“Since Parkland” Memorializes Shooting Victims
In the year following the deaths of 14 students in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fl., last February, 1,200 more American minors have been killed by gun violence. “Since Parkland,” the culmination of over six months’ work by 200 teenage reporters honoring each of these victims, was released online on Feb. 12, two days before the Parkland shooting’s one-year anniversary.
“The purpose of this project is to refrain from treating these victims as mere data points on a gun violence chart. We sought to truly commemorate and honor every child killed,” editor Suan Lee said.
The Trace, an online news outlet focusing on gun-related issues, collaborated with Miami Herald and McClatchy Newspapers to organize the national teen journalism project, consisting of 100-word obituaries for every child victim. Among the high school reporters who contributed were Exeter uppers and Exonian editors Suan Lee and Angele Yang.
According to Senior Project Editor Katina Paron, the main purpose of “Since Parkland” was to highlight the complex, rich identities of young victims. “We wanted to make it clear to a general readership that these young people had lives and families and potential,” Paron said.
Yang agreed, noting that the profiles strove to add depth to the death toll by doing justice to each victim. “We wanted to focus more on what each person was like when they were alive, rather than the effect their death had on their communities,” she said. “That’s what makes this project so unique. There are obituaries online, but we wanted to do more than that and honor each child holistically as a person.”
Lee emphasized the importance of honoring the victims as more than a collective. “The purpose of this project is to refrain from treating these victims as mere data points on a gun violence chart. We sought to truly commemorate and honor every child killed,” she said.
Multiple politicians, activists and news outlets have covered the project since its release. The hashtag #SinceParkland topped Twitter’s trending section when it was first published. The New York Times Opinion section tweeted, “Kudos to the 200+ teen journalists [who] documented the 1,200 American kids that have been killed with guns since Parkland. Check out their work.” Senator Bernie Sanders referred to sinceparkland.org to emphasize that “our children should not have to go to school or walk down the street fearing for their life.” Co-founder of March for Our Lives and a survivor of the Stoneman Douglas High School Shooting David Hogg also retweeted the project.
Senior Jordan Davidson, an advocate for gun legislation reform, felt that the personal narratives of “Since Parkland” were more powerful than the mere numbers and statistics typically used in headlines. “I really liked how ‘Since Parkland’ took each individual story and a picture associated with it and you got to learn more intimate details about a specific situation from a person,” he said. “When you take it down to the human level, I think that really is impactful for people. Not as much the headlines of articles like ‘X’ amount of people died this year, or in this shooting, ‘X’ amount of people died.”
Meanwhile, English Instructor Sue Repko, who witnessed an unintentional shooting of a neighbor when she was a child, expressed that the collection of various narratives effectively represented the scope of the gun violence epidemic. “When you get one story after another, if you’re not inured to the horror of it all, it’s powerful to see all these stories in one place,” she said. “When you put everyone’s story in one place, you go, oh, we have a problem.”
Alumna Auden Barbour ’18, one of the organizers of Exeter’s all-school walkout last year protesting gun violence, appreciated how “Since Parkland” highlighted stories of gun violence beyond the highly-publicized mass shootings. “There’s really horrible gun violence in a lot of communities of color and a lot of low-income communities, which is just not what people think of when they think of gun violence,” she said. “Everyone is paying attention to all these mass shootings and school shootings that are mostly affecting middle-class white people. And I think that it’s important for people to realize that this issue of gun violence is so much bigger and isn’t being acknowledged.”
Repko agreed with Barbour’s sentiment. “No one’s been paying attention to the stories of teens in cities where there’s chronic gun violence as opposed to a mass school shooting,” she said. “It’s really great that there’s a specific outgrowth, another angle out of the Parkland shooting that has broadened the story and opened our eyes to victims whose stories have not been told as prominently.”
Paron added that news outlets often did not cover shootings beyond the statistics, which made the research process for many teenage journalists more challenging. She elaborated on the racial disparities in existing reporting. “The biggest thing you found when they were researching was what number victim they were of a homicide in that town,” she said. “The teen journalists thought, why does this white kid have all this information about him online but this black girl doesn’t? Why is her story not being told if his is? And they awakened in how the media can play a role in racism.”
For Davidson, much of the project’s impact stemmed from the fact that each story was written about a teenager, by a teenager. He recalled that, throughout history, many social justice movements have been spearheaded by the youth. “The fact that it’s from young people’s perspectives [is important]. It’s not from some high-up columnist or prevalent news organization. It’s kids doing their own research,” he said. “I find comfort in that this is also motivated by young people, because I think young people tend to have more passion.”
Paron related that some of the teenage journalists felt particularly connected to “Since Parkland” because they themselves resided in areas plagued by gun violence. “Having kids from the areas that were most affected by gun violence work on the project was huge because it really personalized it for the writers themselves,” she said. “But at some point, the young writers cared about the kids dying on the other side of the country as much as they cared about the kids that were dying in their backyards.”
Although the bonds between the young journalists and victims made the project unique, they also created distinct challenges. Paron shared her concerns about the emotional toll this project placed on teenage reporters. “Asking young people to write about their dead peers was really hard,” Paron said. “It was hardest to tell them, ‘Okay, I know this is really hard to do, but do this for the sake of the victim and the victim’s family.’”
Yang expressed that, at times, researching and telling the stories of these victims was taxing. “Writing the portraits was a very grueling process—sometimes I found myself crying. When you look at these people and start to make the connections and build their narratives, it’s almost as if you are getting to know them in person as you learn what their passions were, their little quirks, how much they impacted their family and the kind of effect they had on people in their lives,” she said.
The process of getting to know each child victim proved to be painful for Lee, though the project only consisted of brief, 100-word obituaries. “The name really comes alive,” she said. “When you move past the numbers, the statistics and just focus on one individual, you realize that gun violence does impact people in a very personal, very deep way, and it becomes an entirely different matter.”
Trace editors offered the student reporters wellness check-ins and opportunities for reflection throughout the entire process. “We had a professional journalist, who has been working on these topics for a very long time, talk about her own experiences as a way to provide some insight for the teens about what’s a good way to separate what you do in your work life to what you can do in your private life,” Paron explained. “You need those boundaries, especially when you’re writing about these issues that are so complicated.”
Nonetheless, students involved in the project felt that these challenges were an inevitable and ultimately rewarding part of the process. Yang was most touched by the responses from residents of Parkland and expressed hopes that the traction would lead to concrete actions. “What was most important about the responses we received is how much it helped those people in Parkland,” she said. “My hope is that the attention it received won’t stop on just that day the project was published, that it will keep continuing and people will actually change something.”
Lee, meanwhile, hopes that readers will take time to process the lives of the victims and truly understand what has been lost. “The purpose of our project wasn’t to promote some kind of political or social agenda—it really was all about the children we were commemorating,” she said.
“If somebody reads an obituary that I wrote, feels all those emotions and takes that moment to reflect just as I did while I was writing that piece, I will know that all the work we put in this year was very, very worthwhile.”