Love Chinese food? Then hate Eric and Dylan

Echoes of tragedy
Effects of 1999 school shooting are shrouded yet unmistakable

By Holly Yettick, News Staff Writer
April 20, 2002

No more does the cafeteria serve the Chinese food that was on the menu the day students fled for their lives on April 20, 1999.

Not once in the past three years has the marquee in front of the school congratulated the marching band, as it did that day.

Balloons are banned because when they pop, they sound like gunfire.

And lockers and locker numbers belonging to killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold have never been reassigned.

The impact of America's deadliest school shooting is at once imperceptible and evident everywhere these days at Columbine High School.

High schools are a little like Ferris wheels. Every year, a quarter of the enrollment gets off and is replaced by a new group. Then the ride moves on. Three years after the shootings, the final class to witness the carnage is about to be gone. Its members will graduate May 18.

And in many ways the school is back to where it was.

In the days and weeks following the shootings, experts forecast years of educational turmoil.

"I would certainly expect many of these kids will have a very difficult time being focused on schoolwork and staying focused," one psychologist predicted in May 1999. "It may actually become dysfunctional for them."

But academic thermometers usually used to gauge a school's health suggest that isn't so.

Attendance rates, down in 2000 to 91.7 percent, were back up last year to 94.3 percent. About 95 percent of the class of 2002 has chosen to spend all four years at the school.

ACT scores for college-bound students dipped slightly from 22.9 in 1998 to 22.2 last year. But graduation rates have remained steady at more than 93 percent, as has the percentage of students planning to attend college -- 82 percent.

Last year students reported feeling safer in the hallways, buses and restrooms and outside the building. And the neighborhood, too, has continue to prosper, with the median home price in the area of the high school rising since 1999 at the same rate as the rest of Jefferson County's.

Parent Joyce Hooker, who sits on the school's accountability committee, says parental involvement is back to normal after an initial surge of concern after the tragedy.

"If I look at a snapshot of the school today and three years ago, a lot is probably the same," said English teacher Eric Friesen. "We're still a school working with and educating kids."

This is the school, after all, where a high school football championship was televised on ESPN, where news of a February food fight went national.

Half the employees who were working at the school April 20, 1999, have left, citing reasons related and unrelated to the shootings. That's a level of turnover more common in the inner city than in the suburbs.

"I think the reason was (that) we're under the microscope," Principal Frank DeAngelis said. "You always had people second-guessing. You had people from around the country, around the world, they wanted to tell us what to do for Columbine to be ... 'fixed.' "

Not everyone is still traumatized.

Like a tornado, the tragedy's tailwinds hopscotched across the school, felling some physically or emotionally but leaving others seemingly untouched.

Science teacher Chris Mosier returned easily to the same classroom where bullets ricocheted as he waited for the SWAT team to save his class.

His wife, Cheryl, also a Columbine science teacher, said she saw no seniors get upset during a practice lockdown this year.

Yet the bulletlike boom of a cafeteria table collapsing one day at lunch sent seniors scrambling for cover while underclassmen continued to chat and chew.

And choir leader Leland Andres Sr., who will retire this spring after 29 years at the school, recently learned that his blood pressure rises each time he enters the building.

The school has done its best to dim flashbacks by designing away physical traces of the tragedy.

Walls have been rearranged and carpeting changed.

Families of the injured and dead raised more than $3 million to replace the library where 12 died.

Food fight and flashbacks

Still, three years later, English teacher Paula Reed has flashbacks. Several times a day. Every day. That's one of the reasons she is taking a leave of absence next year to work full-time on historical romance novels, where "people make the right choices -- and those who don't make the right choices get their just deserts."

"I'm becoming very good at being in emotional turmoil and not showing it," Reed said.

One especially intense flashback came in February during an event that upset many teachers and students.

Four students were arrested in connection with an attempted food fight that ended in a near-riot.

"I was so terrified," Reed said. "The thing that still haunted my dreams is kids getting hurt and me not being able to stop it."

The food fight sent DeAngelis into a funk.

"I was really down," he said. "I took it personally."

Two days afterward, more than 140 seniors, representing more than a fourth of the class, signed a letter of apology to their principal.

"It seems as though the events of last Friday have torn a tightly knit bond between us, the senior class, and you, our principal," the letter read. "Without you, we, as a senior class, might have collapsed in the face of tragedy. But instead, you helped us rise above the pain and to come together as one."

But some saw the food fight as evidence that there is no room left for normal high school high jinks.

"It's not like a school any more, with all the policies," senior Brian Bay said.

Joyce Hooker says her son, Sean, a Columbine senior, feels the same way.

"They have a saying up there, 'I'm offended; you're suspended.' "

Hooker said she disagrees that the school has grown too strict.

