“Something doesn’t smell quite right in Broward, and the school district is the epicenter,” announces the skinny kid at the microphone. He’s 19-year-old Kenneth Preston, and he is promising the school board of Broward County “It will be made clear: the failures of the school system, and particularly the superintendent, in protecting our schools.” The standing-room-only audience gathered in the school board building’s main hall—where the nine board members and the superintendent preside magisterially beneath the school district’s seal—whoops and applauds until the board president quells them with a note on decorum: “We don’t applaud.”

Nearly two months have passed since Nikolas Cruz shot and killed 14 students and 3 staffers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County, the sixth-largest public school district in the country. The satellite news trucks are gone from the palm-lined drive of the south Florida campus, leaving only the armed officers patrolling the points of entry and the “Stoneman Strong” signs that line the fenced perimeter in memory of the slain. Last month saw the “March for Our Lives,” led by Stoneman students whose eloquence earned them national fame before the school had even reopened. Counter-campaigns followed, led by another student who survived the shooting and a Trump-supporting father whose daughter died by Cruz’s gun. The latter stood beside Florida governor Rick Scott when he declared his Senate bid on April 9.