for its students, figure out what kind of advocacy and oversight programs could actually be effective in making TUSD more responsible, and then come back to us with your misleading pitch that “Every school could be a Stoneman Douglas if it just had more funds!”

    If it had more funds and more high quality oversight, maybe. But in Arizona, where is that oversight going to come from? State-level agencies do not provide it, and all the bleeding heart “Supporters of Public Schools!” in Tucson have not been able to organize advocacy that can ensure that the higher per pupil funding levels in TUSD are reliably translated into teacher compensation and student benefit, rather than into bloated administrative compensation and ineffective, poorly designed “educational” programs.

    So what can we conclude from that? Not sure, except that it’s NOT that MORE FUNDING would automatically turn every public district school into a Stoneman Douglas.

  9. Finland TERROR: Two dead and eight injured as knifeman runs amok!

    I bet it was an assault knife wasn’t it? Too bad nobody had a gun, they could have stopped him.

Comments are closed.