Heavily Jewish Parkland Was Florida’s ‘Safest City’ — Until School Gunman Struck
Michele Roseman was convinced that she had found a safe place to raise her children when she came to Parkland, Florida, in 2000. She was stunned when one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history unfolded in her adopted town.
“I moved so my kids could go to one of the best schools in the area,” said the 62-year-old swimming instructor. Her daughter Hannah, 19, knew eight of the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who were killed on Wednesday.
On Thursday, people in this city of about 23,000 struggled to reconcile their views of Parkland as a tropical paradise with the shooting that instantly made its name synonymous with gun violence.
Just this week, Parkland was named in a national survey as one of the safest cities in the country, and last year another study ranked it as the safest city in Florida. The school system has received the highest grade of “A” for seven years running from the state Department of Education.
“People come here because it’s safe,” said David Steiman, 61. “They send their kids to school here because it’s the safest place in South Florida, and then this happens.”
The affluent suburb in western South Florida borders the vast Everglades wetlands, about 24 miles from Fort Lauderdale and twice as far from Miami. The high school is named for environmentalist and writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who earned fame for her defense of the Everglades.
Simply put, the city is “paradise,” said Bryan Weissman, a chiropractor who moved to Parkland nearly 20 years ago and sent his daughter Jackie to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO