By Mark Keierleber, Photo: NASSP.org, The74, August 22, 2022
Shortly after the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School that left 13 people dead, then-Principal Frank DeAngelis got a phone call. On the other end of the line was a school leader from Kentucky who had endured a shooting of his own just two years earlier.
“He called me up and said, ‘Frank, you don’t even know what you need, but here’s my number,’” DeAngelis said during an event Monday at the Columbine Memorial in Littleton, Colorado. The road to recovery, DeAngelis would soon learn, isn’t a sprint but a marathon. Help from others who had lived through similar tragedies was instrumental.
DeAngelis hoped he’d never have to make a similar phone call, but in the decades since Columbine, the retired principal has reached out to traumatized educators across the country who similarly became part of “a club in which no one wants to be a member.”
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