In Part 1 of this powerful two-part conversation, Mark sits down with Dr. Joey Weisler to explore the deeply personal experiences that shaped his path as an educator.

Before Joey ever had his own classroom, he found himself at the center of a community tragedy. While substitute teaching at a middle school next to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School during the Parkland school shooting, he and his students were forced into lockdown as the devastating events unfolded nearby.

Joey shares what that moment was like inside the classroom, the emotional weight educators carry during crisis, and how witnessing trauma within a school community changed the way he understood teaching, safety, and the emotional lives of students.

The conversation also explores the difficult reality many teachers face when students reveal deep struggles—and how systems sometimes fail to respond with the urgency and compassion those moments require.

This episode is an honest and moving discussion about trauma, responsibility, and the human side of teaching.

It’s also the beginning of a larger story—one that continues in Part 2, where Joey shares how these experiences ultimately reshaped his career and inspired a new vision for education.

In This Episode

1. Joey’s connection to the Parkland tragedy and what it was like teaching during that moment
2. How trauma can shape a teacher’s mindset before their career even begins
3. The emotional responsibility teachers feel when students confide in them
4. The gap that sometimes exists between student needs and school systems
5. Why being present for students can matter more than any lesson plan
6. The early experiences that would eventually influence Joey’s philosophy of teaching

🎙️ Listen to Part 1 now, and don’t miss Part 2 of this powerful conversation.

Chapters

00:00Introduction and Connection

01:40Perseverance in Education

05:01The Impact of Trauma on Teaching

11:56Navigating the Aftermath of Tragedy

16:28Experiencing the Shooting

21:38The Aftermath and Support Systems

28:32Navigating Trauma in Education

31:26The Impact of Personal Experience on Teaching

1. Joey Weisler's Website
2. The Throne in the Classroom (Book & Trailer)
3. Classroom Narratives Podcast
4. 10 Steps to Trauma-Informed Teaching (Guide)
5. Emotionally Equipped Educator (Book)
6. Heart Framework (Upcoming Book)

Dr Weisler links

1. Website

Listen to my interview on Joey's podcast, Classroom Narratives: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rising-through-the-unknown-advocacy-trust-and/id1775740636?i=1000748265220

specialedrising.com

https://www.gofundme.com/f/join-rays-respite-care-mission

Great to see you Mark. Happy Thursday.

Thank you. Happy Thursday. Great to see you too. How are you?

Thank you for having me as your guest. I'm super excited to be here.

Oh my goodness, thank you so much. I feel so lucky to have you as my guest. I have to say before we start that I just think you're one of the nicest people I've ever met. You really are. You're just so kind and generous and

My pleasure.

Thank you and likewise.

I

I feel so fortunate that our mutual friend, Juliana Conte, introduced us. She will forever be, yeah, she'll forever be this star in my life because of herself, but also what she's done and introduced me to you because you've now introduced me to so many people.

Absolutely. Likewise.

that I'm connecting with and I didn't even have to ask you to do it. That's what's amazing about you. I didn't even have to ask you to do it. Yeah.

It's what I do. Our first conversation

was charismatic and it stuck with me. So whenever I speak with people from like circles, I like to bring them together. I think I told you this in December as well. When I think about how many people we could take out of our corners that are doing wonderful work in education, that's how we changed the system.

This is my turn to pay you back for having me on your show. And I had such an incredible experience speaking with you. so really excited. We've been building up to this moment for weeks now. So I'm excited to finally have you here and we can get going with it.

I just wanted to start with this one little thing about perseverance. Sometimes perseverance means staying. Sometimes it means stepping away and rebuilding. But it always begins with honesty and the belief that this chapter isn't the final one. So your story is a lot about perseverance through your career and through your chosen profession. At the end of your first year, you said you loved your students, but you were running on empty and felt disillusioned.

Yes.

when you hit that wall, maybe you could talk about the experience and what built towards that

So Mark is alluding to when I found myself at my rock bottom in education, but I feel like it hit my rock bottom a couple of times. I think the moment where I realized that this is never going to work was when my, and I'm adding air quotes for those that can't see when my quote unquote first year teacher mentor, who was the school's librarian, pulled me into my own classroom during lunch one day. This is in September.

Right, yeah, not even.

my goodness.

And she

said that because of a couple of things. She said that because she knew because I thought my vulnerability was my strength. She knew that the year before...

