The Fall

Our building became the site of a major crime scene investigation.  We had no access to it or anything inside it, like the purses we’d left behind, our materials, our grade books, any of that, for the rest of the year.

At first, central administration determined that the ninth grade would be sent to one high school, tenth to another, and so on.  Kind of scary, the idea that the big decision makers know so little about how a high school works that it never occurred to them that we teach many mixed-grade classes.  The principal at Chatfield High School opened her doors.  Chatfield was once an offshoot of Columbine when Columbine was small and overcrowded.  Later they became our rivals.  Now, Chatfield students attended in the morning, and we did a somewhat abbreviated day in the afternoon.

The Chatfield teachers were amazing.  They emptied out all of their desks in the English office and gave them to us, along with access to their books.  The Chatfield kids made banners and put paper columbines on the classroom desks.  They shared their classrooms without complaint and were kind and generous.

We were in a fog.  A lot of it is a blur now, but I can give you the general gist.  I set poetry aside with my sophomores and ordered a class set of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.  Okay, maybe it’s not “great literature,” but it is about a loner who is different.  A loner who befriends another loner, and together, they rise above the teasing and taunting of others to fly, and to teach their detractors to fly.  To me, it was an affirmation that being different did not have to be bad, and that people could choose the high ground—the perfect message upon which to end the year.

I had them write a paper about their perfect selves.  If they could be perfect, without limits, what would they be like?  I was thinking of boundless generosity and love, so I was disappointed at how many wrote about money and prestige.  Maybe I was asking more than their maturity allowed.  Besides, we all had PTSD.  Thinking was no one’s strong suit.

ACE was hell.  For one thing, when Chatfield was told ACE was a vocational class, they gave us the auto shop.  It was well-intentioned, but not an ideal setting, and to this day, the smell of motor oil gives me a very bad feeling.  The entire student body was locked in at Chatfield.  For security purposes, we ran a security gauntlet at the front door at the beginning of the day, and once inside, there we stayed.  Can you imagine 30 at-risk nicotine addicts with PTSD and no way to go outside and get a smoke?  Pure hell.

Add to this that down the hall was a heavy, spring-loaded door that slammed loudly whenever someone accidentally let it swing shut behind them, which people did fairly routinely in the first week or so, until whomever had classes in there learned not to.  After that, it still happened occasionally.  Remember the half of my ACE class that was in the computer lab when the shootings began?  The computer lab was very near the school library and the hall that Eric and Dylan entered after shooting several students outside.  My ACE partner and the students he was with heard everything.  They literally dodged bullets getting out.  One girl was shot in the leg going from the lab to the ACE hall.  At Chatfield, when the door down the hall slammed, my students literally hit the floor, and class was effectively over for the day while they waited for the adrenalin to wear off.  Hell, I tell you.

After a while, something had to give, and students with bad habits were permitted to leave a few times a day under close supervision to get their fix.  Thank God.

Honestly, I struggle to remember forensics and debate.  We had the awards banquet coming up.  We had voted on the next years’ team officers and for team awards already, as I recall.  A local company offered their corporate facilities for the ceremony.  Already, there was a gap in the way Marti and I were dealing with our grief.  She was throwing herself into the team, preparing for the banquet, thinking about the next year, deciding that we would host state in 2000 to get people back in our building and get things back to normal.

I was alternating between sleepless nights and taking sleeping pills despite the fact that it meant I would be unable to wake from the nightmares that came most nights.  If I took pills, I woke up and dragged my way through the morning, glad that I didn’t have to be at school until fairly late.  Some days, I would throw up in the morning, dreading going to school.  It was everything I could do, and the thought of next year was overwhelming.

Students and teachers were all over the map.  Every day, there were people in tears and people who would not talk about it and people who were angry and people who were angry at the people who were angry, and we were in the same classrooms and hallways.  But there were also hugs, and people who wiped tears and smoothed tempers.  For better or worse, we were family.  The bonds between us were tight.  If a teacher saw a student weeping in the hall, whether they knew each other or not, the teacher opened his or her arms and the student took the embrace like a lifeline.

In between, we pretended to teach and the kids pretended to learn.  We acted like it was school, but it wasn’t.  I don’t know what it was.  All most of us knew was that we wanted it to be over.

Until the last day.  Then we realized that we faced a long, long summer without each other.  Sure, maybe school was weird, but we were weird, and the rest of the world…wasn’t.  I went to the national speech meet in Phoenix, and while everyone was as kind as could be, when they took their first look at my nametag, which also proclaimed my school, they would stop talking mid-sentence and their jaws would drop, and they’d say, “Oh, my God,” or “I’m so sorry.”  Over and over.  Every day.  For a week.

