The day began like any other at Thurston High School in the quiet community of Springfield, Oregon. It was Thursday, May 21, 1998. Students were chatting noisily in the cafeteria, eating breakfast, and trading the tales of youthful innocence. That innocence was brutally shattered at 7:55 a.m. when a student walked calmly into the cafeteria and sprayed 50 rounds of ammunition into the crowd. What was first thought to be a prank turned into a nightmare in which two students were killed and 22 others wounded.

As a crisis-response team leader for the Springfield School District, I received the emergency call just minutes after the shooting. Approaching the school, I found the street to be strangely deserted; all traffic was stopped as one ambulance after another raced by with their innocent victims. Throngs of frightened parents and neighbors filled the sidewalks and pressed past the gathering media to reach the school.

When Principal Larry Bentz read the names of the wounded, he saw shock, disbelief, and tears on the faces before him. Parents who had never met literally helped hold each other up. Images are indelibly etched in my mind: sirens, ambulances, stretchers, reporters, police cars, yellow tape, flashing lights, frantic faces, sobbing voices, crowds pressing, a list of names being read.

An eerie quiet prevailed inside the school. Teachers and students had provided immediate first aid to the wounded, and most other students were in their classrooms in a lockdown. The shooting had ended when several students tackled the gunman as he paused to reload. Three hundred students who had witnessed the shooting- and survived-gathered in the library where caring adults calmed them while they waited for police questioning. Frantic parents searched for sons and daughters, some who would never come home. Images I still carry: policemen, counselors, blood stains, darkened rooms, students huddled, phones ringing, backpacks strewn, quiet sobs, parents searching, anguished looks.

The nightmare intensified as we learned that the parents of the 15-year-old suspect had been found dead in their home, each apparently shot by their son. Bill and Faith Kinkel, both teachers, were longtime residents of Springfield. Bill, though retired, still trained district teachers and taught at the local community college. Faith, a popular Springfield High School Spanish teacher, had just learned she would be honored as an outstanding educator of the year. When President Clinton phoned, we realized that this tragedy would affect not only the 11,300 students and 1,200 employees of the Springfield School District, but the entire Eugene-Springfield community, the state of Oregon, and even the entire nation. Our sense of safety and security was shattered along with our innocence, and no longer could we say,

"It can't happen here."

Nothing in our previous experiences with individual student and teacher deaths prepared us for the magnitude of this horrifying event. My colleague Bob Cattoche and I quickly organized a "core team" of school psychologists, administrators, and mental health workers, and together we designed the school district response. That response was an on-the-spot modification of procedures we'd used in two dozen "smaller" crisis interventions over the previous seven years. Crisis specialist Marleen Wong of Los Angeles has said, "There are two types of schools: those that have had a major crisis, and those that are about to." It is our hope this information will assist other schools to plan for and cope with a crisis should it occur.

Here are some of the important lessons we have learned:

BEFORE A CRISIS:

• Coordinate emergency plans with community agencies, including police, fire, rescue, hospital, and mental health services. Identify the key players in your area, and get to know them. Fortunately, our district had practiced a mock disaster with these agencies before the shooting, so we were able to coordinate our response quickly. For example, additional phone lines set up by 10 a.m. the day of the tragedy were staffed 24 hours a day through the four-day holiday weekend by both city and school district employees.
• Educate and train crisis-response team members on a variety of topics, including children's grief and loss responses, critical-incident debriefing, student-support techniques, suicide response, and trauma response.
• Develop a written plan that describes intervention procedures and the responsibilities of team members; identify crisis-response team members each year at either a building or district level. Also, construct a phone tree, updated annually, that includes all certified and classified school staff.

DURING A CRISIS:

• Communicate within the district through an effective, foolproof communication system. Accurate and timely information is critical in any crisis. We found that cell phones, pagers, and two-way radios were essential, although even our cell phones jammed at times. The district phones were flooded with calls in the first hours following the shooting, and thus were useless; we saw ourselves on CNN but could not call the school down the street.
• Drink water and breathe deeply when facing a traumatic event. Responding to a crisis is physically and emotionally exhausting, so be sure to find ways to support the caregivers. We were supported with wisdom and caring by Lane County Mental Health, our local Crime Victim's Assistance workers, the Red Cross, other school districts, and two teams of NOVA (National Organization for Victim Assistance) volunteers.
• Communicate with the media on a regular basis. Develop a strategy and designate a spokesperson to handle requests from the media. Initiate regular contact with them. Throughout the first day and night, the media vans and satellite trucks rolled into Springfield from across the nation. Before the first hour had passed, a CNN helicopter hovered overhead, transmitting images of our newfound, horrific "fame." Following the shooting, we held regular press conferences at a location away from the high school and did not allow the media on campus for filming or interviews. We were amazed to observe that some national reporters tried posing as doctors and counselors in their efforts to interview victims and gain entry to the school, and so on Saturday we obtained numbered ID badges for all volunteers.
• Support students, staff, and families as they return to the school campus. Learn how to set up and effectively manage a "support room" for students. Following the shooting, extra counselors were on campus for three weeks (through the remainder of the school year); six months later, they continued to assist the regular counseling staff. In all, more than 200 counselors have supported our school district in its recovery.

AFTER A CRISIS:

• Provide follow-up support to students, staff, and community members. Anticipate that long-term follow-up will be required to assist the victims, families, students, and staff in moving toward recovery. The school calendar marks potential "'triggering" events: the return to school in Sep- tember, the holidays, the upcoming trial, the anniversary date of the shooting, and graduation.

Cathy Kennedy Paine is Special Services Coordinator and a crisis-response team leader for the Springfield School District. She has 22 years experience as a school psychologist. You may reach her at cpaine@sps.lane.edu. This article is excerpted with permission from the Winter 1999 Oregon School Psychologists Association Bulletin and the November 1998 Communique, published by the National Association of School Psychologists.

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