Schools can take years to heal

The long road to recovery at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Ark., began soon after the shooting stopped.

Four students and a teacher were killed there seven years ago by two boys who opened fire on the school's playground. Two days later, Karen Curtner, Westside's principal, had the delicate task of resuming classes.

So much had suddenly changed: Some students could no longer focus on their studies. Others kept bursting into tears. Most refused to play outside at recess.

"It was disturbing to come back," Curtner said.

"At the end of every day, we would get together with all the teachers and ask, 'Did everybody make it?' "

Red Lake High School, closed since a student fatally shot five classmates, a teacher and a security guard there before killing himself three weeks ago, is about to confront the same challenges.

It is planning to reopen this week, joining the ranks of the unfortunate few schools across the country that have been hit by a deadly attack and forced to find ways to live with the scars it created.

"There's no manual for this," said Ryan Atteberry, who was nearly killed during a shooting spree seven years ago when he was a student at a high school in Springfield, Ore.

Schools victimized by violence have gone to great lengths to help returning students cope with their grief and fear.

Rocori High School in Cold Spring, Minn., where two students were fatally shot in 2003, created "comfort rooms" for counseling. Columbine High School in Colorado, where two students killed a dozen classmates and a teacher six years ago, went so far as to ban balloons -- fearing if one popped, the noise would sound like gunfire.

The school also stopped serving Chinese food, which was on the cafeteria menu on the day of the massacre.

Heath High School in West Paducah, Ky., where a teenager killed three students in 1997, eased up on homework and tests and took all its classes to a water park in the weeks after the shooting. Thurston High School in Springfield, Ore., where two students were killed and Atteberry and 19 others were wounded, assigned counselors to every classroom.

At all of those schools, educators say it took years to heal, much longer than they anticipated. Some said their school did not fully recover until every student enrolled at the time of the shooting graduated or left.

"They've all learned that this process is extremely difficult," said Rich Lieberman, who is part of a national team of psychologists that assists schools struck by mass shootings. "Long after the stories stop and the media moves on, the community still has to deal with teachers and kids hurting in ways that are not always obvious at first."

Lieberman and other school psychologists said that Red Lake's recovery may be even more complicated.

Teachers and students there are bound to be on edge, they said, because police are still investigating whether the gunman, Jeff Weise, acted alone or had support from classmates.

Police scoured the school Thursday after hearing that a gun might be hidden inside. They found no weapon. But the scare prompted school officials to postpone a "healing ceremony" at the site Friday. The event is scheduled for today.

Some psychologists and educators also expressed concern about how long Red Lake's students have been out of class.

"I understand what they're going through, but I think the longer you leave them out, the more terrified they'll be when they return," Curtner said. "As hard as it was for us, the best thing was still to get back into routine. The students and teachers really need each other."

Hard times ahead

Since the shooting at Red Lake, several school psychologists from across the country have come to help the school's staff make plans for reopening and to tell them what to expect.

Frank Zenere, a Miami school psychologist who is leading the national team of counseling experts aiding Red Lake, said that trauma from the shooting soon may manifest itself in many ways: Absenteeism. Poor grades. More cases of alcoholism and drug abuse. Teachers quitting.

Last week, when Red Lake's teachers returned to the bullet-ridden school for the first time since the shooting to pick up personal items they left behind in the chaos, some said they felt deeply shaken and doubted that they could work full days. But they also have decided to return to the high school and not move classes to another site.

"They are all going to keep thinking about what happened and struggle with it," Zenere said. "Nothing is going to fall back into place exactly as it was before. They've all gone through something that most people in their lives will never witness."

Across the country, schools reeling from deadly shootings have embraced similar strategies during their first days back in class. First, they beefed up security. Then they brought in a squad of counselors. But those tactics, while helpful, usually were not enough -- and at times created new complications.

Some students were rattled by the sight of extra guards in their halls and police cars patrolling the streets outside. Others were reluctant to share their anguish with counselors who were strangers at the school.

"I remember a lot of people being uneasy with what was new at school," said Atteberry, a sophomore at Thurston High School when it was attacked. "There were coun- selors still around months later, but I think many students felt more comfortable talking about what happened with their friends."

Officials at Thurston and other schools had another new burden: too many offers of help.

At Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Curtner spent the weeks after the shooting often mired in her office until midnight trying to manage the outpouring of goodwill. "That alone was overwhelming," she said.

Cathy Paine, a school psychologist who coordinated counseling at Thurston High after the shooting, said that she had to contend with a wave of well-meaning but unqualified volunteers who kept coming to the school to talk to students -- as well as a few con artists trying to cash in on the tragedy.

Weeks after the shooting, Paine said, security guards at the school forcibly had to remove a man who kept arriving with dubious offers of assistance.

"We learned very quickly that we needed to screen the people coming to help," she said. "That took a lot of time and energy."

Ways to heal

In Jonesboro, Curtner and her faculty faced another difficult question a few weeks after they had come back to class: When should they get serious again about academics?

Initially, Curtner said, she told teachers, "No nouns and pronouns for a while." Instead, students mostly spent time in class playing board games and completing puzzles. They sang songs and staged a talent show.

But soon they worried that students were getting too accustomed to the new festivities.

"It got to be a little bit too much for some of them after a while," Curtner said. "Teachers were ready to take back control of their classrooms."

Russ Tilford, principal of Heath High School in West Paducah, had a similar experience. He was a teacher there at the time of the shooting. The school opened the next day.

"Eventually you have to stop dwelling on the incident," he said. "It was almost a relief for us to get back into curriculum."

The school found solace in other small, symbolic steps, Tilford said. Students continued to form a voluntary prayer circle in the lobby, for example, even though the gunman had targeted their group. "They never missed a day," he said. "That gave people courage."

Columbine took more drastic action: It demolished the library where 10 students were killed.

Rocori High School created a memorial monument to its shooting victims, resorted to random locker checks for weapons, and trained faculty and staff to defuse student disputes.

Thurston High School kept two more counselors on staff until the freshmen at the school when the shooting occurred had finished their four years.

It all helped. But every time educators in those schools started to think that they had recovered from the violence, another sign of trauma would arise.

Paine recalled a day at Thurston many months after the shooting spree. Students were busy in classes. Security guards were on duty.

"On the surface," she said, "everything looked normal."

Then a car engine outside the school backfired.

"Kids started diving under their desks," Paine said.

Rene Sanchez is at rsanchez@startribune.com.