It was 45 seconds too late, but the teacher had a plan.
A gunman had just barraged her classroom with an AR-15, killing two students and injuring four others before turning to a classroom across the hall. The bullet-riddled walls were crumbling. Ceiling tiles were falling. If the shooter came back to kill more of her students, the teacher decided, she would stand up and shout, “We love you.”
The teacher was Ivy Schamis, whose husband would be waiting at home with a Valentine’s Day dinner; whose son was planning a wedding she couldn’t imagine missing; whose curriculum for this class — History of the Holocaust — had just moments earlier stirred a discussion about hate on campuses.
We love you. These would surely be her final words, Schamis thought. She knew her plan was futile — irrational, even. But with no stop-the-bleed kit, no shield, no help, words were all she had to show the children that an adult had put up a fight.
The moment never came. The gunman doubled back to the class across the hall, but not to Room 1214. At the command of a SWAT team, Schamis climbed over bodies and ran with her surviving students down the blood-smeared hallway, out the doors, and into the blinding light.
What waited for her there, in the days and months and years ahead, would be a whole new role in the lives of the 30 students who had survived. For them, she would be what she couldn’t be for the two who died: a lifeline.
She felt she owed them that. She had been the only adult in the room.
Attending to Her Students
The morning after the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Schamis rose before dawn. Seventeen people had been killed, including Nick Dworet and Helena Ramsay, who had been in her class.
Within a few hours, Schamis was corresponding with her students by text. Today, she adamantly denies that she started the Room 1214 text thread, but everyone else seems to remember it that way. She used it to organize car pools to wakes and funerals, to check in on the wounded and to plan a meet-up at Cold Stone Creamery, just so everyone could be together.
When the school reopened two weeks later, Schamis was there, shuffling between campus buildings with a cart of teaching supplies. The school’s psychological support offerings for students included coloring books and Play-Doh. She found them useless. She arranged instead to have a service dog, Luigi, a golden retriever, join her classes for the rest of the year.
Schamis had known some of the students for only six weeks before the shooting, but she seemed to have a preternatural sense of what each of them needed. Rebecca Bogart, who had been a senior, felt so lost after what she had witnessed that Schamis encouraged her to apply for a scholarship to go abroad to Ecuador. The physical distance finally gave her mental space from the event.
Ally Allen, who had watched the killer approach through a glass door panel, kept waking in the night with tears pouring down her face. When Schamis dropped a picture of a German shepherd puppy in the Room 1214 group chat — a future service dog, in need of a home — Ally felt deep down the dog was meant to be hers. She received Dakota the morning after the anniversary of the shooting: a new beginning.
Students called and texted her with their grief, their panic attacks, their drug use, their suicidal thoughts. What their own parents could not fully understand — the worst moment of their lives — Schamis could.
Leaving Parkland
Schamis committed herself to staying at Marjory Stoneman Douglas until every surviving student from Room 1214 graduated in the spring of 2019.
At the graduation ceremony, Schamis wept: Helena should have received a diploma.
That fall, she took the semester off and then moved to Washington, D.C., forgoing her full pension in search of peace.
Washington was where Schamis began to mourn. She joined a waiting list for therapy. She reached out to Ally Allen, whom she had referred to a breeder for a service dog, realizing she needed one of her own.
Schamis had spent almost her entire career at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. She had loved teaching social studies in part because it allowed her to watch students see themselves anew: As they made sense of current events in the context of history, she witnessed their opinions changing and their prejudices being renounced.
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There was nothing more meaningful to her. But she could not return to another classroom.
So she took a job as an office manager at a small private school, accepting a major pay cut to avoid being in a classroom where she would again be responsible for students’ safety.
When she started, she discovered the office manager station was in the front foyer of the building — in a way, the first line of defense.
‘Always Available’
The students, too, scattered around the country, but the Room 1214 text thread bound them together. Over time, there were updates: Ally Allen, inspired by Schamis, was preparing to become a teacher. Hannah Carbocci was pursing a career in criminal justice and writing her thesis on warning signs in school shooters. Catie Krakow was getting a degree in mental health counseling and shared tips on how the others could care for themselves as another anniversary approached.
I hope everyone is doing as well as they could be, wrote Elena Blanco, who had been assigned to the seat behind Nick.
You guys are forever family, replied Matt Walker, whose desk had been next to Helena’s.
As long as I am breathing, Schamis told them, I will always be available for you.
A Demolition
As the sixth anniversary of the shooting approached last year, Lexi Gendron was struggling. She had tried to go to college, but like many of the others, found herself too preoccupied with classroom seating arrangements to focus. She couldn’t have her back to the door, but facing it meant watching for a killer.
After one class, she dropped out, instead working at a casino and a winery before moving to Texas. Now, she was about to start nursing school in hopes of a career in pediatrics — which meant returning to a classroom once again.
Just spilling my heart out, she wrote on the thread one night.
Schamis was the first to reply. Let me know whatever will make you feel better, she wrote.
When the Parkland school’s 1200 building was set to be demolished, Schamis had reached out to the school board, desperate to return to her classroom one more time. The jury, bereaved parents, journalists and even Vice President Kamala Harris were granted permission to enter, but Schamis was not.
‘The Only Adult in There’
Last summer, Schamis sat on the patio of a Mexican restaurant in Washington, recounting that day in 2018. Her German shepherd, Sayde, sprawled beneath her chair. All these years later, she still seemed uneasy. “That’s what keeps me up at night, thinking I was the only adult in there,” she said.
Jeff sat across from her. He reminded her of the bonds she had forged with her students: the pancake breakfasts; the letters of recommendation; the tattoos that several had gotten — Room 1214 — including one who had it drawn in Schamis’ handwriting.
“But I didn’t save them — I didn’t save them,” she said.
Jeff replied, “How could anybody save somebody from an AR-15?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times
