Twenty-five years have passed since that April day that etched sorrow into the hearts of Columbine High School. Two armed students took the lives of 12 of their peers and a cherished teacher and then their own lives. The reverberations of that tragic day have rippled through the years, leaving a sad narrative of killers and victims often repeated in the mainstream media.
But what that narrative misses is Columbine’s story of recovery, resilience and triumph.
It is in the school’s very fabric, where the emphasis is that every individual, from the principal to the first-day freshman, matters.
As Columbine sophomore Madison Price told us, “It’s just the kind of thing that you can feel.”
It’s kind of a soft finding for a newsroom that spent months parsing through stories of grief and perseverance in our interviews with survivors, past and present school officials, teachers, security experts and even media critics.
Our newsroom sought the answer to a simple question: How has the 1999 Columbine shooting changed the school over the years – and everything else?
On one hand, nothing has changed. Gun violence is rampant in the United States. Take, for instance, the stunning tally of deaths and injuries provided by the Atlas of American Gun Violence, tracking incidents across the country down to the neighborhood level. Such an atlas is only necessary because of the almost-daily barrage of headlines chronicling shootings. Yet some are so large and horrific that everyone knows them by name, like Sandy Hook, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas.
The specter of violence is woven into the lives of children in schools at an early age.
And schools across the country have increased security measures in the years since the Columbine shooting, which took the lives of students Cassie Bernall, Steven Curnow, Corey DePooter, Kelly Fleming, Matthew Kechter, Daniel Mauser, Daniel Rohrbough, Rachel Scott, Isaiah Shoels, John Tomlin, Lauren Townsend, and Kyle Velasquez, and teacher William “Dave” Sanders.
The Jefferson County School District, which oversees the high school, points to classroom doors that lock from the inside. There are single-point entry systems at schools that ensure students, staff and visitors pass through controlled checkpoints. Add to that security cameras, once a rarity, metal detectors and scanners.
Much of the changes are meant to ferret out people carrying guns. Yet our reporting did not take us to the raging debates over guns, like whether background checks are enough or if teachers should be armed.
Instead, we explored how chaos among rescuers during the Columbine incident led to improved coordination today, working to bridge gaps to make all schools safer.
And we looked at the media’s role during and after the shooting. One harsh takeaway from University of Colorado Boulder professor Elizabeth Skewes was that news coverage of shootings can desensitize Americans and even be harmful to survivors. Knowing that helps explain the goals of Jefferson County schools at the district’s recent media day for press organizations looking to report on the 25th anniversary of the tragedy.
Reporters who went to that event heard many of the same things we learned in our reporting, which often involved initially-reluctant sources opening up to trust our reporters and editors with their stories. They wanted us, and our readers, to know that the shooting doesn’t define Columbine. Instead, what defines it is a kind of indomitable spirit that emerged and evolved with intentionality since 1999. It plays out for many every April 20, the anniversary of the shooting, in the school’s Day of Service, now in its eighth year.
“We have turned that day into something so positive,” teacher Mandy Cooke told us. “And that is what I am most proud of — is making sure that our current students know how to be better humans in the world, instead of this awful, tragic thing that happened to us.”
And Cooke knows. She was a student at the school in 1999 and is among three survivors we interviewed who returned to the school to help it turn the page of the adversity to a brighter chapter.
We found a community guided by those who became united in shared pain with a fierce determination to heal.
In that regard, no name came up more often than former Principal Frank DeAngelis, who led the school, its staff and generations of students out of the shadows of tragedy.
“People said that Columbine really needed me — I needed them,” he said.
For many, he is a beacon of hope, even in his retirement, as he aids others affected by similar hardships.
Now, as it has been for decades, Columbine is just another high school. People look forward to football games. They’re studying for tests. Students are discovering who they are and who they might be when they become adults.
To Cris Welsh, a student at the time of the shooting who is now a teacher at Columbine, it’s all very ordinary, except for one thing.
“We exist to extend the notion that one can recover,” he said. “That the awful things that happened to us are outside of our control, but how we respond to those awful things is totally within our control.”
Columbine is a symbol of hope, he said, not only to itself but well beyond.
“If you are determined to overcome the things that happen to you, you can do it,” he said.