Lea Michele is helping Parkland students with their production of Spring Awakening, and our HEARTS

The brave students from Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, have been through a lot these past few months. After losing 17 of their classmates and teachers to gun violence in a school shooting, they rose up, linked arms with other gun violence survivors, and helped bolster the nation to stand together against gun violence. Because of the change these kids have worked to bring about, it’s not surprising to hear that some pretty big names are giving back to the Parkland teens. Lea Michele might be just about to launch her first tour with former Glee co-star Darren Criss, but that didn’t stop her from showing some love to the Stoneman Douglas High School theater department.

In fact, Michele and the entire original cast of the Broadway smash musical, Spring Awakening, decided that they would lend their talents to supporting the Stoneman Douglas’ theater kids. As The Hollywood Reporter states, the students will be putting on the bold musical for their spring show, so Michele and her Spring Awakening castmates — including Jonathan Groff and Skylar Astin — worked with the teens to give them tips, cheer them on, and generally bask in the shared love of musical theater with these amazing young actors.

Spring Awakening is a very bold, coming-of-age rock musical based on a play with the same name written in 1906 in which Lea Michele played the female lead. The musical discusses topics like sexuality and the inner turmoil that a group of highly sheltered and repressed teenagers go through as they become more aware of their bodies and their own sexuality. It’s fitting for these teens to have taken on such a brave show about growing up and moving beyond the restrictions of those who came before, and we love that the actors who made the show memorable for modern audiences were there to cheer these teens on.

Lea Michele posted a photo of the Stoneman Douglas students alongside of her original Spring Awakening classmates, it just gives us all sorts of warm, happy feelings.

We’re so proud of how brave and strong these Parkland teens have been, and we love to see the support being shown for them by people around the world and even celebs. While getting the original cast of a hit musical that first hit Broadway in 2006 in the same room was probably a bit of a job with so many busy actors, we’re glad they were able to come together to honor the Parkland students in such a cool way. Though this year started out in one of the most horrific ways possible, we’re happy to see the year closing out on a more hopeful note.