‘I’m never going to be the same’: Students set to return to shattered Florida school

PARKLAND, Fla. — When students return Wednesday to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, they will start where they left off: fourth period.

A guidance counselor was explaining this the other day to Bruna Oliveira. That’s when the freshman felt the grief well up, her mind floating back to when she was crouched on the classroom floor, praying she would be spared, eyes squeezed shut while her favorite teacher lay wounded.

“My teacher is dead,” Bruna told the counselor at a Sunday orientation. “And I don’t have a class.”

Exactly two weeks after gunfire transformed this tranquil, suburban community into the latest chapter in the American school-shooting saga, students are set to return to the sprawling campus. The massacre that left 17 dead put the campus at the center of a debate over gun violence and many of its students at the forefront of a movement to change firearms laws.

But in the coming weeks, teachers hope to ease students back into the business of learning: graphing polynomials, dissecting Shakespeare, learning the countries of Southeast Asia. For Bruna, that should mean starting with geography class, but her teacher, Scott Beigel, is gone. And Building 12 — which held his classroom — is ringed by a chain-link fence. The Broward County school system is seeking money from the state to demolish the building, to wipe the stain away.