Redditors who attended schools that were victim of a school shooting, how did the culture of the school change? How was the immediate and long term aftermath? Did things ever get back to normal after a few years?

I was only eight when columbine happened, but I was going to an elementary school just down the street, and I remember going into lockdown until about 6 or 7 at night. When I went home I stood on our back patio and watched all the helicopters flying over clemet park and the school. (You couldn't see the school from my house, but it was less than a mile away so we knew just where it was.)

A lot of friends and our babysitters went to the school, though I didn't know any of them to be the victims.

In the following days we went and laid flowers along the fences around the school, it was crazy seeing how many there were. The entire school seemed to be behind a wall of flowers and pictures. But when you looked at it, it was boarded up and was really ominous. It creeped me out.

That said, they re-opened the school after the community said they didn't want it torn down. I think that was a year or two after the incident. (My memory doesn't serve completely accurately, as it's the memories of my eight year old self.)

We stayed living in the same house, and I eventually started attending columbine, I was a senior the year of the 10th anniversary. That said, when we went there it seemed like a normal high school. The cliques were the same as anywhere. There were still jocks and geeks and everything in between. I didn't socialize much and just tried to mind my own business. It seemed to me, bullying wasn't really affected, a lot of us got teased and a lot of people just turned a blind eye to it. All in all, it was a pretty normal high school experience. Though bullying never seemed to get out of hand, at least not from what I say. I started my freshman year in 2005, so about 6 years after the shooting.

The school had been heavily remodeled, though a lot of it remained the same in terms of the layout. The weirdest part was seeing the footage, and thinking how I walk up and down those stairs, and that's right by my math class, etc.

The school closed every year on April 20th and usually had an assembly before that. But we didn't talk about it much in classes, teachers didn't talk about it except for when it was appropriate. A few teachers I had were there when it happened, and would tear up when they talked about it. It was moving to see how they had the resolve to stay teaching there, and how much the school meant to them.

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