I came to their school. I was in Parkland, Florida. Now this school is about 20 miles away from Parkland, Florida. Same district, different part of the district, but not so close as it like they're not like they're glued together through tragedy. They didn't have that same bond as the city of Parkland did. So the year before that,

from Singapore two weeks ago and he's like yeah of course I remember that. It's like the whole world remembers this.

Wow.

And oddly enough, you still have locals that don't address it anymore. So it's all about who remembers what. So I was a part of that event in terms of, I hate to say that I was a part of it as a singular person, but more like I was a community witness. That's what I like to call myself. I was a community witness to that tragedy by substitute teaching at that feeder middle school on that day. I was there the day before as well. I was there in the days after. I was also at Stoneman Douglas High School

Mm-hmm.

Speaking to, I didn't know what the time, Emma Gonzalez. She became the face of March for our lives three weeks to the day before that tragedy happened. I was substituting her Holocaust studies class and she saw an article that I pointed out under the teacher's wall that had one of her brother's favorite teachers and that got us to start talking for quite some time and then three weeks later she's in the spotlight. So I definitely know people from that event.

Parkland had a major effect as a pre-service teacher. guess I had pre-service college level still. Working on my masters at the time, a pre-classroom is a better way to put it. never did pre-service, but as a pre-classroom teacher, that had happened. And I entered because of that, already bypassing what I call anticipation. I didn't have that excitement to get going. I already entered in survival mode.

Hey.

I'm already in the classroom. I'm disillusioned already. I'm in survival mode because I've seen the worst of the worst. There are students that I knew who left blood stains in the hallway where I used to have classes as a student, as Stoneman Douglas has back in 2009 to 13. And then at the same time, three months later to the day of that tragedy in May, a very dear friend of mine,

took his life by suicide. And there are no questions to that in terms of there was nothing that I felt like I could have done to save that person. Even now, eight years later, I still wonder what were the signs that I had missed in this person who was always so kind to me in life that I couldn't save his. And so around this time in September, when that

quote unquote first year mentor said to me, you belong in therapy. She was responding to a previous incident that was on a Monday. said that she was responding to an incident on Friday, three days before where I went down to administration. And at the time I felt like my students were in crisis. I had students who had confided some extremely traumatic stuff to me.

And I said to admin, said, if you do not do something about this, I will. Why? Because I will not see blood in my hands from one of my students at your expense. That did not go over well. a Friday afternoon, that did not go over well. So that hung over my head the entire weekend and much longer than that. And then my first-year mentor comes to me and she says,

Yeah, I can understand why, but good for you.

You belong in therapy. You don't belong here. So yeah, those are some of the events that really disillusioned me as a teacher in terms of it wouldn't be fair for me to say, I mean, of course that first year classroom really disillusioned me and that's a whole nother part of the conversation. But what disillusioned me before that was already running on empty because I had already seen the rock bottom before even starting my entire career.

Yeah. And at the heart of it.

Most teachers go into this because they want to help, So when you see students struggling as humans, it's not just about academics only. You're there as this person that sometimes these kids, they're looking for some sort of adult authority figure that they can go to and unload on and who might be able to gain some trust with. And that trust...

I know I do and obviously you do too. You take that trust very seriously and you can't ignore these signals. And so your natural inclination is to want to help. And where do you go? Well, you don't run the school. So you go to the people who are in authority, right? And you look for their helps. Sure. You were there for four weeks. Why not? had enough practically tenured at that point.

Right. I thought I ran the school.

Exactly, yeah.

Yeah, when you

own nothing, you have to pretend you own it all.

Yeah,

that's great quote. love that. So, you know, really how unfortunate and how defeating when you're going and opening up your heart and thinking you're doing something that would be well received because it's like, hey, this is is real. this kid's trauma. So what happened to your will to move beyond that? How did you find that strength?

was not pretty, did not have a pretty ending. So after the tragedy had happened and when I had lost my friend, I got trained instantly in applied suicide intervention skills training, otherwise known as assistive trainings. It's a suicide preventative measure, which is at that time it was offered all throughout the city in terms of getting people more equipped in suicide prevention.

And once I got that training, the training is phenomenal. We had a great facilitator and she really broke it down well. There's a part that I misinterpreted and I'll talk about that, but the whole premise of the training is to what we call keep a subject safe, comma, for now safe for now. And that was very clear, but at the time I think I read too into it safe for now means that we could be.

