Tumbler Ridge gets support from Sandy Hook parents and other U.S. school-shooting survivors

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By now, it has become familiar, if not routine. When a shooter’s bullets tear through a U.S. school, a machinery of trauma response is set in motion. Experts are marshalled to provide emotional and mental-health support. Information sessions are held. Those affected are taught about stress reactions, so they can understand how their bodies are responding at a physiological level. Therapy dogs are brought in.

There is no textbook. But there is a playbook south of the border, one written by bitter experience.

As local and provincial leaders in British Columbia attempt to build back a shattered school and community, they are leaning in part on those who have been through this before.

In Tumbler Ridge, the local school district is receiving advice from a B.C. company called Safer Schools Together on a range of issues connected to reopening. That company, in turn, has turned for support to Safe and Sound Schools, a U.S. non-profit whose founders lost children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.

“The community has reached out to others who have walked this walk – like me,” said Michele Gay, one of the founders of the non-profit whose daughter was killed at Sandy Hook.

“Because at a moment of absolute brokenness for a community, it’s very difficult to make decisions.”

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In the U.S., those whose lives have been bloodied by school shootings say they have found the greatest solace in other people whose life stories have been altered by senseless killing. It was, for example, a Vietnam veteran who gave important counsel to Frank DeAngelis, the principal at Columbine High School in Colorado when a pair of shooters killed 13 students and one teacher in 1999.

Now, Mr. DeAngelis is among those who say they stand ready to help those in Tumbler Ridge, too, sharing their weight of accumulated experience. Within days of the shooting there on Feb. 10, Mr. DeAngelis had reached out to the principal of the northeastern B.C. high school with the same message he has delivered to dozens of educational leaders stricken by similar circumstances: You have just been made a member of a club no one wants to join. What you went through is real. I’m here for you.

“I say, ‘I know what you’re going through,’” he said.

Mr. DeAngelis has made similar calls to at least two dozen principals in the years since the Columbine shooting, volunteering himself as an informal support centre.

In recent years, he has also become part of a more formalized effort to provide guidance through a Principal Recovery Network in the U.S., formed under the National Association of Secondary School Principals. Mr. DeAngelis was one of its founding members and a contributor to a 16-page document that has become a guidebook to navigating the aftermath.

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Consider reopening school, it says, only after funeral services have been completed. Let students talk and regularly canvass their opinions. Send letters to prospective universities explaining the sudden fall in a graduating student’s marks. Document offers of help from local businesses that can come in handy months later, when the school might need food for staff or students. Secure mental health and other resources “for not just months, but years.”

Therapy dogs, it adds, “have universally been viewed as a welcome and helpful resource.”

It can be helpful, Mr. DeAngelis said, for a school to hire a second head administrator in the wake of a shooting, a person who can oversee bureaucratic school matters and free the principal to roam halls and classrooms, offering their visible presence as a stabilizing force.

“That is so important for the students and the staff,” he said. “If a kid does not feel safe, if a teacher does not feel safe, they’re not going to learn.”

How to talk to those affected also matters. Merely calling in an army of school counsellors may not be enough, said Karla Vermeulen, an associate professor of psychology at the State University of New York at New Paltz, N.Y., who has written extensively on disaster response.

“Traditional counselling skills are really different than crisis intervention and disaster mental-health response,” she said.

“School counsellors tend to focus more on longer-term treatment or addressing broader needs for students. In this case, what they need immediately after a shooting is just that sense of safety – that sense of hope that they will feel better again at some point.”

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Psychologists divide the aftermath of a shooting into four periods: the immediate, heroic stage when those involved struggle to find and help survivors; a honeymoon stage in which some communities come together in unified resolve; a disillusionment stage in which the toll of loss grows heavy; a reconstruction stage in which life is rebuilt.

“There’s no time frame to put on that – it can go on for years,” Prof. Vermeulen said. ”It’s until people really trust each other again.”

The B.C. government, in a statement, said counsellors have been dispatched to Tumbler Ridge, and that “resources will be available as long as needed.” It did not answer questions about whether those resources include people trained in responding to mass shootings.

Elsewhere, experience has shown that the intensity of social fractures wreaked by tragedy can damage the building of new trust. In Columbine, a pastor who provided a funeral service for one of the shooters “lost his congregation. He became persona non grata,” said Ralph Larkin, a sociologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who authored the book Comprehending Columbine.

People blamed the parents of the shooters. Lawsuits followed.

“There was a tremendous amount of conflict, recrimination and all sorts of nasty stuff,” he said.

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As principal, it fell in part to Mr. DeAngelis to assuage the trauma and attempt to hold the community together. His efforts to help others do the same point to a broader truth: Being part of a school shooting is a uniquely distressing experience, more akin to war than to other experiences in peaceful society. It is difficult for those who have never had a gun fired at them to fully understand, said Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium.

She surveyed 167 mass shooting survivors and “the number one thing that promoted post-traumatic growth – and it’s not even close – is social acknowledgment,” said Dr. Schildkraut, who provided an expert report for Canada’s Mass Casualty Commission, following the 2020 Portapique shootings in Nova Scotia.

Even the experience of other forms of death doesn’t compare, she said. “Losing your mom or your dad – while catastrophic – is not the same as watching someone get blown away in front of you.”

Rather than saying “I know how you feel,” she suggests, “I have no idea how you feel.”

It’s the same reason others have found such value in hearing from those who can legitimately say they understand.

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For Dave Posey, it was another shooting survivor who provided a key piece of advice when his son, Reichen, shied away from showering after seven people – five children and two teachers – were killed in his Grade 1 classroom at Sandy Hook.

Reichen was in weekly counselling at the time. But no one could understand the aversion to showering, until the family spoke with a woman who had been through the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting. She recounted a similar experience, telling the family that Reichen was likely “scared to death of being stuck in a place that he’s vulnerable,” Mr. Posey recalled.

“She’s like, ‘Do what I did. I went and bought bear spray and put it in the shower,’” he said. They followed the advice. “Never had a problem again. Ever.”

For Michael Bennett, who was injured by gunfire in 2004 while working as a special-education teacher at Columbia High School in East Greenbush, N.Y., the breakthrough came a half-decade ago. That’s when he found a therapist with expertise helping soldiers who had returned from front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It made a world of difference in the care that I needed, after kind of stumbling through for 16 years,” he said.

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For Tumbler Ridge, the more immediate concern is how school will be conducted when it resumes. The daily calendar will likely look much the same, said Ms. Gay, the co-founder of Safe and Sound Schools, with science and math classes proceeding in familiar procession.

But “we’re going to make these much more experiential opportunities, and we’re going to leave a lot of space for conversations, for connection. So it’s almost a blend of academic and social emotional learning,” she said.

She expects, too, that Tumbler Ridge will extend school-related activities into the summer, with camps and recreational pursuits for students, which have proven “universally helpful in re-establishing for individuals their connection to community.”

For the more immediate future, though, preparations are under way to provide at least some solace for a community stricken by tragedy.

”There will be lots of dogs,” Ms. Gay said. “I have yet to find a school community where that wasn’t helpful.”