He Saved So Many Lives

Scott Beigel wasn’t a hero because he opened the door to his classroom at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that day. He was a hero because he opened doors every day.

- Steve Wulf

To find Camp Starlight, take Route 17 to Hancock, New York, near where the state’s southern border bends down toward New York City. Cross into Pennsylvania and follow Route 370 for a few miles. Look for the stone pillars that mark the entrance to the camp, which opened in 1947. Drive down a dirt road through a tunnel of trees until you emerge into sunlight and what appears to be the summer camp of dreams.

There is a timeless quality about the place, which is being readied for the arrival of the first group of campers. It must have seemed this idyllic in 1959, when a music counselor named Paul Simon was recording songs as Jerry Landis. Songs like “When You Come Back to School.”

This is also where you would have found Scott Beigel for the past 28 summers. He first came to Starlight as a reluctant camper whose mother, Linda, gave him prepared fill-in-the-bubble notes to send home to Long Island. He returned, year after year, until he became a beloved staff member. Photos on the camp’s Facebook page show his growth over the years—and the constant sense of fun that made him so popular.

For two months a year, Starlight was his home. As for the other 10 months, well, Scott couldn’t quite find the same feeling of stability. That is, until the summer of 2017, when the trail from Starlight led him to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, 1,300 miles away in Parkland, Florida.

There was an opening for a ninth-grade geography teacher, and Jeff Foster sensed that Scott, a University of Miami grad, would be perfect for the position. When Foster is not teaching AP American government at Douglas, he is the athletic director at Camp Starlight. “I thought Scott was a natural fit,” Foster says. “His campers loved him, and they were the same age and basic demographic as the students he would have at Douglas. He was easygoing, but at the same time he could command a room.”