For example, the people that could quote-unquote in this analogy, administer the CPR, but we are not the paramedics. We could keep the person protected until the next qualified person or the expert can come and then move them forward to where they need to go. I forgot the comma for now part. And the way I saw it is that it is my job to keep students safe at the same time.

You

after this tragedy and losing or the tragedy of Parkland and losing my friend to suicide. My mindset of entering education went from a rather morphed, it's a better word, morphed from I want to go into education to prevent students from getting picked on to I have the non-negotiable deed and obligation to keep my students both physically and mentally alive.

in my classrooms by all means necessary. And so what happened after these series of events where I'm speaking up to administration.

There's a few more things that went on in my classroom by what I figured was per the curriculum. I'm the English professor. need to make that clear. I'm literature. I'm writing. I'm touchy-feely with the humanities. And by that, I mean even now in my college classrooms, when we read stories, we look at characters' actions to bridge empathy and to bridge feeling in terms of how we actually exist in our own daily lives. When you see even your favorite show, you feel connected to a character and you're rooting for them like,

go go go because that's how we act we see ourselves in those characters in the way that they perform and literature is the same way and it happened when we were reading of mice and men and when reading of mice and men I thought of a quote from Crookes who is living in the stables and he says a guy can get so lonely he gets sick

Right, sure.

And I thought, a great quote. Let me pose that to my eighth grade class and ask them, how many of you have ever felt like you had been an outsider before? The moment I was not expecting is when every hand in the room went up and they said, we've all felt like this. We just never had a chance to express it. But more than that, they felt depression. They felt suicide ideation. They felt everything that I wanted to protect them against.

Yeah.

And I went down to leadership and I showed them my findings. This is after all this had happened in September. This is October, so I'm already under a microscope and now October hits and I find this out. I bring this down to them and I say to them, we need to make some changes in this school. They did make a change. They got rid of me.

Okay.

Sure.

They got rid of you.

Yep. Well, that makes sense.

At the time it didn't for me, but looking back, yeah, they said to me, quote unquote, yeah, it wasn't working out and I see why. I was really pushing them in a direction or a philosophy that they did not believe in and our differences were just not worth reconciling.

Well, no, it doesn't make sense.

Yeah. do you think you would have had this propensity towards responding in this way if you hadn't experienced the massacre of the year before? Do you think

that had anything to do with where your mindset was at in looking at these kids and saying, okay, this is something that we've been overlooking and needs to be addressed. But it was even more personal now because of the experience.

You know, Mark, I think about that all the time, and I'm going to answer it you like this. On February 13th, 2018, 26 hours before the tragedy had happened, I was substituting back at the middle school.

And that classroom I was substituting in, the way, on that day became my first classroom six months later. I call it my classroom, but I was really just the interim teacher for that same teacher who went on a maternity leave. Still, for those six months, I was teacher of record. was my room. People laughed to me and said, no, you were just the sub, but that's beside the point. I was the teacher. In that same classroom on February 13th,

Am I sure? Yeah? Absolutely.

Now, now, now. Yeah.

I was experimenting with an exercise that I called the Marvelous Me, which was a way to have students think about their self-love qualities. And what a great lesson for Valentine's Day to just write something about your qualities of love, your qualities of kindness, in ways that you can just use all the beautiful parts of you, all the marvelous parts, it was called the Marvelous Me, the marvelous parts of you, to help others.

And I just wrote about this in my book. It was the first moment I had ever felt taken off guard as a teacher or somebody, a present figure in the classroom. I'm walking up and down the rows and everyone is, they're writing these wonderful, wonderful things. And then I stop at one student's desk. I look at his paper and he has tears in his eyes as I'm approaching him. He does not want to look at me in the eye. I look at his paper and it says, what am I?

I am empty. I am flawed. I am nothing.

and I bent down next to him and I just said...

I'm listening to you. Whatever you need to share, I'm there. I'm listening. And it means that it didn't even need to take the massacre for me to be a trauma informed instructor. That sounds so callous to say, but as someone who's never ran a classroom before, that that's a great point. You know, what if, what if. So I leaned down to him and I said, I just want you to know that I'm here and I'm listening. And he looks at me and he says, like he couldn't even get the words out. He just says, this is how I feel. That's all I remember him saying. This is how I feel.

because

of course, like out of a Hollywood movie, the bell rang, it was time for lunch. So that conversation never finished. But I remember during lunch, the teacher that I was subbing for was just a few doors down in the media center. She was in data meetings. So I went into her and the expression of awkwardness, rather concern on my face must have been so obvious yet awkward to her because she looked at me like, why are you here? I'm like, need to show you this paper.

