I was in the airport on Feb. 14, preparing to fly to New Orleans when my editor called and told me to get on a plane bound for Miami instead.

A gunman had burst into a high school in Parkland, Fla. We wouldn’t know the number of victims until later, but early reports were enough to convince us that this place we had never heard of—once deemed “the safest city in America”—would soon be central to another round of debates about how to protect students from a mass shooting at school—that rare, yet worst-case scenario.

Education Week doesn’t have the resources to send a reporter to cover every incident of school violence, but we knew we needed to be in Florida. Soon, every detail of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School—from the behavior and social media activity of the gunman to its unusual timing close to school dismissal—would become a lens used to examine the safety practices of all schools.

When local officials chided packs of media who descended on the city, I understood. For many in Parkland, our collective presence was an early tangible sign of their city’s fresh trauma.

See Also: The School Shootings of 2018: What’s Behind the Numbers
But I am also mindful of communities that never see a single national reporter after violent incidents in their schools. They are spared the media intrusion, but does the lack of coverage make them feel like their losses are less profound? That the extraordinarily awful moments that pierce their lives are just too ordinary for the rest of us to remark upon?

Source: The Heartbreaking Work of Tracking School Shootings – Education Week