Max Schachter

Max Schachter is the father of Alex Schachter who was murdered in English class during the Parkland massacre. Now he devotes his life to making schools safe.

[Max Schachter @maxschachter]

Just went to ⁦@MSDHighSchool⁩ to retrieve Alex’s book bag from the day he was murdered in Parkland (in this box). They told me the BIOHAZARD sticker means it has Alex’s blood on it & could have bullet holes. I’m afraid I’m not strong enough to open the box. This is horrible

[Max Schachter @maxschachter]

@EYakoby

[Max Schachter @maxschachter]

@ADL https://t.co/Jfe0J7n3ZP

[Max Schachter @maxschachter]

@ADL launched something this week that EVERY PARENT and PRINCIPAL should see.

Their Center on Extremism mapped 51 attacks and plots tied to one online community since 2024. Since January 2025 they flagged 8 people to law enforcement. All 8 were arrested.

At the center of it is a subculture built on fascination with mass killers. ADL describes attacks designed from the start so the footage gets shared, celebrated and copied.

I have been making a version of this argument since 2018. The celebrity we hand these people is part of the machinery.

The hub has a field guide that decodes the terms and symbols these communities use. Most adults look at a kid's screen and see nothing. That is the gap.

Some of it is hard to look at. ADL says so up front. Look anyway.

Thank you @ADL! Link in the first comment.

[Max Schachter @maxschachter]

@RANDCorporation asked teachers across the country to name the biggest safety concern at their school. They asked three years in a row.

About half said bullying and cyberbullying, every single year. Only 5 to 6 percent said an active shooter.

I spend a lot of my time on the rarest, worst day a school can have. So you might expect me to argue with that number. I don't. Teachers are right, and the Secret Service backs them up.

When the @SecretService studied 41 attacks on K-12 schools, they found that 80 percent of the attackers had been bullied by their classmates. It was often seen by other people. For more than half, it went on for weeks, months or years. In some cases, school officials knew about it and either did nothing or made it worse.

I want to be careful here, because this matters. The overwhelming majority of kids who are bullied never hurt anyone. Being bullied does not make a child dangerous. It makes a child hurt.

But it does mean the thing teachers worry about most, every day, sits upstream of the thing everyone else fears most. Treating bullying seriously is prevention work. Kids who are hurting deserve help whether or not they ever become a threat.

One question for your school this week. When a student reports bullying, what happens next? Does anyone follow up? And does it ever reach the people who can see the bigger picture?

For Alex. And for all of them.

[Max Schachter @maxschachter]

@PBCountySheriff 💔

[Open Source Intel @Osint613]

Israeli Border Police in Judea and Samaria, working with the unit for combating crime, uncovered a tunnel under excavation. The shaft had already reached a depth of at least 25 meters. A sniper rifle, an M16, ammunition and fertilizer used to build explosive charges were seized at the site.

[Max Schachter @maxschachter]

A 12 year old in Florida was arrested this month and charged with felonies over a social media post.

He is one of dozens. A viral trend pairing eerie images of a children's book character with threats against schools has led to arrests in at least five states. Four girls between 13 and 15 in Louisiana. Kentucky districts canceled classes. The FBI is warning parents by name.

Most kids posting it think it is a joke. It does not matter. In Florida, a written threat to kill or hurt someone is a felony whether you meant it or not.

Parents, tonight ask your kids if they have seen the Cat in the Hat trend. Do not lecture. Ask what they know. Then tell them plainly that a post that takes ten seconds can follow them for years.

If they see one, tell an adult. Do NOT repost it.

[Max Schachter @maxschachter]

2025 had the fewest school shootings in 5 years.
By early September, 2026 had already passed it. 19 shootings. 12 killed.
The count goes up when prevention fails. Nobody counts the days it works.

Read full story here: https://t.co/8mJrTwJISU

[Max Schachter @maxschachter]

@Mahogany_Mama @yashar

[Max Schachter @maxschachter]

@yashar @MikeyKinahan

[Roy K. Altman @RoyKAltman]

Israel’s doing the very opposite of genocide.

Israel does everything in its power to move civilians out of harm’s way in order to preserve and protect them.

I'll give you an example. Israel, at the beginning of the war, would warn civilians to get out of harm’s way. They would say, “here are the areas that we’re going to attack tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that you need to leave so that we can fight Hamas who’s hiding in those places.”

Already that’s the very opposite of genocide. Genocide requires an army to be pushing civilians into the killing zone. Here’s an army warning civilians to get out of the killing zone.

But here’s the thing, over time Israel learned that Hamas was not going to tolerate that. Hamas, we know from their private correspondence, they want more civilians to die, not less.

They want to convince the world that Israel is bad, so that Israel can be easily destroyed. So they start killing civilians who are fleeing the war zone. They start at gunpoint, forcing civilians to go back into the places that Israel is going to attack in order to increase the amount of civilian casualties.

Israel learns about this and what does Israel do? Israel starts building these humanitarian corridors—these are unheard of in warfare. They started at 4 hours a day, 8 hours a day. Ultimately there were 16, sometimes 20 hours a day, where Israel would man these highways that they would create.

