It's Been Said....

Dam Safety/School Safety.....Po-tay-to/Po-tah-to What does dam safety have to do with school safety, you ask? They have nothing in common, do they? Totally different scenarios, right? So why am I including a photo of a dam failure in progress to start this post? Hang with me, folks. We're just getting started. The dam failure pictured below with link to a YouTube video documentary that aired 40 years later is of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's only dam failure in the agency's over 100 years of existence. Pretty good safety record, right? Very rare occurrence, right? And, yet, this single dam failure had major consequential impacts on a national level that ultimately resulted in national standards for dam owners and operators that's still evolving today.   Teton Dam Failure June 5, 1976 In comparing this single dam failure, and the consequences that followed, with school safety related to mass school shootings, I ask you to consider how many schools on a national level ...

  Anne Marie Hochhalter Born December 19, 1981 Died February 16, 2025 Hero Courageous Fighter Fiercely Independent Survivor Advocate Victim Following her death on February 16, 2025, all of the above adjectives have been used to describe who my daughter, Anne Marie Hochhalter, was. Thing is, I never saw her as such. I saw her as my daughter, my first-born child. She will always remain so. Please don't get me wrong. I do believe some of those accolades listed above must have, in fact, applied to Anne Marie. Otherwise, so many people would not be using them to describe their own knowledge of who she was. I just never got to see them or experience them with her as they applied to her at least from December 2009 until her death. I wasn't allowed to (more on that later). There were snippets here and there in media stories, but that was all I got to experience of her activities. But I digress. As most folks already know, Anne Marie was critically injured during the Columbine massacre....