For some students, going back to class at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, is like being forced to repeatedly board a downed airplane.

"It’s just really hard to think about," David Hogg, a senior who has become one of the more outspoken survivors, told NBC News on Tuesday. "Imagine getting in a plane crash and having to get back on the same plane again and again and again and being expected to learn and act like nothing’s wrong."

On Wednesday, the school will resume classes with a half-day schedule as Broward County attempts to return to normal. Hogg says he feels sick heading back to class knowing the only change at his school since gunfire rattled the South Florida community on Valentine's Day will be the 17 people who won't be there when he returns.

“It’s a disgusting idea to think about,” Hogg, 17, said of the lack of legislative action on school safety and gun control. “Literally nothing’s changed except that 17 people are dead.”

Students walk to class at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Wednesday. Terry Renna / AP

Stoneman Douglas students are now joining the growing ranks of American schoolchildren who have had to learn how to cope with haunting memories after their campuses became the site of a national tragedy.

When it happened at Colorado's Columbine High School in 1999, Austin Eubanks, now 36, struggled to return to any semblance of the normal life he knew before the shooting.

Related: Parkland shooting victim Maddy Wilford speaks out following hospital release

While inside Columbine’s library, Eubanks, who was 17 years old at the time, was shot in the hand and knee — and his best friend was killed right next to him.

Eubanks said he later tried to return to the Columbine campus in his senior year but painful reminders of the massacre just months earlier surrounded him.

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“My senior year I tried to go back, and I had just lost a best friend. I had been one of the students who was injured, and not only that, at the time they had not done the remodel on Columbine yet. All they did is take plywood and they made a wall where there used to be the entrance to the library,” Eubanks said.

Austin Eubanks is one of the survivors of the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado. Danielle Zimmerer

Every time he passed the plywood, he was reminded that it masked “where, at the time, the worst school shooting in U.S. history occurred,” he said.

Eubanks said he numbed himself from the pain of Columbine by taking drugs, which led to a years-long addiction he has since overcome. As someone who has first-hand experience overcoming the trauma of school shootings, he urged the students of Stoneman Douglas to work through their pain rather than run from it.

Related: Florida officer Scot Peterson defends response to Parkland shooting

“Speak up about it,” Eubanks said. “That’s the most important part, because what happened for me is it was difficult, I didn’t want to do it so I detached. I detached from community. I detached from connection and I didn’t go through the healing that I know a lot of the student body did in the senior year that I missed.”

Eubanks has since become the chief operating officer of Foundry Treatment Center in Colorado, which deals with trauma and addiction. As the students of Stoneman Douglas return to campus, he says it’s important they do not disassociate from the events that occurred just two weeks ago.

Dr. Daniel S. Schechter, director of stress, trauma, and resilience in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at New York University Langone Health, agreed.