EVERGREEN — One by one, they filed into an empty Evergreen High gym, greeted by a tunnel full of pompoms and an outpouring of joy they hadn’t felt in weeks. The kids were here and they all bore the marks of one of small town America’s happiest nights. Some wore football shirts. Some wore blue and yellow Cougars face paint. Some wore blue and white overalls with a pinstripe.
Most of them, unbelievably, had smiles.
The only memory of the shooting on this campus just over a month ago was the flow of Evergreen Strong shirts through the crowd. These students didn’t need anything else. Their town is covered in signs remembering the day: 25/09/10. They needed a touch of normalcy to pull them out of the monotony of the tragedy, so the Student Senate hosted a homecoming meeting Friday afternoon. And the games began.
They took turns spinning on plastic bats and diving through obstacles for relay races. They clambered through the stands to find a pair of socks during a scavenger hunt. Each class took turns performing different songs in a karaoke competition, and the seniors didn’t hold back with Nicki Minaj’s “Starships”: “We’re higher than a mother (expletive!)”
Everyone laughed. Not a single teacher objected. There have been much bigger issues at play.
“I also wanted to vote for the juniors,” a teacher who worked as a karaoke judge told the seniors. “Until you guys dropped an unnecessary ‘mofo’.”
Outside these walls, a tight-knit mountain town of fewer than 10,000 residents is trying to come to terms with the event that shattered their reality, after a teenager near Evergreen brought a gun to school and shot two of his classmates before shooting himself. The adults try to solve the why. And how. And how not to let this happen again. They should take care of the students, as Eric Martinez, owner of the local cafe Java Groove, says.
But inside these walls, at Friday’s homecoming at Evergreen High, all was well with the kids.
“It is our time to come together as a school and as a community and say no to hate,” said 18-year-old Tyler Guyton. “And the violence. And the exclusion. And the heartbreak. And the sadness. And say no for this week – for this weekend.”
“We can have fun,” he continued. “And we can be kids again.”
Community help
On Wednesday, September 10, Shellene Ellington’s son texted her: “Mom, shooter. Active shooter.”
Ellington thought this meant a drill. Evergreen High was supposed to have one a few days earlier, but it was moved. So she called her son, a freshman, to tell him that this was, in fact, just a drill.
She heard distant shouting behind him when he answered.
“No, mother,” her son told her, Ellington recalled. “I’m running home.”
He had sprinted out of the cafeteria and into the woods behind Evergreen, along with a handful of other classmates. Ellington jumped in her car and sped to a stretch of Jefferson County Road 73 that ran past town, where she found her son and about a dozen other children hiding among some cars parked along the road. She slid open the door of her GMC Yukon, let them all in and rushed back to her house to let their parents know they were safe.
“It’s kind of strange – I picked up 10 kids that I didn’t really know,” Ellington recalled. ‘I knew maybe three.
“But now,” she said, sobs in her throat, “those children hug me.”
Evergreen, Ellington noted, is an unincorporated community. It does not have its own police station. It has no city government. The nearest hospital, she said, is in Lakewood. They are used to helping each other, as Ellington said, without the help of any city infrastructure. The school debuted a new set of bleachers on the football field this fall, which — aside from a $25,000 grant through T-Mobile — came entirely from the community and raised more than $325,000, as Cindy Mazeika, president of Evergreen’s Parent Teacher Student Association, said.
Nearly every single business along Evergreen’s main drag has done their part to help the community in some way. Chelsea Treinen, the owner of Sweetwater Boutique, came up with the idea of planting yellow, blue and white flags in the area as a show of strength. Martinez helped raise money for shooting victim Matthew Silverstone, while Silverstone’s sisters work at Java Coffee. Community members donate meals to Silverstone’s family every night of the week, Ellington said, with several people signed up to deliver meals every day through New Year’s.
“I’ve never seen a community like this come together like this,” said Brian Peluso, general manager of the Muddy Buck Cafe. “It’s absolutely amazing.
“Everyone wanted to be a part of it,” Peluso continued. “Everyone wanted to have a hand in the healing process, so to speak. And it was fantastic to see.”
However, that healing process has raised difficult questions. The Jefferson County Parent-Teacher Association, Ellington said, will hold an open forum next week for families to voice their concerns. A full-time school resource officer has been placed on campus after no one was present at the time of the shooting. Evergreen tries out a black Labrador named Oat on campus, as Mazeika said, to sniff out gunpowder. The community is embroiled in a debate over whether metal detectors should be introduced.
But the reality of a potential threat is still in the back of students’ minds, as one Evergreen student told The Denver Post on Friday. And the community of Evergreen — a place where Peluso, Martinez and many more people moved for a quiet mountain paradise to raise a family — is still reeling.
“I think it kind of shattered that, that it’s not safe,” Treinen said. “But is there really any place that’s immune to something like that?
“And I don’t think so.”
Student pride
Just a few days after the shooting, the school’s student senate went “to every place in Evergreen” where it thought a homecoming dance could take place, as Guyton said.
There was a quick decision by the student body, through discussions with administration, to attempt to organize a homecoming for the weekend of October 17th. But they, too, soon realized they couldn’t host a dance party at Evergreen High’s gym. It would be dark. It was too early. They moved Saturday night’s dance to Evergreen Elks Lodge and made admission free to all students.
Students at Evergreen, Guyton said, have been “yearning” to reconnect with their community at large for some time. To, as he said, feel like a school again. This was it.
“Unfortunately, a lot of us have had to grow up super fast. … It’s not fair that a 14-year-old has to grow up in one day,” Guyton said.
Schools from around JeffCo helped out, Evergreen athletic director Maddy Hornecker told The Post. Bear Creek High designed posters. Dakota Ridge brought a coffee cart by Tuesday morning. Ralston Valley helped plan Friday’s meeting. Columbine High helped write the halftime script for Friday night’s football game.
The Evergreen Student Senate also tried to think of every angle imaginable, as memories of September 10 still hit Guyton when a loud noise echoes through the halls of Evergreen. There would be no loud confetti poppers; instead, the students shot streamers in the gymnasium. The school also provided guest rooms where students who felt uncomfortable with the meeting could sit and talk.
“It’s important that no one feels alone,” said senior Will Carlin, who helped plan the meeting. “Of course you can be alone, and sometimes it’s part of how people interact, but it’s important that everyone knows you have someone around.”
At that moment, as he sat in the stands after the meeting, a fellow student gave him a high five.
“It’s important,” Carlin continued, “that everyone knows there are people who care about you.”
As the sun disappeared Friday and community members bundled Evergreen Strong T-shirts into jackets, the crowd headed to the football field. And during the first run of Evergreen’s Friday night game with Skyview, hundreds of people stomped their feet against the metal of the stands — the $325,000 bleachers they built with those same feet.
“I don’t think anyone is 100% OK,” Guyton said. “But compared to where we were a month ago, we are really good.”
Originally published:
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