After that came of summer of trying to be relatively normal for the sake of my children, then four and eight-years-old.

View from the Top (cont.)

I went home and watched the news.  That’s when I saw Dylan and realized who he was.  That’s when Oprah Winfrey’s producer called and asked me if I would meet a cameraman in the park for an interview early Wednesday morning.

I thought about Jonesboro, and West Paducah, and Springfield—all places most people have forgotten but whose ranks we'd just joined.  They hadn’t seemed real to me.  They were news stories—something to be discussed in debate class when we talked about gun control and school violence.  I wanted to be real.  I wanted people to understand that we could be them.  So I said yes.

To this day, I remember very little about giving that interview.  I watched it many years later, surprised at how glibly I told the lies I was supposed to tell: No, I did not know the identities of any of the dead.  Two members of my speech team were missing, but I was still hoping to hear from them.

Bullshit.

My memory of the next two weeks is pretty hazy.  Actually, the rest of the school year is a jumbled up mess.  I went from the Oprah interview early the next morning in the park to a staff meeting at a local Catholic church.  I remember people shoving pieces of paper in my face that said things like “get plenty of exercise and drink lots of water.”  What the hell?  I had no idea what to do with them.  I didn’t have the brain-power to read anything.  I handed them to my husband and have no clue what happened to them after that.  I remember Frank standing in front of us and weeping.  There were other meetings at another church, but they blur together.  People stood up and talked at us, but I couldn’t concentrate, so I stared out a window and felt like I literally wanted to climb right out of my skin.  I wanted out, out, out, out, out.  It was almost impossible to sit still.  I could not pay attention or retain anything, so I have no idea what they babbled to us about.

There were “debriefing” sessions after staff meetings where we were supposed to go talk, but by the time I’d sat through whatever it was I was sitting through, I had to leave.  I just couldn’t sit anymore.  My anxiety level was off the chart.

Marti and I met with the speech team on Thursday.  I brought a minister from my church who brought a few other counselors, but the parents were the only ones who talked to them.  They seemed glad for the resource.  The kids wanted each other, Marti, and me.  Marti brought memory books so the kids could write memories of Dan and Rachel, and we could give those to the families.  The kids wrote in them more as if they were writing in yearbooks, addressing their comments to their dead teammates, which wasn’t quite what we’d had in mind, but I think it says something about where our students were at the time.

Intertwined in all of this were meals in restaurants with my husband and Marti, five funerals, surely some time with my own children, though I remember none of it, and countless nightmares.

At Rachel Scott’s funeral, out of love for Rachel, I bit my tongue while the minister basically blamed what had happened on taking prayer out of schools.  Schools, he told the assembly, were raising a generation of “clever devils.”  Some teachers walked out.  I concentrated on memories of the Rachel I remembered, a true Christian with an open mind and loving heart, because I wasn’t going anywhere.  This was, after all, the first funeral.  I was surrounded by speech kids who had never been to one before.  When it was over, Marti and I walked them past the casket, where they saw Rachel one last time. 

For me, it was a relief.  That wasn’t our Rachel in that box—no smile, no quick, sarcastic quips.  She was gone.  For kids like Sarah, it was devastating, as she looked into the coffin and saw that Rachel was still wearing the earrings she’d lent her days before.

I remember next to nothing about Dave Sander’s funeral, only that it was closed casket.  I went to Steve Curnow’s funeral to support his father and sister.  His sister had put together a video of her brother with “You’ll Be in my Heart” from Disney’s Tarzan playing in the background.  Dan Mauser’s funeral mass was held at the same time as Kelly Fleming’s, another Catholic victim, with the archbishop presiding.  I am not Christian, much less Catholic, but there is something so soothing about Catholic ritual.  This, too, was an open casket funeral, and again, Dan looked so unlike himself that, for me, it made it somewhat easier to let him go.

There is one strange aside I will mention.  When I first met Dan, he reminded me very strongly of a student I’d had when I first started coaching.  That boy’s name was Sean, and like Dan, he started off as a CX debater then changed areas of competition.  They had similar looks, similar mannerisms.  It was a casual observation.  I had never accidentally called Dan Sean or confused the two of them.  The day of Dan’s funeral, I could not stop substituting the name Sean in my head when I thought of Dan.  I would have to remind myself, “No, not Sean.  Dan.”  When I spoke to Dan’s mother after the service, I actually said “Sean” twice.  Right to her!  I never did this again after the funeral.  The two boys went back to being completely separate in my mind.  I wonder if I was just overwhelmed by loss.  Sean had left my life the way he was supposed to, by graduating and going on to adulthood.  I think I wanted to cling to that kind of loss instead of the kind I was drowning in.

