The heroic acts of teachers are surfacing, in what was the deadliest US school shooting since 2012, at a Florida high school on Thursday, resulting in the deaths of 17 people.
Staff from Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have been praised for selflessly protecting their students from the crazed teenage shooter.
Former student Nicholas Cruz, 19, confessed to carrying out the attack at the high school in Parkland, and is facing 17 counts of murder charges.
Tributes are being paid to multiple teachers who students say, had it not been for their bravery, many more could have lost their lives.
One teacher was killed while attempting to barricade a classroom door, BBC reports.
Geography teacher Scott Beigel had opened his classroom to shelter students and was trying to lock the door when he was shot dead.
Another hero was security guard and assistant American football coach Aaron Feis who acted as a sheild to students from a spary of bullets.
The school's janitor also played a part in protecting students from walking into the path of the shooter.
Student David Hogg, 17, told BBC after the fire alarm had ushered him from his environmental science class into a "tsunami" of students in the corridor, "a very heroic janitor" stopped them.
"He said, 'Don't go that way - he [the shooter] is over there'."
Ashley Kurth, another teacher, said she "just started pulling kids in that were running past", and got all of them back into a storage area and in her office.
"I think we had like 65 in my room," Ms Kurth told the Daily Beast website.
Melissa Falkowski managed to pull 19 students into a closet with her, where they stayed for half an hour until police arrived, reports CNN.
Athletic director and wrestling coach Chris Hixon, described as a father figure to students, was amoung those 17 shot dead.
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