They would put their own soldiers, Israeli sons and daughters on the front lines of these highways to sit there and guard Palestinian civilians from other Palestinians as they fled the war zone to make sure that Hamas couldn't kill them as they fled.

Again, that’s doubly the opposite of genocide and the numbers bear this out.

In fact, every month since the war went on, you see the ratio of militants-to-civilians killed get lower and lower and lower so that ultimately, at the end of the war, when they go into Rafah—where Israel moved 1.2 million civilians out of harm’s way in order to destroy the final stronghold of Hamas in southern Gaza—you see the lowest civilian casualties of the war, at the end of the war.

Again, it’s the very opposite of a genocide.

[Max Schachter @maxschachter]

What does Code Purple mean at your child's school?

If you don't know, most parents don't. The harder question is whether the substitute, the cafeteria worker, and the visitor at the front desk know.
At my son's school, the first Code Red came 3 minutes and 16 seconds after the first shots, and when the fire alarm sounded, some students evacuated while others sheltered. I sat on the commission that documented it.

Plain words save time. Swipe through, then ask your school the questions on slide 6.

For Alex. And for all of them.

[Max Schachter @maxschachter]

@sarahadams “What appears to be a firearm”… lmao

[Max Schachter @maxschachter]

@meta agreed last month to pay up to $18 billion to settle claims from 29 states that it designed its platforms to addict children. California alone gets at least $1.5 billion, paid over ten years.
If you run a school district, read this carefully. That money goes to the states. Not to you.

It is earmarked for youth online safety work. Mental health programs. After school activities. Digital literacy counselors. All of that happens in schools. Almost none of it routes to schools automatically.

I have watched this before. The tobacco settlement in 1998 was supposed to fund prevention, and within a few years most states were spending it on other things. Not corruption. A budget hole, unrestricted money, and nobody with standing in the room asking where it went.

Find out who in your state decides how these funds get allocated. Usually the attorney general's office. Ask what the process is and when it opens. Get your name on the list before there is a list.
Ask for counselors. Threat assessment training. The things hardest to fund and easiest to cut.

The money is coming. Whether any reaches a school depends on who shows up.

[Max Schachter @maxschachter]

The @FBI confirmed yesterday that student and staff data was stolen in the cyberattack on Springfield Public Schools in Massachusetts.

Every story is leading with the Social Security numbers. I want to point at a different paragraph.

The attack cut the district off from student medical records. Officials said what worried them most was that this could stop nurses reaching what they need to dispense medications and handle allergies. So they closed all 66 schools, for 27,000 students, for a week.

A superintendent looked at a network problem and concluded he could not safely open the doors. Not because the building was unsafe. Because the information that keeps children alive inside it had been taken away.

That is not an IT incident. That is a school safety incident, and Springfield treated it as one. I think they were right.

Full story in the comments.

For Alex. And for all of them.

[Max Schachter @maxschachter]

Last Thursday California signed a law named after a sixteen year old.

Adam Raine died in 2025. His family says he had been talking to a chatbot before his death, and the authors of the bill say it encouraged him toward it. His parents sued the company, then spent a year making sure it could not happen to somebody else's child.

Adam's Law requires crisis protocols in chatbots used by children, real parental controls, and notification if a child turns safety settings off. First in the country to require independent child safety audits.

His mother stood next to the legislators at the signing.

To the Raine family, as one father to another. I know what it takes to talk about your dead child in front of strangers, and I know the part nobody tells you. Passing the law does not bring them back, and you do it anyway.

@lorialhadeff did it for Alyssa. We did it for Alex and the sixteen others. The Raines have done it for Adam.

None of us wanted to become experts in anything.

For Alex. And for all of them.

If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24/7.

[Max Schachter @maxschachter]

17 people have been killed at high school football games since 2018. The same number we lost at Parkland, spread thin across eight seasons so nobody counted it as one thing.

Everything a district buys for safety assumes a building with a perimeter. Then Friday night comes. The entry point is a folding table somebody carried out at five. The perimeter is a fence with three gates propped open. Four thousand people in the dark.

Every system we bought is two hundred yards away, watching an empty corridor.

The fix is not another scanner. It is three questions you can ask before Friday, and they cost nothing.

I want those bleachers full. I want kids to have Friday nights. I would give anything to complain about the parking one more time.

Read full story here: https://t.co/UiASIZca7o

For Alex. And for all of them @alexsafeschools

[Max Schachter @maxschachter]

In July I wrote about a Georgia father awaiting sentencing for his son's school shooting. He got 15 years.
He is now the first parent in this country convicted of murder for what their child did. Not manslaughter. Murder. That is a different line, and prosecutors elsewhere will be reading the file.
The judge said it plainly. The warning lights were flashing brighter and brighter, and he did not get his son help, and he did not remove his access to the guns.
Mason Schermerhorn was 14. Christian Angulo was 14. Richard Aspinwall and Cristina Irimie were teachers. Last Friday was two years.
In July I listed the chances missed in that house and said every one of them was a chance. A court has now agreed and put a number on it.
A 15 year sentence is not prevention. It is what is left when prevention has already failed and four people are dead.
But it answers a question that has hung over this work for years. When an adult sees a child in crisis with access to a firearm and does nothing, is that a private failure or a public one?
Georgia just said public.