Leading the Journey

We had run the drills. We had the procedures in place, yet when it actually happened that December 4, 2024, it felt like chaos, uncertainty, confusion, and pain. I wasn’t on campus that day; my own part in it began afterward, at the reunification center, where I sat with our staff and students and listened as they told me what they’d lived through. Everything I share here about the chaos, the sounds, the confusion, and the strength people drew on comes from sitting with them and listening to their stories, in their own words, in the hours and days that followed. These are the lessons I keep coming back to — and talking with others who have lived through the same kind of day, I’ve learned we were far from alone in what we saw and felt.

But alongside the chaos, something else was true: we were able to meet that moment with a strength that didn’t come from our carefully developed plans. It came from trust — trust in God, and trust in our team. We knew God loved those two kindergarten boys more than we ever could. It gave our staff the strength to hold those bleeding boys, to hide with students under the table and to trust that God would help those first responders make the right decisions.

Before I get to what happened that day, there’s a lesson that belongs earlier in the story — one about what happens before the emergency, not during it. As Christians, we are trained to extend grace, and to see the good in people. That’s a gift. But it can also work against us. When someone shows up on campus and something about them makes the hair on the back of your neck rise, the instinct many of us have is to push that feeling down, and give the benefit of the doubt. Research bears this out in a sobering way: the U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center has found that in the great majority of school shootings, someone — a classmate, a teacher, a parent — noticed something concerning beforehand and didn’t act on it, not wanting to overreact, or simply talking themselves out of what they’d sensed. A more recent Secret Service study of dozens of averted school shootings found the opposite pattern: attacks were stopped when people paid attention to those signals and said something. The lesson isn’t to become suspicious of everyone. It’s to stop overriding the instinct God gave us for a reason. Grace and discernment aren’t opposites — we can hold open hands toward people and still trust the alarm bell when it rings.

One of the strangest parts of that day was how unclear the sound itself was. Some of our people thought it was a roof caving in. Others thought it was a heavy door slamming. This turns out to be almost universal. A Sandy Hook teacher later recalled thinking the first shots sounded like metal chairs falling over for a holiday program, not realizing what was happening until she saw things flying off the walls. Survivors of the Las Vegas shooting described the gunfire as sounding like fireworks or popping, and experts note there’s real science behind why: gunfire is genuinely hard for an untrained ear to identify, especially indoors, where sound bounces and distorts. Even trained responders have been fooled — a North Carolina school once locked down an entire district over a damaged water heater that sounded exactly like shots on the roof. The takeaway isn’t that people were foolish to hesitate; it’s that uncertainty in the first moments is the norm, not the exception, and procedures need to account for that instead of assuming everyone will instantly recognize a threat.

Without a PA system, we found there was no way to know what was happening in the other classrooms or out on the playground. That gap — not knowing, and not being able to find out — is consistently one of the most damaging parts of these events, and not just for small schools. The independent investigation into the 2021 Oxford High School shooting in Michigan found serious communication breakdowns among first responders themselves, not only between staff and families. If agencies with radios, and mutual-aid protocols struggle to keep everyone informed in real time, it’s little surprise that a school, might find it even harder. It’s a strong argument for building redundant, low-tech communication into a safety plan — group texts among staff, radios, and prearranged signals are good places to start.

We learned quickly that our own procedures were superseded the moment law enforcement arrived. Teachers weren’t allowed to communicate with parents, even when the parents were calling and texting them. The staff also weren’t told what was happening around the campus. This is consistent with what after-action reviews from other shootings describe: once law enforcement takes command of a scene, school staff shift from decision-makers to bystanders inside their own building. The federal review of the Uvalde response went further, finding that confusion and a lack of clear incident command among responding agencies compounded the chaos for everyone, including the families desperate for information outside. The lesson many districts have taken from these reviews isn’t just “trust law enforcement” — it’s that schools should press, ahead of time, for clarity on how and when information will reach staff and families once law enforcement is in charge, because that handoff point is where communication most often breaks down.

