Columbine 10 years later: just another school, with a history

LITTLETON, Colo. — It could be any sprawling, modern high school in any sprawling, modern suburb.

Royal-blue lockers line tiled hallways. Hand-drawn banners remind students to vote in elections, attend dances. Teachers rush, students shriek. Glass cases display the shiny trophies of athletic triumph.

But this is not any high school.

This is Columbine, the school whose very name has been co-opted into a cultural icon for the worst that children can do and the worst that parents can imagine.

The name itself morphs into every form of speech — none good:

It's an adjective, as in, "Hey, don't go all Columbine here."

It's a noun, as in, "Authorities said the suspects had planned another Columbine."

Columbine is a touchstone, an event, a heartbreak.

It's also a school.

The school isn't Gettysburg; it couldn't become hallowed ground. The broken glass had to be swept up and replaced. The bullet holes had to be plastered over, and everybody had to go on.

Since that tragic day 10 years ago today, nine classes have walked through its doors and out again.

Now, the youngest of the students who shuffle along these hallways would have no memory of it at all.

They wouldn't know that Mandy Bowen Cooke, one of their government and history teachers, was a sophomore then. Or that when the fire alarm first bleated its warning, she was afraid the interruption would keep her from finishing her math test. "We all thought it was a prank," she said.

The students there now wouldn't know that just outside the administration office is where Frank DeAngelis, principal then and now, heard the glass shattering, and saw the shotgun pointed at him. It seemed the size of a cannon, he said.

Not 10 yards from the administration office door hangs the trophy case, suspended from the ceiling, that he briefly ducked behind.

For DeAngelis, the years haven't scrubbed the details from his memory.

Walking these halls now, he remembers that his mind, doing those odd flips and turns human brains do when they can't process the inconceivable, honed instead on the merely macabre: "I thought, 'What's it going to feel like to have bullets go through me?' "

Walking down a hall recently, he pointed where 25 to 30 girls dressed for gym ran from the locker room. He led them to the gymnasium, where the door was locked.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out his fistful of keys and somehow grabbed the right one.

Inside the gym, DeAngelis locked the doors, "But still we didn't feel safe," he said.

The killers never came after him, DeAngelis said. He didn't understand why until he read the investigation reports.

"Dave came up the stairs" — stairs outside the cafeteria that fill with students every day — "and they shot him instead."

On the second floor, not far from the cafeteria, is a science room.

Most who sit there now, doodling, passing notes, have no clue that Dave Sanders laid in this room for hours, Bowen Cooke said.

They would have no idea that here is where a desperate teacher stuck an unforgettable sign: "1 bleeding to death."

They shouldn't have to know that, Bowen Cooke said.

"A terrible thing did happen there. But we built the memorial to have those memories there. Columbine is still a high school, and kids need to be able to have it just be that. I'm glad they don't have to be reminded of it every day."

To rebuild and repair the school, Columbine and Jefferson County School District officials consulted with psychologists who told them there should be calming colors, soothing materials.

They changed the sound of the fire alarms so students never would hear that same shrill wail again.

Chinese food was being served that day. So that was off the menu for a year or so. Ketchup was shelved for a while, too.

The library was above the cafeteria then, but that library, where students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed most of their victims and themselves, is gone.

The new library, with lots of windows, is on the first floor. Students, if necessary, could smash chairs through those windows and escape.

The second floor above the cafeteria is now a towering, two-story open ceiling crowned by a blue-sky, aspen mural. Looking up is like being lifted into the clouds. Thirteen clouds — the number killed that day in 1999.

On the Columbine campus, mementos are subtle like that.

Outside the newly configured west entrance are 13 spindly trees.

In a trophy case outside the cafeteria, Rachel Scott and Daniel Mauser smile out of photos over winners of the forensics awards established in their names.

Danny was a sophomore, but made the forensics team. Rachel played the lead in the school play a couple of weeks before she died.

Lauren Townsend's volleyball jersey, No. 8, is framed and hangs on a wall in the administration office, alongside a photo of the team.

Ten years on, the names Rachel Scott or Matt Kechter may have faded from many memories.

But not those of Harris and Klebold. The pair are, in a twist that undoubtedly would have pleased them, enduring household names.

Yet, their names are not inside the school they tried to destroy. There are 13 etched in granite at the library entrance, not 15.

There is only one place where they cannot be erased. In hallways outside administrators' offices hang framed photos of Columbine senior classes, going back decades.

In their photo, members of the class of 1999 sit on gym bleachers. There's Lauren Townsend, who would have been a valedictorian.

In the back row, in the corner and barely visible, Harris sits next to Klebold. They are smiling.

They became famous. They forever changed the way school administrators discipline and SWAT teams operate. They turned their school into a synonym for horror.

Bowen Cooke said people ask her why she came back here to teach.

"People say, 'How can you go back into that building?' But it's Columbine. It will always be my high school."