In the eight years since Alyssa Alhadeff and Alex Schachter were murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, their parents have worked tirelessly to turn their grief into action and to try to keep the tragedy that left 17 people dead from happening again.
Lori Alhadeff took her pain and ran for the Broward School Board, where she has spent years working to make schools safer not only in Florida but across the country. She has pushed for the passage of Alyssa’s Law, which requires a silent alarm system in classrooms that teachers can activate to alert police and fire rescue if there is anything from an active shooter to a medical emergency.
So far, 10 states have passed Alyssa’s Law. Lori Alhadeff was in Washington, D.C. last week, where Alyssa’s Act was introduced, which would create standards for such systems across the country.
“We have passed Alyssa’s law in 10 states, which is panic buttons in schools directly linked to law enforcement, so they can get there faster. Time equals life,” she told CBS News Miami. “And then with Alyssa’s Act at the federal level, we will create standards around panic buttons and digital mapping and have a data Center because we want to try to reduce violence and prevent the next school shooting. Unfortunately, we know that school shootings are continuing to happen. So, this work is so vitally important to get Alyssa’s Act signed into law by President Trump as soon as possible.”
Max Schachter has spent years creating a national school safety dashboard so that parents can know if there have been dangerous or violent incidents at their local schools. He served on a statewide commission after the shooting to investigate school safety.
“And throughout our investigation, we found that schools weren’t reporting incidents, specifically Marjory Stoneman Douglas was shoving everything under the rug,” he explained. “And so they were reporting zeros across the board. And then when I went to look at my other three kids’ schools, all the data was in a massive Excel spreadsheet, which just made it impossible for me to evaluate, compare, and understand. So Safe Schools for Alex, the charity that my wife and I started after the tragedy, we created the first of its kind school safety dashboard because when I sent Alex to school we had no idea that our children were going to school with a violent individual, an individual that had accumulated over 70 disciplinary referrals and law enforcement was at his house over 40 times. And so, parents have a right to know what’s happening in their school. So, we created this user-friendly dashboard for parents to use and to empower them with the knowledge so that they can become advocates and they can make sure that the schools are doing everything they can to reduce violence on campus, so this never happens again.”