Hahaha

You

And of course, she looks at that paper and says the exact same thing that my leadership said the year after at the new school. She looks at that paper and she uses the three most invalidating words. I'm not worried.

my goodness.

Mm-hmm.

So please point me in the direction of the school counselor. I'll leave this with her and I'll keep this person safe for now until that next trained person, see I hadn't even taken the ASIS training yet, imagine that, until the next trained person on campus can help the student. Two hours later, that kid's at my door.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

He's smiling, he's peppy, he's happy. He says, hey, didn't mean to offend you. Didn't mean to get you worked up. All is well. Love the lesson, worked great, got me thinking. And yeah, happy almost Valentine's Day. And he skipped away. And I'm like, what a great.

day of what teaching should be all about. Like my chest is all puffed out, like I just had the best teaching day ever. I helped somebody and then 25 hours later I was in the corner with a bunch of sixth graders in middle of their math class as we just heard of this bloodbath happening next door.

can't even begin to imagine even being in a school next door, I mean you were hearing it, right?

There's so many questions that. I don't know how deep you want to go into that. just, I just want to know what was the momentary feeling like for you and your students in that classroom? And then I want to talk about how kids carry that trauma with them and

I'm an open book

the emotional realities that they walk away with. And just even not even fully experiencing that, but just as kids as you were just talking about, know, who have their own internal struggles and how that moment shapes you and how you helped to shape them. But can we go back to the moment where that was actually happening and what was happening for you in your classroom and your students? Yeah, if you wouldn't mind. I don't want to be morbid about it. I just, feel like it's important that people know.

Yeah. Absolutely. So you want me to take you back to the moment of the shooting? Okay. Absolutely. yeah. No, no, no, no. It's...

I'll tell you why it's not morbid. Because I didn't see or hear anything. I'm in a classroom. I was not in the building where it was all going on. I was the whole school removed. And now, like you said, there were students that I had the next year, depending on where you were in the school that day. And the portables, they heard it.

Mm-hmm.

I was in the front of the school. I heard nothing, I saw nothing. I did not see anything until the Stoneman Douglas faculty were safely evacuated into the hallway I was in.

So I was in the safe zone. I was actually in the safest classroom in the whole building that day. I was in the first classroom, or the first door, and I would not have been safe if we were under any kind of attack. I would actually be the most dangerous. But in this situation, I was the first classroom by the front office for the sixth grade math class. And I still talked with that sixth grade math teacher every year we touched base with each other around the 14th of February. On this day,

Right, you would have been the first. Right, exactly.

A parent volunteer ran into my room and here I am teaching the coordinate plane and I'm getting so much fun and animated. I'm acting like I had more sugar than the kids and I didn't have any sugar. And I'm running around like, the coordinate plane is like, you know, X and then Y. It's like a plane taking off. and I'm running around the classroom pretending I'm an airplane. And then all of sudden, a parent volunteer.

who was there for picture day just barges into my room. I remember the door was locked because that morning the teacher said to me, they give you keys. They used to never give subs keys. I remember that conversation just that morning about the importance of having keys in the classroom. So my door is locked. Somebody let in this, I guess, strange yet heroic parent volunteer. She's running into my classroom and there's a student under her arm.

and the student is crying out and trembling. I had to call my parents. I had to tell them that I'm safe. And the parent volunteer runs in. What we did not know at the time is that the shooting was probably already over. Okay? It did not, it took law enforcement way too long to let surrounding areas know that there needed to be security. So this must have been closer to 2 30. I think the tragedy ended at 2 27.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, so this parent runs into my room. I have Charlie Brown's Be My Valentine jazz music playing in the background. It is the most gorgeous day. And this parent runs in and she says, you need to get those kids into the corner. There have been gunshots at Douglas. And I thought, so what else is new? There has been moments when I was a student there. I remember there was one time, even in my eighth grade year, where somebody set off an acid bomb in the courtyard.

you

Hmm.

I mean

Nah.