By the time I dragged myself to Isaiah Shoel’s funeral, I was fried.  I had to buy a new dress, because all my funeral clothes were at the drycleaner.  I looked at Marti and said, “Who the hell runs out of funeral clothes?”  I probably could have worn one of the outfits again, but I felt the need to clean each funeral out of them before I wore them again.  I threw away the dress I was wearing on April 20.

If no one does ritual like the Catholics, nobody sings a child’s soul into heaven like black Baptists.  Oh, I was having another one of those “man, am I white” moments as I watched people dancing and singing, but I felt better.  I hoped with all my heart that Isaiah was with Jesus and that Jesus could dance and sing like that. 

Isaiah was the last child we had to bury.  There had been other funerals in between, but I didn't go to them because they were for kids I either didn’t know well or didn’t know at all: Cassie Bernall, Corey DePooter, Matt Kechter, Danny Rohrbough, John Tomlin, Lauren Townsend, and Kyle Velasquez.

There were two other funerals somewhere, sometime, but they were highly secret.
 

The View from the Top

So I guess we’re here, aren’t we?  For those of you who come from states without mountains (or from states you only think have mountains), let me explain to you what happens when you climb your first peak.  You think, “Yea!  I’m at the top!”  And then you look around and see that there are a whole lot more mountains, many of which are bigger and look very cold and inhospitable.  Also, if you climbed that mountain in Colorado, well, it’s getting to be afternoon right about now.  Time for a thunderstorm to roll in, and the top of a mountain is no place to be when lightening is striking.

The 1998-99 school year was a great one.  By now, Frank, my old partner in the dean’s office, had been the principal at Columbine for three years, our former principal having moved on to central administration in the school district.  My ACE partner and I had been teaching together for two years.  We’d hit our stride, could tag-team any lesson, fly by the seats of our pants, finish each other’s sentences. Squeezed in with ACE and forensics, I taught American Lit to sophomores, and I had a terrific group there, as well.

The forensics team was doing beautifully, consistently ranking among the top schools at every meet.  There were squabbles among kids, to be sure, but they worked them out.  Spring arrived on a high note.  I helped sponsor the spring play, which was written by a forensics kid and had a cast full of many of them.  We had a state champion in poetry (the playwright) and three qualifiers for the National Tournament in Phoenix in June.  It was at the national qualifying meet on April 10 that Rachel Scott gave me a letter she had written between rounds, telling me how much forensics had meant to her and outlining her goals for the next year.  I still have that letter.  

I helped chaperone prom on Saturday April 17, where I chatted with a bunch of forensics kids waiting in line to get their picture taken as a huge group.  It was there that Rachel and I discovered that our black dresses were nearly identical.  We laughed about it, pulling out fake ivy-league accents as we scoffed at girls in pastels.

That is the last conversation I remember with her.  I must have spoken with her on Monday.  She was in class.  But it was just a day.  How was I to know I would never see her again?  How was I to know that I should have taken a long, hard, last look at my debater, Dan Mauser, that Monday afternoon?  It had been a nearly perfect year.

I have told this part of my story a thousand times, and it never gets easier.

Tuesday morning, I taught war poetry to my sophomores.  We read “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” and other similarly horrific poems.  One, I can’t recall the title, spoke of the euphemisms we use in war, like “casualties,” not “deaths.”  We talked about how enemy soldiers must dehumanize each other.  It is much harder to “kill a person” than to “neutralize an enemy.”

How could I have known we were talking about us?  That in just a few hours, two of our own would stop thinking of us as people?  Come to think of it, I guess they already had.

In ACE, the kids were reading independent novels.  Then half the class accompanied my partner to the computer lab to finish a project while I stayed in the classroom with the kids who were finished and were catching up on other assignments.  One student was reading a book on serial killers, and we joked about the fact that people who knew them always described serial killers as being “so quiet.”

Did I think for a moment about a quiet sophomore I had taught two years before and who was now a senior?  Not at all.  When I heard the name Dyan Klebold later that day, I didn’t recognize it.  It wasn’t until I saw his picture on the news in the wee hours of Wednesday morning that I realized that I knew him.

Anyway, the kids were on-task, and I had to go to the bathroom, which was just across the hall, so I ducked out for a few minutes.  When the fire alarm went off, I thought it was a drill, and I followed my ACE kids into the beautiful spring day.  When kids ran by me screaming, “They’ve got guns,” I thought they were overreacting to something—a rumor of some kind.  Kids did not bring guns to Columbine.  When I heard gunfire, I thought there was a real fire after all and something was exploding.  When the administrators ran by and told us to get the kids over the chain-link fence and away from the building, I did what I was told, calmly certain that everything was going to be just fine.