One detail that surprised us was that students and teachers couldn’t take their belongings with them. All their purses, backpacks and lunchboxes become evidence and had to remain exactly where they were. We were also surprised that clearing the 4-classroom building and gym took over an hour, while students were huddled and hiding. This is something other schools have discovered as well. It’s a jarring shift: the building you know as a school becomes, instantly, a crime scene, and normal instincts like “grab your things and go” no longer apply. Preparing students and staff ahead of time for that possibility — that a slow, controlled, evidence-conscious evacuation is a sign things are being done correctly, not a sign something has gone wrong — can ease some of the panic in the moment.

The value we found in first aid training and having supplies close at hand is borne out well beyond our own experience. The national Stop the Bleed movement exists precisely because of this lesson: it was born out of a review of the Sandy Hook shooting, when trauma surgeons concluded that some victims might have survived if bleeding had been controlled sooner. Since then, millions of people — including, increasingly, high schoolers themselves — have been trained to apply pressure and tourniquets in the first minutes after an injury, before professional help can arrive. The principle behind it is the same one we experienced: in that first hour, the people already in the room are the ones who can make the difference, not the people still on their way.

And yet, for us, it wasn’t the training or the supplies that carried people through — it was prayer. That’s not something you’ll find in an after-action report, but it’s real, and it belongs in this account. Procedures got us through the mechanics of the day. Faith is what got our students and teachers through the rest of it.

I want to be clear about what that looked like, because it wasn’t passive. It wasn’t simply waiting for the fear to pass. Feather River students led out in prayer groups while teachers were tending to the injured. The teachers actively turned to prayer and to one another — checking on each other, and staying calm enough to help someone else stay calm. That kind of strength was built through morning worships, regular prayer for students’ safety, and deep teamwork among the staff.

We found it was incredibly important to bring people together afterward and let them tell what they experienced, because no two people had lived the same thirty minutes. One teacher finding the injured student, Another hiding and listening to everything from under the table with her students, an office staff member gathering student contact information — each had a piece, and hearing how the pieces fit together, again and again, was part of how people began to process it.

That’s consistent with what specialists in trauma recovery say too: healing isn’t a single conversation, and connectedness with community and fellow survivors is itself a source of resilience.

We were encouraged by the counselors to not wait too long to go back to the school. The day the teachers and students came back took profound courage on everyone’s part. Other school communities describe the same thing — one principals’ network advises against even resuming classes until every funeral and memorial has been held, and schools that have gone through this often hold a reunification day or open house before students return, precisely because walking back through the doors is its own hurdle, separate from anything that happened before.

It’s also true that “getting over it” isn’t really the goal, because it doesn’t happen like that. One minute you’re feeling “ok” and the next you’re crying. We were fortunate to receive an outpouring of love and resources, and it helped enormously — but so much of it arrived in the first days, when everyone was still in shock and not yet able to take it in. The harder stretch came later: the months afterward, when a knock on a classroom door could send kids straight back under their desks, and when the flood of counselors and casseroles had quietly tapered off just as the deeper processing was starting.

Other communities have described that same gap; one school even redesigned its hallways with quieter flooring to soften the sounds that were still startling students months on. Specialists who’ve walked schools through recovery describe short-term and long-term phases that unfold on very different timelines, and stress the need to keep support in place well past the point when the cameras and casseroles are gone — because that’s often when the real, slower work of healing begins. Knowing that gap exists ahead of time — and planning to still be present for people in month four or month ten, and year two— is one of the most important things a school community can do for itself.

No plan survives contact with the actual event — not fully, not exactly as written. But the schools and communities who’ve been through this consistently point to the same handful of things worth doing beforehand: build communication systems that don’t depend on one piece of infrastructure, prepare people for the reality that law enforcement will take over decision-making, explain in advance why an evacuation might be slow and belongings left behind, and invest in first aid training before it’s ever needed.

But if I had to name the single biggest lesson, it’s this: preparation gives you procedures, but it’s trust and faith that give you the strength to actually live through the moment those procedures can’t cover. Our students and teachers walked through chaos and came out the other side able to turn toward good instead of being consumed by fear. That didn’t happen by accident, and it isn’t something a checklist can produce. It’s something a community builds together, long before it’s ever tested — and it’s the part of that day I’m most grateful for.