When bad people do bad things at schools we never hear about what the students have to deal with when they go back to school.
School Is Important
“My school got bombed multiple times in Bosnia while I was in 2nd grade. We had multiple deaths, including my classmates. School and community fix what could be fixed, change classes around because we didn’t have enough room. Life went on. Education is important. My parents gave me an option not to go school but I went. I valued school as it was only positive thing I had, yet I messed up when I moved to US and ruined my grades in high school. Even though I’m doing good in life now I regret it.” Source
Jeez
“A Mexican girl got shot in the leg by a rival gang at lunch time at my high school. We didn’t even go home, only on lock-down for about 45 min. They hosed off the concrete before second lunch started and we continued on about our day.” Source
That girl from Columbine
“Columbine. 1999. Freshman. I went back into the school once after, to collect my belongs. Noped out of state. Spent the summer with my grandparents in Florida before moving to Texas and then to Oklahoma where I graduated. I had 3 more years of high school. Everywhere I went, people seemed to magically know about my past and it became a badge like a scarlet letter. I was forever ‘That girl from Columbine’.” Source
Eerily quiet
“Shooting at my school in 2013. It’s was eerily quiet. It happened right before winter break, so they cancelled school for the rest of the semester. When we got back, there were therapists and councilors everywhere. The first day back was more of a relaxed day where you could just spend the day talking to people, there were no real class activities. It was actually nice to be able to interact with the other students in a non-school environment. All midterms became optional, and would not dock your grade if you chose to take them.” Source
Oh my
“We were still in class when a kid accidentally shot and killed the little boy in front of him while the chorus class watched a Disney movie. The school was put on lockdown for the afternoon while the victim was moved and, I assume, people checked to make sure it was an isolated (and accidental) incident.
It was all very, very sad. IIRC the boys were friends. His funeral was the first dead body I ever saw and he looked like he was sleeping, and he was so teeny tiny. I was in 8th grade when this happened, and it was over 20 years ago so my details are fuzzy. Check my history, I have mentioned it before and managed to find a link. The shooter didn’t do it on purpose. Both boys were seventh graders. I know guns don’t just go bang in the night but whenever happened wasn’t intentional. It was utterly heartbreaking.” Source
Sandy Hook
“Live about 10 minutes from Sandy Hook, our teacher had to tell us not to tell any of the younger kids what had happened or he could lose his job, we were silent and had the principal come in and comfort us before we all went home and saw the news. I might as well elaborate. when we went back to school post-sandy hook, the teacher had us draw little post cards that said ‘because of 27’ and ‘sandy hook strong’ it was a shock in our county what had happened and we had all sent our prayers to the school. most of the day was spent in silence and with teachers starting off classes with ‘because of the current events..'” Source
Depression
“When I was in high school a well-liked kid shot himself in the head while everyone was in class, with the exception of one other kid who witnessed it.
It was super sad, everyone got sent home early. People were crying and yelling at the news cameras trying to film. Our school gave students the option of counseling and there was a lot of hugs and tears in the hallways for a while. I wasn’t super close with him. I was going through my own depression issues/suicidal thoughts at that time. To witness the shock and sadness in everyone around me, not to mention the permanence of his absence and the effect he had on the person who witnessed his death (he didn’t handle it well); it really made me try harder to pull myself away from those thoughts.” Source
Hopping Fences
“Had a school shooting in my home town in 2014, thankfully I had graduated the year before but my SO’s little brother and my best friend’s little sister were there and dealt with it in totally opposite ways. My SO’s brother wasn’t in the cafeteria when it happened so he didn’t really have any trauma since he was hiding in a classroom on the opposite side of the school. Didn’t see anything, didn’t see a need to go to the grief counselors, and went back to school with almost no issues. My best friend’s sister on the other hand was in the cafeteria when it happened and she’s still having a lot of problems. The school had a fire alarm drill not too long after it happened and she and some other kids freaked out and run out of the building and tried to hop some fences into the neighbors’ yards. Any loud noise and she has a panic attack. The smoke detector went off while they were cooking at home and she ran out in the backyard and it took them over an hour to come in and calm down. She tried to transfer out of the school the year it happened but wasn’t able to. She has severe anxiety and it’s hard watching her get ready to go back to the same school where all of this went down.” Source
Miss You Zack
“This makes me think of something that happened when I was in high school. In my sophomore year, a well liked soccer player committed suicide. Obviously everyone was very upset. Assembly for him, t-shirts made, memorial on his locker, the whole nine yards. I didn’t know him, but it was understandably a sad time. Just about a month later, one of my best friends, Zack, was in a horrible car accident on his way home from school. He’d had his license for less than 6 months. He drove home and was turning from the county highway into his driveway, and was struck by a semi pulling a load of lumber to the nearby paper mill. The semi didn’t stop, and Zack’s car was pushed into the ditch. November in Wisconsin, it was already getting dark.
