It's Been Said....

Columbine Memorial Clement Park, Littleton, CO Image From Wikimedia Commons Awhile back, a high school student from Medellin, Columbia asked me a series of questions about 'Columbine' as part of a project she was doing in her English class. What follows is my answer to Question #4 in the Series: Would You Forgive the Shooters? Oh, I don't know.... What time of day is it? What day of the week is it? What month of the year is it? Who am I with, and what are we discussing? Am I 'required' to forgive the shooters? Will forgiving the shooters make me a happy person? Will my forgiving the shooters make a difference in anyone's life, much less my own? I mean, they're dead, right? Seems like the more I tried to come up with an answer to the original question, the more confused, frustrated, and emotional I became. Truth is, English is a very strange language....very strange, indeed. In its proper context, the original question sounds a...

Columbine Impromptu Memorial Clement Park PennLive.com Screen Capture YouTube Video The Columbine High School shooting, April 20, 1999 A few years ago I participated in a four part interview for a website titled It Can Happen Here (ICHH) . ICHH formed not too long after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. Its primary focus was on promoting school safety. Unfortunately the site is no longer active. Because it is no longer active, I thought it might be ok to amend, update, and reboot a newer version of my interviews in that series. This post is the first. The other three interviews will follow at later dates. ================================================================== ICHH : Your daughter, Anne Marie, was shot and severely injured at Columbine April 20, 1999 and your son, Nathan, was in a science room for four hours that day but was physically unharmed. How are you and your family doing these many years later? Ted Zocco-Hochhalter :...

March For Our Lives WIKIMEDIA COMMONS What if, indeed? What if students did become more powerful than the politicians? Back in 2015, I posted a comment in a local message board here in Colorado ( School Safety: To Plan or Not to Plan ) about a meeting I had with a group of Denver East High School students. The topic for discussion was 'campus carry'. Here's the post: Yesterday, March 25, 2015 I had the pleasure of meeting with a group of high school students from East High School in Denver, CO. This is an activist group that has a range of things on their agenda that they hope to address over time. The subject of this particular discussion was "gun violence".  I must admit I was a little apprehensive going in as to what to expect. After all, it's been over 30 years since I last set foot in a classroom at that level and in a "teaching" capacity (although I wasn't there to teach, but, rather, to discuss with them), and I'm not ...

Whitney Cornett is my niece and the daughter of my youngest sister, Belva Palmer, who shared her memories of Columbine in a previous post.  The following narrative recounts Whitney's memories of the Columbine massacre that took place when she was in fifth grade. When she was a junior at Columbine High School, she wrote the following essay as part of a journaling class she was in.  She indicated to me this was spur of the moment, and the topic was of a memory of something that really affected her growing up. "Good, bad, ugly, fun. Whatever came to mind." She chose her memories of Columbine as her topic. I'm glad she did. Some of the details she relates have changed since she wrote this, but her 'story' is the only thing that matters here, and her story is powerful. Every time I read this I have to sit back, collect my emotions, and take a deep breath before going on because Whitney was only eleven years old when the shootings at Columbine High ...

Brent Rockswold is my nephew and the son of my younger sister, Faye Rockswold who shared her memories of Columbine in a previous post. He's also the same age as my son Nathan who was hunkered down with his classmates in the science wing at Columbine High School during the massacre. These are some of his memories as a 14 year old when that massacre took place.  Brent Rockswold Brent....in his own words: In April of 1999 I was a pretty regular fifteen-year-old boy. Having grown up in a small town I had always been pretty sheltered and as a result I was mostly concerned with things that affected me directly. On April 20th I walked into homeroom and a friend asked if I had heard about a shooting that had happened at Columbine High School. My first thought: "I don't know where that is. It's probably in New York or LA, things like this happen there all the time." The rest of class went on normally. As I was w...