As I walked to the local library (not to be confused with the school library) in the warm sunshine with hundreds of kids, some asked whether they could get their cars and go home.  I said no, because I was sure they’d get this whole thing cleared up and we’d finish the school day.  If that sounds crazy to you, remember, this is from the woman who thought something minor had blown up on the space shuttle Columbia and that the astronauts would return home.  I told you then, Queen of Denial.

The neighborhood library was in chaos.  My colleagues and I wandered from group to group, calming kids down, helping them locate siblings and call their parents.  Cell phones were not as ubiquitous then, but even though there were relatively few of them, it took no time at all for the lines to jam.   For those of you who insist that your children keep their cell phones on at school “in case there’s a Columbine,” take my word for it, they stop working pretty fast.

Remember what I said about high school fire drills being organized chaos?  Well, in the event of a real emergency like this one, they became utter chaos.  Parents were streaming into the community library and a nearby elementary school looking for their kids, and we had no way of knowing who had gotten out of the building and who was still trapped inside.  

This has changed in subsequent years.  Kids stay with their teachers who take attendance during a drill.  Students who have a free period at the time report to whatever teacher they can find, who then adds them to his or her list.  An administrator picks up the attendance sheets, and then we know who made it out.  If we must vacate the campus, we stay in a group with our classes and all go to the same place.

Back then, I spent God knows how long getting kids to sign sheets of paper saying they were there, letting parents peruse the lists, and then trying to get the information faxed over to the elementary to panicked families there.  After a while, it occurred to me that I should call my husband.  If you doubted my sanity before, I guess you’ll really doubt it now.  See, it hadn’t dawned on me that we were a major news story.  I wasn’t outside our library.  I didn’t see Patrick Ireland jump out the window.  I didn’t know what was going on back at school.  By the time I talked to my husband, the event had been on television and the radio for over two hours, and he’d been worried sick, but I had no sense of time.  It felt like it had been 20 minutes at the most.  Oops.

My father and his wife knew I was all right because they heard me on television.  A local station asked me to get on the phone and report how parents could find their children.  I did so, thinking it was a local broadcast, but it was actually CNN.  I found that out much later.  That broadcast also made it possible for my son’s second-grade teacher to pull him aside after recess and say, “Your mom is all right, but something bad happened at her school.”  At some point, my dad called my mom, who was living in Florida and was frantic.

By about 4:00 in the afternoon, victims’ advocates from the sheriff’s department had taken over the jobs I’d been doing, so I listened to the news inside.  At that point, the news was reporting 35 confirmed dead.  (I’ve learned a lot about the accuracy—or lack thereof—of the news.)  The denial bubble burst.  Thirty-five, I thought.  I must know some of them.

I met up with Marti and we went to the elementary school where the last unconnected children and parents were gathering.  It was there that countless students told me they’d been evacuated past Rachel’s body.  Yes, they were sure it was her, and yes, they were sure she was dead.

I looked at the first boy who told me that—her varsity mentor on the team, my state poetry champion, and I said, “That’s not true.  You’re lying.”  Then I walked away.

I’m not proud of that.  It was Marti who snapped me back to my senses and told me that I’d better get back there and apologize and help those kids out, which I did.

Many forensics team kids went home, some stayed.  We were directed into the elementary school gymnasium, where Rachel’s mom waited.  I started to walk over to her, but a woman intercepted me and told me that under no circumstances was I to acknowledge Rachel’s death to her mother.  It wasn’t official, and her mother had not been informed.  I couldn’t face her.

One member of my team pointed out that no one had heard from Dan Mauser, whose father was also in the gym.  I tried to talk to him, but Tom Mauser looked right through me.  On some level, I think he already knew.  Next, I joined Bob Curnow, a regular judge at speech meets and whose daughter, now graduated but at her father’s side in the gym, had been on my team.  His son Steve, a freshman, was a soccer kid rather than a speech kid.  Bob, his daughter, and I spoke lightly of how much trouble Steve would be in for not calling, for letting his family worry.  It was so much easier to pretend that he was going to call any minute now and there was no real need to worry, but the hours kept crawling.  

I had heard from several sources that my colleague, Dave Sanders, had been shot and transported to a hospital, but for some reason, they would not remove his name from the list of missing people.  He remained on that list, along with Rachel Scott, Dan Mauser, Steve Curnow, Isaiah Shoels (a former ACE student), Lauren Townsend (a senior that I’d taught as a freshman), and a number of other names unfamiliar to me then, but etched in my memory forever now.

