It sits about five miles east of the Rocky Mountain Front, on what used to be the edge of the high plains. Well removed from the bustle of Colorado’s largest city, it’s surrounded by homes and features that most of my contemporaries who grew up in suburban America in the 1990s would find familiar, maybe even comforting. Visually, there’s not much out of the ordinary when you look at it; it’s a building that looks like countless other high schools across the country. There’s no big sign, no arrow pointing at it, nothing that would draw your attention. And yet, we all know the name of this place, even those of us who grew up in states thousands of miles removed from it.
In an average travel season, I’ll visit well over 100 high schools across the United States. After a few travel seasons, they all start to blur together a bit. Sure, you’ll have your standouts - who could forget visiting a high school that has three seniors in its graduating class - but most of them fall into a cookie-cutter template and pattern. Scheduling a visit here, at least on the surface, was no different. The staff are as helpful as anywhere else. The students have the same stunningly fantastic diversity of interests, stories, hopes, and dreams. It is, for all intents and purposes, a normal high school in the Denver suburbs.
I was born in August of 1993, and grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, NY. Distance-wise, a long way from the suburbs of Denver, to be sure, but culturally not so different. I enjoyed the same safe, fostering community so many of the students there do. When April 20, 1999 appeared on the calendar, I was not yet six, and was just finishing kindergarten. At that age, and in that time, you didn’t hear about what happened on the news. Today, it’s not uncommon for kindergartners to wander around with cellphones; I wouldn’t get my first phone until nearly a decade later. We were too young to comprehend what had happened, and nobody was going to go out of their way to explain it to us. Too young. It wouldn’t be until several years later, approaching high school, that we learned about a place called Columbine.
The first time I heard the name Columbine was shortly after April 16, 2007, in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting. I was just finishing Eighth grade, and remember covering the topic briefly in journal assignments for my English class. We were discussing the abhorrent, unspeakable nature of what had occurred in Virginia, when our teacher mentioned the Columbine incident as a point of reference. While unquestionably more mature and more capable of processing the event, it’s still a big ask of a 13 year-old. A strange by-product of learning about and understanding an event is your state of mind and frame of reference at the time, and how it colors your view for years after. We learned that the Columbine victims were high-school aged, most between the ages of 15 and 18. To a 13 year-old, students of that age were very much seen as older, more mature, almost “adults” in a very naive sense. More on this later.
We didn’t talk about Columbine - or any other school shootings - throughout my time in high school very much. In fact, the years I spent at 1180 Delaware Avenue (2007-2011) were some of the “quietest” in recent memory, at least in terms of number of annual incidents. To be sure, they were happening - 13 alone in the year I graduated - but they were so far removed from our comfortable and privileged existence at one of Buffalo’s finest private schools. College was a different story. Incident rates began to climb. Sandy Hook happened in my sophomore year, opening up a new chapter of unspeakable horror on the general public. It was, for a time, harder to tune the incidents out, as media coverage ramped up drastically around each event, each time accompanied by the same debate, on repeat, about what to do, and how to confront the problem. Today, events seem to happen with such frequency that it’s easy to become emotionally numb to the news of "yet another school shooting.” If you step back and think about that statement critically for a moment, you may realize how far into the darkness we’ve wandered.
I started working for the university in the summer of 2015, and found myself back in the high school environment much sooner than I ever expected to be. From September to November, it’s not uncommon for me to visit four to six high schools, five days a week. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I’m sure I was thinking about the events that continued to happen, and those that had happened before. My contact was still limited; I had never experienced an active shooter incident myself, and God-willing never will. I was older, but even at 22, I don’t think I had fully grasped the reality and depth of so many of the situations. Five travel seasons, and a healthy dose of personal growth, has left me with a much-adjusted perspective at 26.
When I was assigned the Denver trip this fall, I knew I’d be visiting Columbine; it’s always been a school that’s been a strong performer for MSU. I knew that it would feel a bit strange visiting - how could it not? The name was seared into the collective consciousness as a benchmark, a turning point. I visited in early October, a busy time of year for a high school student by any measure. It was at this particular visit, and for several days after, that I think the full reality of the horror that had unfolded in April 1999 hit me. To be clear, I have not and will never pretend to understand the horror that those students, or any other student who has been involved in a mass shooting incident experiences. But for someone who has enjoyed a comfortable, privileged, and trauma-free life, it was a sobering realization.
I talked to a room of about 20 students for 45 minutes, comprised mostly of juniors and seniors. None of them were alive in 1999. Almost none of them have any tangible connection to the incident. They’re regular high school students, and have the same worries, hopes, trials, and tribulations as their peers at thousands of schools across the nation. The place itself is a normally-functioning high school; it has to be. The people lost on that day in April had to be remembered and honored, but life had to go on. For many, moving forward was the only way to heal. Looking around that exceedingly normal classroom, at those everyday high school students, really underscored one thing for me that I hadn’t understood fully.
I mentioned earlier how the age and mindset we hold when learning about an event colors our perception of it. I had, for years, envisioned the victims as older students, because that’s what they were to me when it happened. I’m now ten years their senior, and to look as a 26 year-old at a room full of students no older than 17 underscored how young those students lost in 1999 really were. How many things they hadn’t experienced yet; how many things I myself had gone on to experience that they never would. How painfully similar they were to the students sitting in front of me at that very moment, who are still so incredibly young, and have so much in front of them. As someone who doesn’t yet have children, it has been relatively easy to subconsciously disassociate with the horror of the death of students at the hands of a killer. It was in that moment that the collective experiences and interactions I had had with five years-worth of college-bound students brought that comfortable ignorance crashing down. It stayed on my mind with me for the rest of the day, for the rest of my trip in Colorado, and through the rest of this travel season.
I don’t have the answers, and I won’t pretend to. I don’t know how to stop these events. I don’t know the best way to have the conversations, the best way to help those who are lost, or the best way to help those who remain. Pouring my own thoughts and reflections onto this page was the best way for me to process what I’ve been sitting on for over a month. I know that the conversation that needs to happen is going to be a painful one for our country, and it’s been met with resistance every single time. 110 school shootings occurred in 2018. 2019 has seen 67 as of my writing this.
To have the conversation will be painful, but to not have it will prove fatal.
-MH