My family left Venezuela for a safer place. But my years as a student in Florida, very close to a high school in Parkland, were marked by fear.
By Caracas Chronicles – Carlos Rodríguez López
May 31, 2022
The year was 2018. I was in my junior year of high school in Florida and it was Valentine’s Day. Flowers were being sent around campus, students were exchanging gifts and the general mood was relaxed. I was preparing for my exams and I was just waiting for the bell to ring so I could go home. As the clock signaled the end of the school day, some people started murmuring that there were reports of an active shooter in a nearby school.
In my mother’s car, I listened to a man narrating for a local Spanish-speaking radio station, in a somber tone, that there were reports on social media of a school shooting in nearby Parkland. Always very skeptical of Miami radio, I just turned it off, but once I got home I started getting calls from my friends to turn on the news because apparently Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, a school in our same district, which we regularly play football against and with which we share a close relationship with, had an active shooter situation. My mom and I immediately realized that the horrendous nightmare situation we usually see on cable news in some far away city had finally come to the school next door.
When I saw the gruesome videos that were posted on social media, I noticed how most of Stoneman Douglas’ classrooms not only were extremely similar to my school’s but that some students still had their Valentine’s gifts laying around while 5.56mm NATO rounds were razing their classrooms. I started to realize that for most of these kids that day had been a regular Wednesday just like mine, but I got to go home to my mom after the bell rang and many of them were texting their parents and loved ones their final goodbye.
At that moment, the obvious-by-now thought came to my mind: “That could have been me.”
Not only did this atrocity occur in a nearby school, but many of the victims were my age, the school demographics were very similar to mine and even one of the students that died was a Venezuelan.
Put simply, I felt that if certain circumstances were different, I could have been one of the seventeen people who lost their lives by just making the simple decision of going to school. A haunting feeling that still accompanies me today as I continue to watch the list of mass shootings in the United States grow like it happened this week in Uvalde, Texas.
Insecurity in Caracas vs. Uncertainty in My Classroom
As my community looked horrified at what happened to one of our schools, terror started to pressure kids and parents alike on how to react after such tragedy. A great number of students in my school were refusing to attend out of sheer fear, as in their eyes, the possibility of losing their lives in school had been proven to be quite real.
That fear was reinforced when threats were made to my school and others around it, raising the idea of a possible copycat shooting. Emails, calls, and letters from the Broward County School Board and the Superintendent’s Office were sent, reassuring parents of our safety and attempting to give us a sense of security. When classes restarted, many classrooms were almost empty, leaving several teachers no option but to not teach and talk about the tragedy instead.
Seeing students and teachers talk about violence, and uncertainty for their future instead of things like a Science quiz is anything but normal. As for me, the constant discussion of politics, the suspension of classes, and everyone’s concerns about the near future reminded me of the time when a certain person died while I lived in Caracas. For the first time in five years, I worried because I felt my life was in danger. Any stranger could simply go through the school gate with an AR-15 and break pandemonium. The massacre in Parkland only took six minutes to be carried out. I was outraged by our government’s response to that situation, like implementing some “feel good” measures and sending “thoughts and prayers,” as they’ve done so many times.
For the first time in my life, I felt that while my family and I escaped the danger of crime in Caracas by moving to the United States, we had reached a situation where that very violence we were trying to flee might knock on my classroom door one day, and I could do nothing about it except hide in a corner and hope the shooter didn’t see me.
‘Students and Teachers, We’re Under a Code Red’
In response to the Parkland shooting and to the tense situation in schools, the state legislature and the local government approved certain policies to make us “feel” safe but which actually did the contrary. For example, armed police officers started guarding every public school in order to arrest anyone considered a threat. In reality, those armed police officers caused more tension than anything, as they started to arrest more and more students every week for “behavioral reasons”. As a recent report found, many of those arrests were not only unjustified, but we saw an increase in the use of physical restraints on students for minor infractions, thus proving that an increased armed police presence not only failed to make schools safer, but actually made the students feel unsafe.
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Read More: Caracas Chronicles – From Venezuelan violence to American mass shootings
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