By 7:30 p.m., I ran into Ron, my old principal.  As I mentioned, he’d been working in central administration and was privy to more information than most of us.  I said, “Ron, when will we know?  I can’t leave without knowing where my kids are.”

He said, “Go home, Paula.  They’re not releasing any names until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest.”

I said, “But how do I know who’s OK?”

He said, “There are as many bodies in that building as there are families in this gym right now.”

“Oh.”  I don’t remember exactly what I thought or felt.  I said, “What about Dave?  Everyone knows he was transported, but they won’t take him off the list.”

Ron said, “He wasn’t transported.  He’s still in the building.”

“What!  But he was shot.  Why is he still there?”

Ron paused.  It must have been so hard for him to say, “There wasn’t any need to take him out.”

Oh.

A few minutes later a man stood up at the mic on the stage in the gym and said, “Those of you parents who have not heard from your children, could you please contact your dentists for records?”

A woman went outside and threw up.

Belaying

For those unfamiliar with the term “belaying” in mountain climbing, it refers to supporting another climber with a rope.  Belaying is not done to haul climbers up with no effort on their part.  It is simply a safety precaution as they climb for themselves.

This is what the ACE (Alternative Cooperative Education) program at Columbine does.  It’s a set of classes offered to juniors and seniors at risk of flunking and/or dropping out of school.  The junior year is devoted to English and computers, the senior year to math and careers.  It is a high-stakes, tough-love approach to education, where students are expected to complete every single assignment, doing it as many times as necessary to meet the standard—perfection.  With a 15:1 student to teacher ratio, there is a ton of support along the way.

In my second year as dean, the woman who taught junior ACE English approached me about taking over the position.  She also taught the math portion and was burning out.  (She later became a dean.)  I said I wanted a year back in the classroom, a break from a heavily at-risk focused job, and then I’d do it.
The first year I taught ACE, it was with a much-loved social studies teacher.  He is still at Columbine and still much-loved.  ACE, however, wasn’t really his cup of tea.  The next year, we hired the man I would partner with another five years.  Like my forensics partner, I got along well with him, and the class was a joy, if a challenge.

I have taught students from many, many backgrounds in this class.  I taught a boy who was taken from his mother when he was in preschool and social services found out his teenaged mother was giving him LSD.  I had a student that I had first encountered when I was a dean, whose father had sold her eight-year-old body to support his drug habit.  She, too, was taken away.  Soon after she was adopted at age 10, her adoptive father was in an accident at work and left a paraplegic.  I’ve taught numerous kids with drug and alcohol problems, many for understandable reasons, like the girl whose father murdered her stepmother in front of her.  I have taught children whose parents are in jail, and some of my ACE students have done a bit of time themselves.  For some, school is a condition of their probation.

And I’ve taught basic kids, ones who simply struggle in school and ones who are just plain lazy.

We work as hard on work ethic and self-worth as we do on academics in there, and we work hard on academics.  We’ve had a significant number of students graduate from ACE and go on to get college degrees, sometimes even post-graduate degrees.  One came back to tell my partner and me that he had been fellowshipped for his doctorate.

A typical day in that class is spent in long periods of intensive reading, building a skill that is often deficient with these kids.  Then they work on computers, and I check and recheck their work, sending them back to the computer time and again to tighten up their writing and research.  Every now and then, we take a detour:  (Much of this was taken from a previous blog entry.)

We give an assignment called the “self-perception assignment.”  It requires students to first write a paragraph describing how they think others perceived them, then one about what they are truly like—how the wrapping is different from what’s inside the package. We stress that we aren’t asking them to care how anyone perceives them, simply to be aware of what they project. Finally, we pair them up with someone in the class they don’t know well, and ask them to write a paragraph apiece of their impressions of each other. It can be a risky assignment, but by the time we give it in the spring, the kids have been in the class together two hours a day, five days a week, all year, and we’ve really done a lot to establish a sense of trust and respect.

Well, one year, we had a really tough bunch, and they were VERY resistant. They insisted that there was no way to be honest with other people about how you perceived them and still be respectful. It blew me away—the idea that anything respectful anyone might say to someone else, anything complimentary, must be dishonest.

My partner’s and my MO, whenever kids said that something we were asking couldn’t be done, was to do it and model it for them. Let me tell you, what happened this one day would never have worked if we’d planned it. It was completely spontaneous. My partner and I took turns; he described one kid, and then I described the next. We went student by student and gave them our 100% honest, unvarnished opinions.

