The Club That No One Wants to Join
From Elaine Godfrey, writing in The Atlantic –
Frank DeAngelis, the former principal of Columbine High School, wears two silver medallions around his neck at all times: a crucifix and a Virgin Mary pendant. He wears them because they keep him tethered to reality. Every time DeAngelis hears about a mass shooting in America, he squeezes the cold metal between his fingers. The sensation helps him stay in the present, preventing his thoughts from darting back to that day in 1999 when two armed teenagers killed 13 people at his school in Colorado—when he encountered one of the gunmen in the hallway, and watched his students evacuate the building with their hands on their head.
DeAngelis is familiar with the heavy emotional burden carried by principals and other school leaders after mass shootings. And for the past two decades, one of his goals has been to make sure that those leaders do not have to carry it alone. DeAngelis, who is 67, soft-spoken, and reflective, is one of the founders of the Principal Recovery Network, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like—a support group for current and former principals who have experienced shootings at their schools. That there is even a need for such a deeply niche, macabre club—that enough people are affected by school shootings in America that they can be sorted into subcategories—is unsettling enough. What’s worse is that every year, this group, with its unfathomable cost of entry, has more and more work to do.
The PRN is a club that no one wants to belong to. But its existence is a necessary reminder that, even after the news crews rumble out and the nation’s attention turns elsewhere, school-shooting survivors and the people who care for them do not have to pick up the pieces alone. “In the PRN, when we say we know what you’re feeling, we really do,” DeAngelis told me. “We’ve all been through it.” The PRN’s 22 members are working on a manual to help principals lead their schools through recovery after a shooting. So far, the group has mostly steered clear of politics, but it’s getting more and more desperate for some kind of action.
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