Yeah.

Right.

Sure, sure. And with that experience

and that knowledge, that foreknowledge, sure, even less so.

Yeah.

So I get my students into a corner and I text my parents who are literally right down the street, just said, hey, heard this. And now the family group chat is going on. They're watching the news. They're keeping me engaged with what's happening. All of a sudden, my grandparents from New York City, from the same room I'm sitting in now for today's recording in the Bronx, they call me and I'm like...

This is more than just a local thing of grandma and grandpa trying to get a hold of me in the middle of a work day. And as more people from out of the area started calling me, that's when I realized this might be quote unquote bigger than us. At the same time, that parent volunteer who ran into my room, I wanted for so long to be in touch with her again because she saved us that day. She was fantastic. I had no idea who she was, where she is, but...

I guess there was a way to find out because her husband, her husband was the chief of police. And he was given the key to the school. When that had happened, he was, I guess, patrolling our area. And because he knew his wife was in that classroom that I was in, he would key into us every now and again and just tell us what was going on. And it was not good news. The death toll was climbing. The superintendent said that this has now become one of the worst massacres since Sandy Hook.

And I'm standing in the corner in this abyss for three hours. And it wasn't until I walked outside that room and saw my faculty from Stoneman Douglas, being evacuated into my building. And then I see that there is yellow tape everywhere. The whole street from the school up to my guard gate at my home was under yellow tape. And that's when I realized this...

was not something that was just meant to be this little event that had happened several years ago that we're still mistaken as for. This is definitely bigger than anyone would have anticipated.

how old were your students in your classroom that you were teaching? 12. OK. And the craziness about putting kids in a corner as if that's really going to do anything is always amazing to me, what was that experience like for them? I mean, they must have been terrified. I'm not laughing because I think it's funny. I'm just laughing at the insanity of all of it. But yeah.

12, they were sixth grade.

They were. No, no, yeah. No, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Unfortunately, what I came back to see the year later is that that was no wake up call for the students. I mean, of course, in their defense, I could say this, but it is what it is. Their brains were still developing. They don't fully understand.

⁓ wow.

get it.

suggestion, if you want to call it that, from my quote-unquote first-year mentor to go be in therapy far away from the students, was my response to a student who was in my class 20 miles away from Parkland, yet lost one of her closest friends at the time who she was dancing with. And this student was visibly

and emotionally and physically distraught because of that loss that she encountered. And to me, her mom who worked in the school actually came to me and her mom was not like, she was somebody pretty high up in the school too. Her mom came to me and she says, you were the only person in the school who was in Parkland who knows about Parkland.

And even though admin doesn't like people talking about it, I want you to know that my child has come back to life because she is in your class and she knows that your experiences match hers.

Did you do anything that would particularly be effective as far as writing assignments and things like that? How did you connect to her? Or did you connect to her in any other way? Or was it simply the fact that you had that commonality? Yeah.

Just being present. That was all

I needed to do. Just show presence. And even that for leadership was like a no-no. Like, why would you do that for a student?

So

even leadership, even after the massacre, still didn't seem to get it. That's amazing.

not at all. I'm

chuckling because my seventh grade counterpart, I was the eighth grade teacher, my seventh grade counterpart, who was one of my favorite colleagues in that position, he even came to me and was like, well, I guess you don't have to do mindfulness Monday anymore.

They were, this school, very, flip it on me. I was ahead of my time with the whole social and emotional endeavors that I tried to do because they even said to me when they hired me, they said,

remove your humanity. ⁓

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. You got it. You got it, man. That's for free.

I'm going to write that down. I'm sorry. It's going to be great for my new book.

It's so disheartening to hear that because my perspective is that you immediately go to post massacre what changes are gonna be happening, how much more sensitive to things that the administration is gonna be and then to hear that it really isn't that way or wasn't that way is really, really devastating to hear because.

your students, right, as you said, maybe they were like they were not developed at that point, but other students were and they had to go back to school. How did they possibly muster up the energy and the guts and the and being brave enough to be able to do that? And you teachers, you don't have to be specific in school. And truth be said, you could have been substituting in the school that day. You could have been in it. Right. So.

Yeah.

easily. I declined a

job to come to the sixth grade math class. Yes.

that day.