“Becca, you’re smart, and you don’t care who knows it. It’s evident in every word you say, but you don’t follow through. It’s like you’re afraid that if you put your ideas on paper, they won’t seem as smart as when you said them. You come off as this tough girl that no one can touch, but inside you are broken glass from every person who’s ever hurt you.”

“Evan, you struggle. School, especially reading, doesn’t come easily, and you’ve completely convinced yourself that you can’t do anything. But you’re quick with a comeback and you have a wicked sense of humor. A person has to have a quick mind to be able to do that. You don’t have to be book-smart to have a good mind. That’s the lesson you’re here to learn.”

“Nick, you have a generous heart. You’re the person everyone comes to. In a lot of ways, you take on too much, and there’s not enough room for school…”

For a full 50 minutes, the 28 toughest, rowdiest kids in the school were dead silent. They listened intently to each description. You could see the anticipation as we got closer to each of them. Many couldn’t raise their eyes from the table when their turn came, but they held perfectly still, almost didn’t breathe. There were a lot of tears that day. When we were finished, you could hear a pin drop until Becca said, “Wow. You guys really know us.”

“Do you feel respected?” I asked. “Accepted?” Enthusiastic nods all around. “Did you think we were bullshitting any of you?” (You can talk to them that way in ACE from time to time. I use the privilege judiciously, and only in that class.) They shook their heads vehemently. Then they begged to be allowed to describe my partner and me.

“Mrs. Reed, sometimes you come across as a bitch, but it’s really because you want the best for us…” A teacher can hear no higher praise. “Mr. T, you’re like the dad of the group…”

The papers they wrote were the best we’ve ever gotten from this assignment. They were thoughtful and open. The feedback we got over and over again was that it was the first time anyone had told those kids what was good and valuable about them and they really believed the person who was saying it, because we were honest about their faults, too.

In reality, I’m sure it wasn’t the first time. I think it was just one of the most memorable because of the circumstances.  It wasn’t something we could repeat every year. It has to be the right moment, the right kids; they have to be open to it in the moment, but the words we spoke that day were magic.

Isaiah Shoels was in that class.  I think my partner described him.  I wish I could remember what he said.

It was from my ACE students that I first heard the term “Trench-coat Mafia.”  We were reading The Power of One, by Bryce Courtenay (to this day my favorite book), and talking about the social structures within it.  After we examined political and social power in South Africa in from the 1930s through the 40s, we talked about power and social structures at Columbine.  (Always, always, how does this connect to your life?)

The kids agreed that the jocks were at the top of the ladder.  Now, before you say, “Oh, see, that Columbine was a jock school full of bullies, yada, yada, yada…” tell me how many schools that isn’t true of.  Look at athletes’ salaries versus mine, and then tell me it’s not true of our whole culture.  Yes, there was and is a heavy cross-section of kids who competed in sports and were also popular.  It wasn’t uncommon.  It also wasn’t a conspiracy.

Anyway, as we got to the bottom of the ladder, the equivalent of “kaffirs” in Courtenay’s book, the kids said, “The Trench-coat Mafia.”  I had seen a few kids in trench coats—well, western-style dusters, actually, this is Colorado.  One competed on my team.  (No, not Eric or Dylan.)  They were mostly computer-savvy, smart kids.  Some might have been seen as nerdy, but certainly not all of them.  My ACE kids clarified that the Trench-coat Mafia was a group of maybe a dozen kids who didn’t like jocks and the jocks didn’t like them.  Several athletes in my class agreed—they didn’t like this group.

There was no sense of deep-seated animosity, no deep, brooding hatred.  They just didn’t like each other.  The discussion moved on, and nothing more was ever said to me.  This was in the fall of 1998.

I should clarify that I actually ran out of prewritten material a while ago, back when I mentioned Marti visiting and saying she was going to assistant coach at Mullen.  That was all my critique group ever saw, and all I had planned on attempting.  The weird thing is, my hits have more than doubled starting with this particular series, so I figured I finish the story, despite the fact that I'm also working on another novel.  Consequently, you'll find typos I miss, more second person sneaking in, all kinds of glitches.  Sorry about that.

Plateau

The very next school year, every relocated teacher was back in a high school.  I was back at Columbine, back with my team, and as I mentioned earlier, now coaching with a former student.  After the baby came, my son’s bouncy chair just sat on whatever table I was working in the tab room.  The second year, we switched.  She became the head coach, taking all the Saturdays (though I still attended important meets), and I taught the classes.  Marti came in for class most days, so we worked together pretty seamlessly.  The team did well, producing national qualifiers, having fun.  I taught American Lit to juniors until we moved that curriculum to the tenth grade and I followed it.  The next three years were about perfect, even with the adjustment of raising a child along with working.  

