Twenty years after the mass shooting at Columbine, a former teacher grapples with the warning signs.
A vigil in Littleton, CO on April 21, 1999, the day after 14 students and one teacher were killed during the attack on Columbine High School
It’s just an English teacher ritual — a Sunday afternoon and a pile of ungraded papers to conquer before morning, and this was what I was doing when I encountered the story for the first time. It was a few weeks before the shootings, and on that particular Sunday, I was delving into short stories from my senior creative writing class. Memories sometimes are seared into consciousness by the strong emotions they elicit, so when I reached the end of the narrative, I paused, horrified.
But it wasn’t just a story to me. As soon as my first free period came around, I took the counselor a copy of the story and spoke of my concerns. He later brought Dylan in for an assessment, and they talked, and he left the meeting thinking Dylan had plans to go to college. Back then, there was no roadmap of what to do in these situations.
I recall being dismayed when Mr. Klebold immediately shifted the conversation to a cerebral, philosophical discussion of teenagers today. I remember being surprised that they did not ask me more. Because of the depth of my concern over Dylan’s work, and how adamant I was about it, I recall having the expectation that they would at least be talking to the counselor that night.
Mrs Klebold has endured the unendurable, and it was hard not to sympathize with a mother in her grief. But I was unprepared to read her version of our meeting, published inin 2009, a decade after the shootings. She wrote that at the parent-teacher conference, I never described the contents of the story that had shaken me so badly, only calling them “disturbing.” In this version, Dylan’s mother claims to have asked for a copy but never received one.
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