Giving Compass' Take:

• Ashley Fetters at The Atlantic reviews Dave Cullen’s new book about the 2018 school shooting massacre in Parkland, Florida where he writes upon the turmoils and challenges coming back to the classroom.

• How might this book inspire others to advance more reforms in communities affected by such violence?

• Here's an article on how a Columbine survivor strives to help other shooting survivors.

The ways in which schools and students think about the possibility of mass violence on campus changed a lot between the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School and the 2018 one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Dave Cullen’s last book, 2009’s acclaimed nonfiction work Columbine, chronicled the public and private lives of high-school students who survived the 1999 Columbine massacre as they grappled with the question of why this unthinkable horror had happened at their school. Cullen’s newest book, Parkland—about the activism of the survivors of the February 14, 2018, attack that killed 17 students in Parkland, Florida—follows a group of students determined to not let the world forget that of course this horror had happened at their school. Why wouldn’t it have? It was happening everywhere else.

These students, unlike those who survived the tragedy at Columbine, grew up under the ever-looming threat of school gun violence, and then it materialized. Still, the Parkland kids’ back-to-school experience looked a lot like the Columbine kids’. They missed their dead classmates; they feared more violence in their classrooms; they had to fight through post-traumatic–stress symptoms to get to calculus on time.

Read the full article on what it's like to go back to school after a shooting by Ashley Fetters at The Atlantic