On a mild Monday afternoon, Mandy Cooke was walking on a path near the high school where she teaches social studies. Nearby, a few students were warming up for track and field practice.
The team’s coach spotted his colleague and shouted, “There’s Mrs. Cooke!” and the students waved.
It was just like any high school in America. The school’s colors — navy and white — accented the track as teens ran, stretched and laughed. Behind them, the word “Rebels” was painted on a shed near the field. A coach blew a whistle and the kids came into a huddle, as others walked through the nearby parking lot with backpacks on.
But unlike most high schools in America, this scene happened close to a memorial with the names of 12 students and teacher who were killed in a mass shooting on April 20, 1999.
Cooke sometimes gets concerned reactions when she tells people she works at Columbine High School.
“I still have teacher friends who are like, ‘I don’t know how you walk into that building,’” Cooke said.
She probably gets asked this question more than some other teachers, as Cooke is a survivor of the shooting. She was a sophomore at Columbine in 1999.
Twenty-five years later, she works alongside several other survivors, hoping to support and care for students in the same way teachers and staff supported and cared for them in the wake of the tragedy.
Cooke works with friends she grew up with, including fellow teacher Cris Welsh and Noel Sudano, a school counselor.
Cooke and Welsh went to preschool together, and Cooke took piano lessons from Sudano’s mom. They all attended Dutch Creek Elementary School and then graduated together from Columbine in 2001. All three now live in the same neighborhood, where they are raising their own kids.
A similar call led them all back to their high school.
For Welsh, who teaches social studies, there was no other choice.
“I wanted to be there for my students in the same way that teachers had been there for me — I wanted to kind of pay that forward,” Welsh said.
In a time of “total, complete chaos,” he said, the teachers at Columbine represented stability. He drew a lot of strength from his relationships with his teachers in the months and years that followed the tragedy.
“They had gone through exactly what we had gone through,” he said. “They showed us kindness, and consideration and compassion at a moment where so much of that seemed to be lacking in the world … I think, in each of us, there was a desire to extend that to another generation in what, regrettably, seems like an increasingly unstable world.”
Sudano said the adults at school were willing to show students their humanity, which was healing for her. One teacher, who was usually rather intimidating, gave her a hug a few days after the shooting.
“I just remember thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, this helps me understand the magnitude of what we went through,’” she said. “And, it also helped me feel that safety of like — even this authority figure, we’re all in the same situation, and we can all depend on each other.”
These connections, the trio said, were a critical part of the healing journey for not just them, but many of the Columbine survivors.
“Our generation grew up where we could only process through genuine communication with each other,” Welsh said. “And I think it made a big difference.”
He said he wonders if social media — with its inherent social pressures and opportunities for criticism and damaging words — has prevented some victims of school shootings from processing their experiences effectively.
“I would not want to have posted my opinions and ideas and emotions online for the world to see” after the shooting, he said. “I wanted friends, not the world.”
Because of the closeness and familiarity of being among people who understood what she had gone through, Cooke said she remembers never wanting to leave the Littleton area after she graduated.
“I was so comfortable because we bonded and came together, and I knew I was protected there,” she said. “And then, I knew going to school in Fort Collins, I wasn’t.”
Cooke started college at Colorado State University. She said the first page of her psychology textbook was about the Columbine shooting.
“Going out of that bubble was very difficult for me,” she said.
Sudano had a similar experience as an undergraduate student at DePauw University in Indiana, where she learned “very quickly how just saying the word ‘Columbine’ triggered all sorts of reactions.”
Cooke, Welsh and Sudano said the students who attend Columbine are generally aware of the history, but mostly don’t think about it unless adults mention it. For them, Columbine is just their school. Going there is “not something that seems abnormal to them until people around them tell them that it is abnormal,” Sudano said.
“I think their first thought is not the shooting,” Welsh said. “Their first thought is, you know, the history test that I just made them take.”
So, for all three, working at Columbine is not strange. In the decades since the tragedy, they have come to know it as a tight-knit, service-oriented — and otherwise completely regular — high school.
“It was a high school, it always has been,” Welsh said. “If there is any special nature to Columbine, it has been the family or community atmosphere that we have created. It’s been the desire to aid and support and service others. If there is a difference between us and other high schools, that’s it.”
Welsh said Columbine has been portrayed in many negative ways by the media. He, Cooke and Sudano said they want people to see Columbine as a wonderful place instead of the site of a national tragedy.
The Columbine community remembers and honors the victims, but they do it in a way that is forward-thinking and hopeful, they said.
Sudano said she wants people to know that Columbine is “a school that’s thriving.” The employees say they don’t let the shooting define their experience there.
“It is such a hub in our community for everybody, kids and adults.” Cooke said. “(They) go to basketball games, go to football games. It’s just such a rallying point for me, that I don’t think of the shooting every single day.”
“We have a job to do,” Welsh added. “I can’t be thinking about my students and getting ready for the AP test or whatever it is we’re focused on at the moment if I’m constantly obsessing about the past. I’m not saying it’s not there, to a certain extent, but you don’t walk in and immediately have flashbacks to April 20.”
Cooke said the employees are in a place where they are ready to never forget, but still move on with their lives. She is a mother and wants to spend her time and energy focusing on her kids.
“I’m in a really good place in my life,” she said. “I don’t want to be sad.”
Her kids — who are in fifth and seventh grade — look forward to going to Columbine someday.
It’s a place where students study for history tests and do chemistry experiments. They laugh in the hallways and are late to class. Students change in the locker rooms for practice after school and look forward to things like football games and prom.
Columbine is like any high school in America, only it is stronger than it was before 1999. To Welsh, the school is a symbol of hope.
“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 … If you are determined to overcome the things that happen to you, you can do it. There are people out there who have done it, and you need to look to them.”