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Dr. Ilan Alhadeff ’98 moved to the small, sunny community of Parkland, Fla., because it was marketed as “the safest neighborhood with the best public schools.” It was the perfect place for the physician and his wife, Lori, to raise their daughter and two young boys. He was aware of the countless mass shootings that had taken place across the U.S., but he never once thought that something like that could happen in an idyllic place like Parkland.

“It wasn’t even a glimmer of a thought,” Alhadeff says. “We said, ‘This is a safe place, great community, great schools. Sounds good.’”

That image was shattered on Feb. 14, 2018, when a former student walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and killed a total of 17 students and staff members — including the Alhadeffs’ daughter, Alyssa.

For most, it was a tragic news story — the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in U.S. history. But for the Alhadeffs, it was a bitter, daily reality: Alyssa was gone, and their lives were changed irrevocably.

“We live it every day,” he says. “When everyone’s celebrating birthdays, we’re going to the cemetery. When they’re celebrating holidays, we’re just trying to keep our heads up.”

But the Alhadeffs ultimately did more than keep their heads up. In the wake of the tragedy, people all around them were saying “Something has to be done.” They interpreted that as: We have to do something.

“We had a choice: stick our heads under the table and cry all the time, or get up and fight. And so that’s what we did,” Alhadeff says.

Just a few months after the tragedy, the Alhadeffs launched , a national nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting students and teachers at educational institutions. Its mission is to “empower students and staff to help create and maintain a culture of safety and vigilance in a secure school environment.”

“The reality is, it’s not about if it happens, it’s about when it happens next. And that’s the problem,” Alhadeff says. “It’s about what we can do to prevent this from happening. That’s why we created our foundation — because we believe there’s a lot of things we can do.”

The organization’s most important and noteworthy “pillar” is advocating for Alyssa’s Law, legislation that requires schools to install silent panic alarms directly linked to law enforcement, to ensure that emergency personnel can respond to an emergency as quickly as possible.

To date, seven states have passed Alyssa’s Law: New Jersey, New York, Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Utah and Oklahoma, and there are now bills in eight others.

Alhadeff points out a recent situation in which a panic-alert system, like the kind advocated for in Alyssa’s Law, saved lives. When a 14-year-old student at Apalachee High School in Georgia began firing a gun on Sept. 4, 2024, multiple staff members pushed the panic buttons on their ID badges. Two students and two teachers were killed and seven more were injured, but the losses would have been worse had those alerts not been put in place, Alhadeff says.

Passing a law to improve school safety might seem like a no-brainer, but convincing legislators is often an uphill battle. Usually, it’s a case of cost expenditures, or there are too many bills on the docket. The next thing Alhadeff usually hears is “That could never happen here,” which he knows, all too well, is a naive and dangerous assumption.

“The biggest one is how many degrees of separation until you care to try this? How important is it to you as a legislator to make this happen for your community, for your constituency?” he says. “What’s sad is that only when there’s a school shooting do all of them suddenly jump up and say, ‘I want to be part of that. Let’s do it now.’ But why do we have to wait for the next school shooting each time?”

In addition to advocating for Alyssa’s Law, MOSS also works to improve overall school safety. This could involve anything from structural projects — such as specialized fencing, cameras and single-point entry — to safety and learning programs. To date, MOSS has given back more than $500,000 to school-safety initiatives.

The organization also works to create a culture of safety from within schools and has kickstarted high school safety clubs (called MOSS clubs), of which there are now 26 across eight states.

“There’s a tremendous need for knowledge and awareness — both self-awareness as well as public awareness,” Alhadeff says. “And it’s important, because it’s not something you want to talk about. How do you start talking with little kids about school shootings? Who wants to talk about that at the dinner table? It’s something we need to educate on, just like we do with fire safety. We need to figure out how to focus on school safety, and it’s not an easy thing, because it’s traumatizing to some degree and schools are supposed to be a safe place for children.”

Working on MOSS and enacting real change across America hasn’t healed Alhadeff, but he can take solace in knowing that he is saving lives.

“First and foremost, I’m a physician. I’ve saved a lot of lives. But I couldn’t save my daughter,” he says. “But we can save other kids’ lives, and other teachers’ lives, with Alyssa’s Law. If the alert from Alyssa’s Law was there, Alyssa would be here today. So, we’re able to save lives — and that’s what drives us.”