PARKLAND, Fla. – At the Schachter family home, Alex remains close at family dinners with his picture resting near the dining table.
“It’s horrible – every day I miss Alex,” his father, Max Schachter, said.
In 2018, Alex was 14 and played trombone with the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School marching band.
But that Valentine’s Day, he would be fatally shot in his classroom.
Alex was one of 17 MSD students and staff members the Parkland shooter murdered that day.
“No child should be afraid going to school, that they are not going to come home again,” Max Schachter said.
Max Schachter has since channeled his anguish into advocacy, becoming a member of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission.
“One of the issues during the shooting was that Coral Springs and BSO didn’t have each other on their radio channels,” he said. “That is a source of my frustration. We are five years since the shooting, and we still don’t have the communications issues fixed.”
Max Schachter also launched Safe Schools for Alex.
“When I travel the country, there is still a lot of complacency -- people don’t think it is going to happen in their community,” he said.
The organization has a mission to harness and educate on best practices in school safety.
“These individuals who commit mass violence, whether it is in a school, in a church or a synagogue, do not just snap overnight -- they exhibit concerning behavior over time, so we need a ‘See Something, Say Something’ app at a state level in every state,” he said. “There are states that still don’t have that. We didn’t have it after Parkland. We do now.”
With a focus on prevention, Max Schachter is an advocate for having a school resource officer at every school site and behavioral threat assessment teams – what he calls a coordination of care.
“The Secret Service uses threat assessments to protect the president,” he said. “The Capitol Police uses threat assessment teams to protect members of Congress. We have them in our schools now to prevent acts of targeted violence and mass shootings.”
Mo Canady is the executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers.
They have launched the training curriculum “Project Unite” -- a multi-disciplinary school safety approach that involves bystander reporting, behavioral health awareness and information sharing.
“Mental health, school counselors, school administration, SRO -- to be around a table together,” Canady said. “We are leaning toward avoiding school violence, and now we have the opportunity through intelligence gained through those relationships to stop an act of violence before it occurs.”
“It is heartbreaking every time I hear about another mass shooting in the United States,” Max Schachter said. “We try to move forward every day, be there for our other kids, and to have a positive impact and prevent this from happening again -- that is my mission in life.”
RELATED LINKS:
Are Broward schools safer since the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas?
SB-7026-Public Safety at Florida Schools
Governor Ron DeSantis Signs HB 1421, Improving School Safety in Florida
Stand with Parkland Partners with SaferWatch Mobile App to Protect Schools
FLDOE: Model Behavioral Threat Assessment Policies and Best Practices for K‐12 Schools
After Parkland, Miami-Dade budget allocates more security for schools