So was there anything for the teachers? I'm gonna assume no, if the administration was that unaware of how to manage this post the incident. Did teachers come together? Did they look for mutual support with each other? What was the process like after that?

as far as the faculty at Stoneman Douglas went.

they were given immediate support with grief counselors and whatnot. And I actually had to give a shout out here to Paula Reed. Paula Reed is an activist in the aftermath of Columbine. She has also spoken on my podcast and activists like Paula actually came to Parkland and spoke with the faculty and said, from experience, now that you are part of the club that nobody wants to be a part of, these are the things that you'll notice happening as you go forward in your grief journey. I was not there for that. I only know that

through

what I read and from who I heard when I spoke to Paula myself a couple years later. But they did have that initial support. I would even say that they had an outpour of support in terms of the media didn't always get it right. The media was capturing or witnessing grief, grief, grief, grief, grief. But there was also a major factor of unity and even love that came together. I mean, I used to speak with teachers in building five and I would mention my other favorite teachers in building two. And you're like, who's

that. Nobody knew each other in the school of 4,000 students. Nobody knew each other. There were hundreds of faculty members for, did I say 48,000? 4,000. Yeah, yeah. But even still, yeah. The school has 15 buildings at the time it was 13.

Mm-hmm.

$4,000.

You said 4,000. You did. Yeah, I'm just blown away by that many students, right?

we'll say 13 buildings at the time. unless they were in each other, like social studies teachers did not know the science teachers. And that's just how it was. The Spanish teachers did not know the math teachers. Everybody was very separate. But I think after that event had happened, people really started to connect with the whole school. mean, how sad it took a globally recognized massacre for that to happen, but people actually started to get to know each other.

Mm-hmm.

as

far as the middle school went, where all these high schoolers who were present that day came from, which is where I was as their substitute. It was different in terms of what I can tell you is that those teachers were back in the classroom on Thursday, February 15th. There was no...

Really?

The school is open the next day.

Yeah,

I'm thinking the right word. There was no mercy for those students or for those faculty as well. Students didn't show up, but yes, all those teachers were right back in their rooms. I did not show up on that day, but.

By the 15th, they were expected business as usual. Even the principal, who had his daughter enrolled in school at that time, said, he wrote on the school's website, he says, parents, I'm not bringing my child to school tomorrow. You do not have to bring yours, but I will be there and my faculty will have to be there as well because that is what the superintendent had told them.

That's.

My goodness, how disconnected can you be?

So it

was very disconnecting. There was no mercy, a little forgiveness. And I could tell you that, okay, I'll talk to you about what happened in August that year when I was a first year teacher at that school. There was very strange boundaries in terms of just like we were always walking on eggshells. On 9-11 that year.

I wanted, my anticipation was to show a documentary about the resiliency, not the trauma, but the resiliency of my aunt and uncle's survival story from Manhattan, from surviving 9-11. My uncle was a 9-11 survivor. And my aunt created a quote unquote home video, as we call it.

Grief turns into a sense of hope and resilience and that pain transformed into purpose. And we could even say those scars into stars to sound philosophical about it.

I attempted to show that in my class, but it was dysregulating the students so much that at one point of the day I had a coach walk in, she was like a literacy instructor, she's just like, you're making them a little unsettled. Maybe this isn't the right year to talk about things like that. So you really had to be extremely careful with how you pose such things. Even reading The Giver, which talks about opposites of peace being war.

when we looked at those moments in the text and then using the film as well, was also very dysregulating for students. So things that would be very normal to speak about in any other year were that year very dysregulating.

Yeah, that year.

Yeah. And how old were your students were still 12? Right, that was the same.

At that time I

was doing eighth grade at that point, so they were 14.

14, okay. And they had experienced the shooting as well from a distance. Okay.

Exactly. Much like me who

was in the sixth grade classroom that day, they were in seventh grade classrooms that day.

Okay. But

no one really attended to them and their trauma after that to be able to get them in a place where they could then the next year deal with something that you were teaching like this. Okay.

exactly those at

the middle school we definitely felt like we were the second thought.

Yeah, my goodness. mean, no surprise if that's how they felt about the first, the main school and opening it up the next day. That's no surprise.

Yeah. Yeah.

I'll actually make a correction statement. So Stoneman Douglas was closed for two weeks. The middle school was what opened up the next day.

I see, okay, Still, I would think that the community would honor it and just shut down for the rest of the week at least, right? Give those kids a chance.