It wasn’t until hours later, when his parents let his dog out to go potty and she ran down the long driveway and led his parents to his car, that he was found. He spent a week in the hospital in a coma, never woke up, and finally died. Zack, myself and our few other friends were not popular. In our small town high school, we were the weird kids. The gay kids, the kids with bad home lives. The kids with no money. We were beat up, bullied and picked on and treated terribly by our peers while the faculty stood by and insisted ‘they would talk to those bullies!’ So after Zack died, there was no announcement at school at any point. No assembly. Three of us put a memorial on his locker. Bullies tore it off. Three days after his death, during 2nd hr announcements, they called Zack down to the office. Even though they knew that his funeral was that day. No one cared about Zack, no one cared about his friends who were suffering from his loss. I just wanted to share this, it’s appalling to me still, all these years later. We miss you Zack.” Source
New School
“I went to Columbine and was a sophomore during the shooting. We went to our rival school (Chatfield) to finish the year. We had classes, but a lot of them didn’t really do anything. Math was the only class that really tried to get back to normal. We also had tons of assemblies when random celebrities would show up. The following year we returned to Columbine, I remember a lot of parents built a human wall around the school to keep reporters out. Things returned to normal fairly quickly the next year. It was always weird with the school being remodeled though. Area where library used to be was gone.
Getting your stuff back was a huge problem though. They kept our cars and other belongings for several months. This created a lot of issues as most high school students don’t have multiple cars to get to school. Also, a lot of us left our backpacks when we finally got out of the school. I always had my wallet in there, so I didn’t have any credit cards, ids, etc. Also, the sprinklers came on after so when I did finally get my stuff back is was moldy and mostly ruined. I don’t mean for this to sound whiny that I lost some belongings while others were paralyzed or even dead. Just something I never would have thought about had it not happened.”Source
Increased Security
“NIU shooting in 2008 – Nothing was really different except that Cole hall was closed off and there were a bunch of hired security guards patrolling campus along with the university and city police.” Source
Personal Connection
“My sister was in class of 2002 at Columbine. She was there. My two brothers should have been there that day but were ditching school to get high since it was 4/20. I was at the elementary school across the street, Leawood Elementary. After finishing up the school year at Chatfield (another local high school) the students all went back the next year. My sister said it was rough going back with all the memories of that day and loss of a few friends. However, the community came together so much during that time that everyone really helped each other out. It was a big part of her healing process I know. It’s weird to this day when people find out where any of us went to high school. The questions pour out quicker than imaginable. Most can be answered pretty easily since it has been over 17 years. At an out of state college, however, things got a little weird. Not from people asking questions, but from a 100 (freshman) level psychology class ‘teaching’ me about Columbine. The professors ‘facts’ were pretty wrong. When I got up to leave he questioned me and I told him he was wrong. He went on a rant on how I had a case of the freshman know-it-alls until I told him that I was the 4th kid in my family to go there and he was not fact checking his sources. I didn’t say much in class after that.” Source
Different World In Oakland
“This probably isn’t what you intended (I’m assuming you’re asking about mass shootings like you see on the news), but f**k it, there were a lot of school shootings in my life. Let me explain: I grew up in Oakland and went to public schools. Shootings were a fact of life. We would usually spend the next week running around all giddy, checking out the bullet holes, guessing what kind of gun it was, and finding out which gang did it and who (if anyone) was going to get shot in revenge. It was like gossip time for us kids. I should note that the vast majority of these shootings were some teenager trying to prove to gang members how ‘tough’ he was. They’d just spray an Uzi off in the air and almost never hit anyone because they weren’t actually trying to be killers, just to look like killers. I can think of maybe three kids I went to school with who actually got shot. Only one died. That being said, there were many other shootings around the schools which were far more fatal, but also not technically school shootings: Some hooker got shot in the parking lot one night, taco bell across the street got held up and the robber shot the clerk, two kids walking home from school got shot for their Jordans. Again, this was all normal stuff to us. I didn’t hang out with the gangsters so I didn’t ever really feel like I was in danger (not even after one drive-by shot at someone who was standing behind me).” Source
