Before “lockdown” flashed on classroom screens last Wednesday and Apalachee High School changed irrevocably, its 1,900 students were getting into the groove of a new academic year.
Seniors with cars had started decorating their assigned parking spaces, a perk available only to their class, painting them with flowers and Bible verses and a rendering of SpongeBob SquarePants.
The varsity Wildcat football team had played its first three games — losses, but there was still the rest of the season. Bar-B-Cats, a student club with a mission to raise “the next generation of pitmasters,” had catered its first few events of the school year.
But on Sept. 4 — five weeks into the new academic year — a 14-year-old freshman at the school in Winder, Ga., opened fire with an AR-15 during second period, officials said, killing two students and two teachers in the deadliest school shooting in Georgia’s history. Classes and events were canceled indefinitely.
The initial horror and shock of the attack has by now given way to the probing anguish that so often follows a school shooting. Students, parents and teachers are wondering what the rest of the school year will feel like and what challenges it will entail — just as they wonder how a student’s unraveling could have turned so violent.
“I’m still trying to question that,” said Myo Naing, a junior who credited one of his friends for running across their classroom to slam the door when the shooting started.
On Thursday, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said on its website that Colt Gray, the student charged in the attack, had brought the AR-15 to school in his backpack that morning and had asked his teacher if he could leave the classroom to go to the front office and speak to someone. The teacher let him leave with his belongings, the agency said, adding: “Gray went to the restroom and hid from teachers. Later, he took out the rifle, and began shooting.”
For nine days now, Apalachee students — Chee Nation, as they call themselves — have been in a kind of limbo. Many are hanging out with friends and playing video games, but there is no mistaking this unexpected break from classes for a vacation. “I wish we could go back to school and none of this had to happen,” Jose Inciarte, a 16-year-old junior, said.
In a video message to students on Wednesday, Jessica Rehberg, the principal, acknowledged that the pull to return was strong for some — but that it would also be daunting, which she and other administrators were trying to take into account. “I know some of you are not ready,” she said.
Other schools in the district reopened on Tuesday, with the Georgia State Patrol and the Barrow County Sheriff’s Office providing extra security for each building.
Winder, a city of 19,000 people about an hour from downtown Atlanta, and the surrounding small towns from which the student body also draws are where the metro area’s sprawl collides with rural Georgia. Apalachee High School opened about 20 years ago, as subdivisions with row after row of new family homes cropped up on what had once been farmland.
The evolution that has come with explosive growth — increased racial, ethnic and socioeconomic diversity — is as evident in the halls of the high school as in the rest of the area. About half of the school’s students are white, according to federal data; another quarter are Hispanic, 18 percent are Black, and 4 percent are Asian. About half qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch, mirroring the national average.
The school’s student-teacher ratios and counselor-student ratios are also almost exactly on par with national averages. With its boxy brown building flanked by parking lots and a football stadium, the school could fit in just about any American suburb or exurb.
There had been comfort and a sense of safety embedded in that normalcy.
“I felt safe when I was attending Apalachee. And everyone, I felt, had a sense of belonging in one way or another,” said Layla Renee Contreras, who graduated in 2019. Her sister is a student there now, and their mother is a substitute teacher.
Ms. Contreras praised the school’s teachers for nurturing her writing abilities, which served her well when she went to the University of Georgia in Athens, a half-hour away. But she also had fond memories of traditions that made the Apalachee experience unique, like “Mr. Wildcat,” an annual beauty pageant and talent show featuring male students.
Decorating the parking lot was also one of her favorite traditions.
The school had high-tech security features and detailed procedures, like automatically locking doors, the screens flashing “lockdown,” and the buttons that teachers could push to alert law enforcement of potential danger. All were deployed during the shooting. But before then, they had been regarded as precautions schools just have to take these days, not as evidence of an omnipresent danger.
Rabecca Sayarath, who has a 16-year-old daughter at Apalachee, described what now felt like a false sense of rural security, contrasting Winder with more populous Gwinnett County, where her family previously lived.
“They feel like it’s this tight-knit little country town that nothing bad could ever happen in,’’ Ms. Sayarath said of Winder.
Apalachee has never had to confront anything like the shooting. At scattered vigils over the last week, community members have gathered to console one another and grieve those who were killed: Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and the math teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 52.
But assigning blame is also a natural urge after a tragedy. Doubts have taken root about missed opportunities to act on warning signs displayed by the student charged with carrying out the attack.
“I definitely feel this was preventable,” said Sarah Licona, a senior, who has been trying to keep herself occupied with her job at McDonalds. She was galled by reports that the father of the suspect had given him the AR-15 as a Christmas gift, months after the boy had been accused of threatening in an online post to shoot up a middle school online.
“That’s just the worst thing he could have done,” Sarah said of the suspect’s father, Colin Gray, who has been charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter in connection with the shooting.
To many students, the suspect himself, is one of the biggest mysteries. He was not with them in classes on the first days of school when the year began on Aug. 1, other students said, and he had often been absent.
“I don’t really think the kid was part of our community,” said Stephen Kreyenbuhl, a social studies teacher, adding that “we didn’t get a chance” to draw him in. The school year was still so new.
“What could we have done more?” Mr. Kreyenbuhl said.
Maybe the tragedy will create more unity, encourage more kindness — that is Jose’s hope for when classes resume. “We all went through the same thing,” he said, “and we don’t want this to happen again.”
Myo, 16, thought back recently to his own freshman year, when the school had seemed like a big maze. “The halls are very confusing at first,” he said, “but once you get used to it, it’ll be very easy to navigate.”
He and his classmates now, once again, have to navigate something unfamiliar.
The son of immigrants from Myanmar who moved to the area from another Atlanta suburb, Myo described the school as crowded and lively but also nurturing. He recalled times he had leaned on school counselors. “I’ve gotten help from them many times, and they were very, very supportive,” he said.
Other schools in the district have reopened, but district officials have not said when classes will resume at Apalachee. Instead, students have been hanging out at an arcade and bowling alley, where the owners were letting them play for free, or have been staying home.
The parking lot at Apalachee was empty on Tuesday. Doors were locked. The flagpole had become a memorial.
This is where students who come to campus are likely to be, standing quietly and grieving everything lost — the lives, the sense of safety, the promise of a school year that might have been something close to normal.
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