"How do you let them have their freedom, learn responsibility, yet protect them within reason? I feel the kids are safe without trying to make it a jail."

The school that inspired a national debate on metal detectors, uniforms and closed campuses has adopted none of those.

During a lunchtime this month students flowed freely between the cafeteria and fast food joints without wearing IDs.

Still, Columbine has not been immune to increased security.

Only three entrances are open during the day. Keys have been replaced by electronic cards that can be programmed to grant access during limited hours. An extra security guard has been working the 2-10 p.m. shift.

Once the class of 2002 graduates, Columbine will lose that guard, along with a full-time registered nurse and half-time mental health worker added after the shootings.

The bullying debate

At least one senior is worried the school will lose more than funding for extra staff when the class of 2002 graduates.

"I'm really afraid that the school will be the same as it was before the shooting," said Betsy Kwerneland. "People were mean to each other. I don't mean bullying. I mean specific groups who just hang out with each other and don't go outside their groups.

"But our class was like a family. I'm afraid once that family is gone that everybody will be disconnected again and won't understand each other."

In the year after the attack, videos and writings left behind by the shooters, bolstered by accounts from some students, led to speculation that bullying might have driven them to kill. Kids were "vicious" to Harris and Klebold, said senior Lauren Maestas.

"It doesn't surprise me, what happened, because of the constant harassment Eric got," she said.

But that kind of talk tends to make others at Columbine bristle.

"I think sometimes we feel like the rape victim who's told her skirt was too short and she shouldn't have been walking down that street at night," Reed said.

Said Cheryl Mosier: "(Harris and Klebold) scared me more than any kids in the building. They bullied more kids than they were bullied."

Even those who deny bullying was a major problem say a nice school has grown nicer.

Heart of Columbine, founded in response to the tragedy, raised $14,000 last year to fight homelessness

Students say the LINKS program, already in the works before the tragedy, makes high school less intimidating by pairing upperclassmen with freshmen.

New this year is The American Students Fund. Funded by Maryland philanthropists, one goal is to award scholarships to students who embody such qualities as integrity and respect.

The new niceness has not been restricted to formal groups. Some of it has been as small as an added "I love you" to mom on the phone, a hallway "Hello."

The day of the shooting, senior Meghan McKee was trapped for nearly four hours in Cheryl Mosier's science class. Last year, Mosier broke down in tears during class because she was having a bad day.

Shortly afterward, Mosier received a note from McKee telling her to hang in there. The student had learned of the bad day from her little sister, who had witnessed the teacher's tears.

"I think the biggest thing is, I've realized people aren't here forever," McKee said. "I've learned to show them how I feel because I don't know when they're going to be gone."

End of illusions

For many seniors, youthful illusions of immortality had evaporated by sophomore year, when they suffered more tragedy with the suicides of a classmate and a classmate's mother and the murders of two classmates.

This worries DeAngelis.

"They were deprived of so much of their youth," DeAngelis said. "They saw so much death. It scares me. I hope it made them stronger."

Senior Jamie Conwell said students and teachers who hadn't been in the building during the tragedy kept expecting things to return to "quote unquote normal."

"The faculty that wasn't there, they have a hard time relating to our class," she said.

Andres sees less difference between those who were there that day and those who weren't.

And next fall, no one will need to make that distinction any more -- at least among the students.

But DeAngelis, the only administrator left who witnessed the tragedy, doubts things will ever be the way they were.

"People are figuring when this class leaves, we'll be back to normal. That's not going to happen. Columbine will never be back to normal.

thanks, very interesting. but no chines food is so overdone, i think.

How did the massacre cause the school cafeteria to stop serving chinese food?

Because they don't so anything that remotely resembles that day.
Chinese food was on the lunch menu that day... Thes they aren't going to put it on there again.

"Columbine, administrators changed the fire alarm sound and stopped serving Chinese food in the cafeteria to avoid invoking the smells and sounds of that day."

so they should cancel all classes which were on 20th april 1999

That seems a bit ridiculous to me to not serve Chinese food just any more just because it was on the menu that day.

Well, it is a fact that smell is the most powerful thing to bring back memories, so I can KINDA see why they did it, but yes it is dumb in my opinion.

There are a couple major points in this article which really show how complex humans really are especially in regards to perception and opinions.

Cheryl Moiser (science teacher) says Eric and Dylan were bullies themselves but a student senior Lauren Maestas says quite the opposite, that other kids were "vicious" towards them so she wasn't surprised it happened.

Always interesting.

I read a document that was posted in here and there was a bunch of people saying they (E/D) bullied a bunch of ppl.... Of Course this might fall into "Shit rolls down hill"...

Jocks pick on everyone
Popular kidds pick on metal heads
Metal heads pick on comic/ video game nerds
and so on...