When the Emergency Ends, the Impact Doesn't.

What school tragedies teach us about resilience, preparedness, and the responsibility we carry long after the crisis.

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There are moments when words feel inadequate. The tragedy at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, is one of them.

Three children and a teacher lost their lives. Others were injured. Families, classmates, educators, and an entire community are now facing a reality they never imagined would become their own.

Before anything else, they deserve our compassion, our respect, and the space to grieve without becoming the subject of speculation or another debate about what should have happened.

In the days following a school shooting, attention understandably turns to the circumstances surrounding the event. People want answers. They want to understand how something so devastating could happen and what might prevent it from happening again.

Those questions matter. They deserve careful, honest examination when the facts are known.

But there is another part of these tragedies that deserves our attention long after the headlines begin to fade.

The emergency eventually ends. The impact does not.

What We Carry Forward

I've spent more than two decades working in law enforcement, child protection, forensic interviewing, and training professionals who are responsible for recognizing and responding to some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable. I've also experienced the response to a school shooting firsthand.

Those experiences have shaped how I understand both safety and trauma.

In September 2024, I responded to the shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia. Like so many others who were there, I witnessed things I wish no child, family, educator, or community ever had to experience.

I also witnessed something extraordinary.

In the midst of unimaginable heartbreak, people came together. First responders, educators, families, neighbors, and community members showed up for one another in ways that were both humbling and beautiful. There was strength in that community, compassion in the face of devastation, and an incredible determination to support those who were hurting.

Children and communities can be remarkably resilient.

But resilience does not erase grief. Community strength does not make loss less profound. And the ability to move forward does not mean that what happened has been left behind.

I know that professionally. But I've also come to understand it in deeply personal ways.

I travel across the country teaching professionals about child protection, trauma, violence, and the importance of recognizing and responding to concerning behavior. I've dedicated much of my career to understanding the impact of these experiences and have worked intentionally to develop healthy ways of processing the stresses that accompany this work.

Still, coming home after Apalachee was incredibly difficult.

I had to reconcile what I had just seen and experienced with another role that matters more to me than any professional title: being a mother. My children had questions. There were conversations to have, fears to address, and the familiar responsibility of helping them feel safe in a world where I knew, perhaps more intimately than I wanted to, that terrible things can happen. I wanted to be honest without burdening them with experiences that were mine to carry. I wanted to give them reassurance without making promises no parent can guarantee.

And I was trying to process my own experience at the same time.

About a year later, I returned to Apalachee High School for an entirely different reason. My son was playing baseball, and I was there to cheer him on. I wasn't responding to an emergency. I wasn't there in any professional capacity. I was simply a mom going to watch her son play a game.

But sitting in the parking lot, I found myself unexpectedly emotional. I hadn't anticipated that response. Despite my experience, training, and all the work I've done to process the difficult parts of my career, that moment caught me off guard.

I took the time I needed to acknowledge and process what I was feeling. And then I went to watch my son play baseball and cheer him on, just as I had come to do. I've thought about that moment often.

The impact of trauma is not always immediate, predictable, or proportional to how an event appears to someone on the outside. And if someone with decades of experience working in these environments can still be caught off guard, we should be thoughtful about what we expect of children, educators, and families navigating these experiences for the first time.

We Practice for the Emergency. What About Everything After?

Across the country, children and educators routinely participate in lockdowns, emergency exercises, and active-shooter drills. We teach them where to go, how to respond, when to remain quiet, and how to follow instructions if something dangerous happens.

Those preparations serve an important purpose. We want students and personnel to have the knowledge and skills that could protect them during an emergency. But I wonder whether we spend enough time considering what we're asking children to carry simply by preparing them for the possibility.

What does it mean for a young child to practice hiding from someone who may want to hurt them? How does an educator balance the responsibility of teaching children with the knowledge that they may someday be called upon to protect them from violence? And what happens when repeated threats or rumors begin to reinforce the very fears those drills are meant to help students manage?

These aren't arguments against preparedness. They're questions about how we prepare.

A 2025 National Academies report examined the potential effects of school active-shooter drills on the mental, emotional, and behavioral health of students and staff. While the research remains limited, the report reinforced the importance of preparing schools in ways that support safety without unnecessarily creating fear or distress.

That distinction matters.

Being familiar with an emergency procedure is not the same as being emotionally prepared to experience the emergency itself.

And once an actual crisis occurs, everything changes. For a child who has practiced lockdown procedures year after year, the possibility is no longer hypothetical. For an educator who has participated in countless drills, the responsibility takes on a different meaning. Even students and staff who were not directly involved may begin to experience familiar routines, sounds, announcements, or situations differently.

An ordinary school day may no longer feel quite so ordinary.

We should be asking not only whether people know how to respond during an emergency, but how we help them regain a sense of safety, confidence, and connection afterward.

Resilience and Grief Can Exist Together

One of the most meaningful things I witnessed after Apalachee was the way the community came together. There is something powerful about seeing people care for one another when circumstances are at their worst. Communities find ways to support grieving families, honor those who have been lost, and help children return to the routines and relationships that give their lives stability. Those moments matter. They are part of healing.

But sometimes our admiration for resilience can unintentionally create expectations.

We celebrate when students return to school, when activities resume, when classrooms reopen, and when a community demonstrates that it will not be defined by tragedy.

And those milestones deserve recognition.

