Parkland - Dave Cullen Page 0,16

getting pummeled by attacks alleging that they were pawns of adults, agitators, and the Democratic Party, which must be helping them behind the scenes. Their childhood friends who had gone to school and collaborated with them the past two years hardly qualified, but it was a touchy subject.

It was a big group for a living room, but what a living room. Like most of the other kids, Cam lived in a gated community, lush with palm trees and succulents nestled around a web of inland waterways and a pond with a waterspout. The living room featured a grand piano and walls of windows that seamlessly blended the indoor/outdoor living spaces out to the pool. A tiny little finger of the Everglades stretched right up to the edge of his lawn. Frogs, marsh rabbits, and whitetail deer roamed the area, along with an occasional great egret or alligator. “Parkland was just the most stereotypical white suburban, rich, perfect place,” Alfonso said. Parkland’s median income topped $130,000, double the national average, with the median home price nearly triple, at around $600,000. It had tiny pockets of poverty, just 3.5 percent of its population below the poverty line, and 19 percent of its students eligible for free lunches. The wealth was visible in the big houses and in the small details. The Porta Potties for the spontaneous memorials in Pine Trails Park didn’t smell. They were spotless, odorless, and plentiful, and the basins gleamed. Outside, there were two handwashing stations, double sided, for a total of four sinks, with full soap dispensers and pristine bottles of hand sanitizer too. There were water bottles everywhere, pallets of them, free for the taking.

Parkland is a pastoral four-stoplight community that most of South Florida had never heard of. It hugs the Everglades, fifty miles north of Miami, on the periphery of the metro area. A chain-link fence along the edge of town marks the border of the Everglades preservation area, but that’s a political distinction—technically, scientifically, the town sits atop the Everglades, its homes on a series of tiny peninsulas constructed along its edge.

For several thousand years, Parkland gurgled within the Everglades, which the writer and activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas famously called Florida’s River of Grass. But twentieth-century developers were busily draining the wetlands to “reclaim” new tracts for sugarcane farms and housing divisions, aided by the Army Corps of Engineers. Stoneman Douglas began fighting to preserve the wetlands in the 1920s, when they were Florida’s only fresh water source. But it was her landmark 1947 book that woke the public to a coming crisis, with the Everglades on a trajectory toward extinction—wiping out a vital, complex ecosystem, and threatening the drinking water of the millions of new residents flooding in. The battle raged for decades, but when the dust settled, Stoneman Douglas was hailed as a visionary who averted ecological catastrophe. But she couldn’t stop the creation of Parkland.

Developers created it by dredging up tons of sand and piling it into craggy finger peninsulas, surrounded by deeper canals, until the map looked like a suburb of cul de sacs, with blue waterways in place of the lanes. In 1963, Parkland was incorporated, and cane farms began to rise from the swamp. In the 1980s and 1990s, the farms were carved up and paved over, to create an outdoor wonderland dotted with high-end homes. The town’s original charter demanded 2.5 acres per dwelling, a requirement relaxed later, but that set the tone.

Parkland remains a cozy bedroom community, with 23,000 residents as of the last census, but still just a handful of shops, restaurants, and gas stations, mostly on the perimeter. It has several spacious parks, where coyotes, raccoons, bobcats, and iguanas roam among the scrub oak, Australian pine, and numerous varieties of palm. Pine Trails Park was just expanded the past decade, with baseball, football, and soccer fields; basketball courts; children’s playgrounds; and the outdoor amphitheater for live shows. The town is young and vibrant, with 30 percent of the population too young to vote, and less than 11 percent old enough to retire.

It’s not cheap to live in Parkland, but there are affordable neighborhoods close by. Douglas High draws a big chunk of its student body from Coral Springs, a larger commercial town across the Sawgrass Expressway whose median income is about half that of Parkland. Ethnically, the Coral Springs kids brought MSD into almost perfect alignment with the country: 59 percent non-Hispanic white, 18 percent Latino, 12 percent black, and 7 percent Asian—within a