There was a new principal when I returned to Columbine from Lasley.  The principal who had hired me was transferred after the RIF.  (I often wonder whether it was a consequence of his having been very outspoken in his support of the teachers during that storm.)  The new principal was Ron, and while he had tended to stir up controversy in schools before, I found him reasonable and dedicated.  He backed his teachers when he could and let them know exactly why when he couldn’t.  Best of all, he was an avid supporter of the speech team.  (Not that my first principal didn’t support it—he was pretty hands-off.)  Ron may not have totally “gotten” the whole speech thing—mouthy, opinionated kids, ridiculously long meets—but he knew that a strong speech team made a school look good.  My budget got pumped, and he was happy to work out flexible arrangements for Marti and me.

At the end of my third year back, he came to me with an offer.  Columbine had been piloting a new program—deans of students.  Previously, Jeffco schools simply worked with assistant principals.  Under this program, two teachers left the classroom for two years to work with half the student body each on attendance and discipline.  The program had been in place for a year with great success as far as teachers were concerned.  They liked having people in the main office who still had close ties to the classroom.  One dean, however, opted out at the end of the first year, and needed to be replaced.  Ron asked me to apply for that spot.

For the record, I was not then, am not now, and have never been interested in being an administrator.  Most people saw this job as a jumping off point for that.  Not me.  Still, it seemed like an interesting idea.  It would give me a whole different view of the school, so after talking to Marti about the fact that it meant I wouldn’t be working with her for two years, I took the job.

I had never really worked closely with Frank DeAngelis, the other dean, even though the social studies and English departments shared an office.  We were never in there at the same time.  As deans, we worked side by side.  Granted, we each had our own attendance and regular discipline groups—I had sophomores and juniors, he had freshmen and seniors—but when a big drug-bust went down or there was a cross-grade-level fight, we worked with the assistant principals to resolve the issue.  I learned that Frank has a very Italian temper, that he loves kids, and that he is unfailingly honest and loyal.  There were more than a few kids who thought he was mean because he yelled at them, but I knew it was because he genuinely cared and got so frustrated when they made choices that sabotaged themselves.  He is also a classic coach who loves sports and really connects to athletes.  Later, that would be the thing the media would latch onto about him—the athlete thing, none of the other qualities I’ve just talked about.  

Did he favor athletes?  I don’t know.  Maybe.  But he expected more from them, too. Maybe he assumed too readily that all student athletes were like him, and many are.  I’m just saying that, if he seemed to favor athletes, maybe that’s because he figured every kid walked off the field with the same ethics sports had taught him, and while that may have been a little naïve, it wasn’t gross negligence.

Not that any of that was an issue at the time.  We were deans together for a year, then he moved up to assistant principal while I trained a new dean the next year.  I also got pregnant with my second child.

Dean stories: Many illustrate the kinds of problem parents every teacher knows about.  One boy with ADD had a mother who insisted that he was incapable of behaving in class.  She had all the right eduspeak and said that his out-of-control behavior was a “manifestation of her son’s disability,” so teachers were not to kick him out of class and I was not to discipline the boy.  Now, it’s true that schools must accommodate issues that are “manifestations of a child’s disabilities,” but that doesn’t mean not disciplining a kid. Furthermore, when I sent out an evaluation to all his teachers, it appeared that the lad had ADD in every class but science, where he was a model citizen.  I asked the boy about this in front of his mother, and he said, “Have you seen my science teacher?  He’s huge!  The first day of class, he took me back in his office and said, ‘Son, one of us is going to run this classroom, and it isn’t going to be you.’  He scares me!”

You’d have to meet this science teacher.  He’s retired now and has been subbing for years.  He’s a giant teddy bear of a man, and the kids adore him, but he doesn’t take any nonsense.

Mom still did not see this as evidence that her son could behave in class.  She didn’t see the relevance of the fact that the kid was flunking every class but science, in which he had a B.  Too many parents fail to understand that discipline is critical to success.  It doesn’t undermine a child’s self-esteem; it makes it possible for the kid to build real self-worth.

Then there was the mom who had no daytime phone number.  She insisted that she was simply incommunicado during the day.  Naturally, her son had his own discipline issues.  One day, I called him into my office, and to let me know what he thought of me, he intentionally got his shoes full of mud and wiped it in a trail from the front door to mine.  I got cleaner from the custodians and told him to scrub it.  Miraculously, he was able to call his “incommunicado” mother, who came sweeping into the school to protest this degrading treatment of her child.  Ron, the principal, pulled a fifty-dollar bill from his wallet and offered it to her if she would let the boy do the same thing to her carpet.  The mother got so angry she withdrew the boy from our school.