But a return to routine is not necessarily a return to what existed before.

A student may laugh with friends and still be afraid. An educator may return to the classroom while carrying memories that others cannot see. A parent may celebrate ordinary childhood moments while quietly struggling with how differently they now understand the world.

Healing is rarely linear. It may happen alongside joy, achievement, laughter, and the everyday experiences that make life worth living.

I think about that baseball game.

I was genuinely happy to be there. I wanted to watch my son do something he loves. And I also needed a moment to process what returning to that place brought back.

Both things were true.

We can celebrate resilience without expecting grief to disappear. We can recognize a community's strength without overlooking its pain. And we can help people move forward without deciding for them when they should have moved on.

The Adults Our Children Depend On

In school safety, we frequently talk about the importance of trusted adults.

We encourage children to speak up when something feels wrong, report concerning behavior, and seek help from teachers, counselors, coaches, and school personnel. And we should.

But I've increasingly found myself thinking about the other side of that relationship.

Are we doing enough to ensure those adults feel prepared, supported, and equipped to carry the responsibilities we're placing on them?

Educators are navigating challenges that extend well beyond academic instruction. They encounter behavioral concerns, family instability, mental health needs, threats, disclosures of abuse, and the list goes on and on. Some will encounter experiences during their careers that they were never fully prepared to carry. Others will face an accumulation of smaller, less visible pressures that become significant over time.

And after a tragedy, many of those same adults are expected to become a source of reassurance and stability for children while trying to understand and manage their own reactions. We should recognize how much that asks of them.

If we want children to have trusted adults, we must also build environments where those adults feel trusted, supported, and empowered to act.

Prevention Is More Than Preparing for the Worst Day

After a tragedy, communities naturally revisit security procedures, emergency plans, physical safeguards, and response capabilities. Each has an important place in protecting our schools.

But meaningful prevention cannot begin and end with preparing people to respond when violence is already occurring.

It also requires understanding the conditions that may allow concerns to develop unnoticed, the barriers that prevent information from reaching the right people, and whether personnel know what to do when they recognize something concerning.

As threats and rumors circulate through schools and online communities, students and educators may find themselves repeatedly confronting the possibility of violence, even when a particular threat is ultimately determined not to be credible. Those experiences deserve attention too.

Not every threat represents an imminent danger. But that does not mean every threat is without consequence. Fear, uncertainty, disruption, and the repeated expectation that something terrible might happen can affect how people experience their school environment.

When an actual tragedy occurs, those existing fears may take on new meaning.

This is why I believe school safety must involve more than physical security and emergency response. It requires understanding the environment children experience every day, creating meaningful reporting and intervention pathways, and helping personnel recognize concerns while there is still an opportunity to act.

This philosophy guides our work at Servius. We look beyond isolated threats and individual security measures to understand how people, relationships, information, and community conditions intersect.

The goal is not to burden educators with another list of responsibilities. It is to help build safer environments in which prevention becomes a shared, realistic responsibility, supported by the people, training, resources, and processes necessary to make it possible.

What Meaningful Support Looks Like

For communities experiencing a tragedy, there is no checklist that makes the grief disappear or restores everything that was lost. But there are things institutions can do that matter. They can recognize that recovery does not follow a uniform timeline, and that children and adults may respond differently, sometimes long after the immediate event.

They can ensure students and personnel have access to appropriate professional support without making them feel that needing it reflects weakness. They can give students opportunities to ask questions, express concerns, and regain a sense of stability without expecting every child to respond in the same way. They can evaluate emergency exercises not only for procedural effectiveness, but also for whether the preparation is age-appropriate, trauma-informed, and responsive to the needs of the students and staff participating. They can recognize that returning to normal activities is an important part of recovery without assuming that participating in those activities means someone has fully recovered. And they can continue that work when the immediate attention has passed.

For school leaders everywhere, the lesson is not to assume that what happened in Oregon will happen in their own communities. Nor is it to speculate about failures before the facts are established. It is to recognize that preparedness, prevention, and recovery all depend on people, and those people deserve thoughtful support before, during, and after a crisis.

The Responsibility That Remains

As a parent, my heart breaks for the families in Oregon. As someone who has dedicated much of my professional life to protecting children, I know that no assessment, training, policy, or security measure can diminish the enormity of their loss.

We should be careful not to turn their grief into a professional lesson before allowing it to be recognized for what it is: a profound human tragedy.

But we also have a responsibility to carry forward what our experiences have taught us, and to use that knowledge thoughtfully in service of others.

For me, that means remembering that school safety is not only about identifying threats or preparing for emergencies.

It is about relationships. Trust. Recognizing when someone needs help. Making sure people know what to do with the information they have. Understanding what our children and educators are being asked to carry. And building environments where the people we depend on are supported long before a crisis occurs.

I think about the resilience I witnessed at Apalachee. I think about the families whose lives will never be the same. I think about my own children, the conversations we've had, and that unexpected moment in a parking lot before a baseball game.

And I think about the community in Oregon, now beginning a journey no family or school should ever have to make.

They deserve compassion today and sustained support in the days, months, and years ahead.

Because protecting a school community is not only about what we do when the worst happens. It is also about how we care for the people who must carry on afterward—and what we do, every day, to make prevention possible.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2025). School Active Shooter Drills: Mitigating Risks to Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Health. National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/29105