Some parents were easier to deal with than others.  There were the five girls who got high in the dark room of the photo classroom and adamantly denied it, though the stench took days to clear out of the confined space.  One parent was unconditionally supportive of the school; the rest supported their kids, who continued to have problems at school and elsewhere.  The parents of the one girl were frustrated by her friends’ parents’ permissiveness.  It certainly didn’t make their job any easier.  

There was the senior girl who had never gotten in trouble, not once, in all her years of school, who finished her classes one spring day just before graduation and got rip-roaring drunk.  She had no more classes to attend, but she returned to school, just to show her friends she had done something naughty.  She was a main office student assistant, so when she saw me outside, she smiled and waved very enthusiastically.  “Hi, Mrs. Reed!”  Then she tripped and giggled, righted herself, stumbled, giggled again.  

The moment I came within three feet of her, my nose told me what was up.  She denied it at first.  Even when she bolted from my office to throw up, she insisted it was some bad leftover fettuccini she’d eaten at lunch.  As she began to sober up, though, she became increasing compliant and horribly embarrassed.  Her parents were mortified.  I felt bad for the whole family.  That was not an easy five-day suspension to dole out, but the parents backed me 100 percent.  Heck, they thanked me.  She was back on the straight and narrow, and we were on good terms when she graduated.

Neither was it easy to suspend a speech kid for possession of marijuana.  I knew this kid and loved her, and she didn’t hold it against me.  Her parents also thanked me.  She graduated and, in fact, kept in touch for years after.

In addition to my discipline duties, I was in charge of organizing graduation, and I got to know the man who is generally referred to as the “cap and gown dude.”  To this day, when I see him at graduation, he laughs about the day he came to see me about the 1995 graduation, when I was eight months pregnant.  That happened to be the day I finally had the evidence I needed to nail a drug dealer, so I went running out the door to catch the kid before he could leave school grounds.  Let me just tell you, running at that stage of pregnancy is damned uncomfortable, but we got him.

Wow.  This makes it sounds like Columbine has all these drug and alcohol issues, but really, those were few and far between.  Actually, I spent most of my time dealing with chronic non-attenders, and even these were a minority in the school.  In the dean capacity, I dealt with maybe 10 percent of the student body.  More than once, I referred to Columbine as Utopia High School.  

And there were fun times, too.  Another speech kid and I worked out a rather elaborate prom invitation where I called a young lady to my office and told her she was in trouble because a bottle of liquor had been found in her locker.  (Bear in mind, this was another really good kid.)  As she stammered through her conviction that it couldn’t be hers, I told her that she couldn’t prove it, so she would either have to take a five-day suspension or attend the prom with J.R.  It took a few seconds for her to process that one, but amazingly, she said yes to J.R.

As a dean, I worked with teachers all over the building.  I believed in being highly visible, so it wasn’t until I was in my last trimester of pregnancy that I had student assistants fetch kids I needed to speak to.  Before that, I went and pulled them out of class myself.  I talked to their teachers extensively.  I soon learned, not only which kids were problem kids, but which teachers couldn’t manage a classroom and who expected next to nothing from students.  I came to respect outstanding colleagues I had once barely spoken to.  It was a two-year experience I wouldn’t trade for anything, but when my two years were up, it was good to go back to the classroom.

Mostly.

During those two years away, two teachers had covered my teaching position, neither of whom pushed the speech kids very hard.  Marti, who had always been much-loved, suddenly found herself in the position of “evil coach” in opposition with the “nice teacher.”  For her, it was a relief to go back to having a partner who pushed along with her.  I, however, had left as a “cool teacher” but was now returning as “the evil former dean” who was replacing the “nice teacher.”  The vast majority of varsity team members hated my guts, including a charismatic team officer who made it a personal mission to get rid of me.

It was an entirely unexpected situation.  I had never encountered anything like it.  He disobeyed rules, blew off his duties as team officer, and quietly worked behind the scenes with the varsity kids, undermining every word out of my mouth.  Fortunately, Marti and I formed the more customary bonds with the novice students, and before long, the novices were outperforming the varsity.  It was a strange dynamic, and in time, we had to remove the officer from his position and eventually from the team.  The varsity kids wrote letters to the school board about how awful we were, while the novices supported us.  It took two years to clear away the fallout and another year to really regain our strength, but by the 1998-99 school year, Marti and I were working with one of the strongest, most cohesive teams we had ever coached.  In many, many ways, it was a magic year.

It made what was to come a thousand times easier.  And a thousand times harder.