School in Newtown, Connecticut, through their morning meeting. They just needed to sit still, focus a little bit longer, and then they could make paper snowflakes for the holiday luncheon. The group was quiet when a sound outside the door got Abbey’s attention. A crash, then clanging, like the sound of metal chairs falling. There had been a school program the evening before; the janitors were likely cleaning up, and something must have fallen. Then the sound again, this time louder. Abbey opened the door and immediately sensed that something wasn’t right. She didn’t grow up with or have exposure to firearms—her mom not even allowing Nerf guns in the house—but the sound was unmistakable. The sound was bullets, flying through walls and glass and flesh.
When it comes to what happens next, some details are crystal clear for Abbey; others come in and out of focus. When I meet with her in early January at a restaurant a few miles from her Connecticut home, this is what she remembers: The students were scared, some crying and at least one needing to vomit, but they were also being good helpers: Call 911, Mrs. Clements. Put the furniture against the door, Mrs. Clements.
At one point, she tried to hide the students under jackets hanging along the wall. A row of coats with little feet poking out. In an unfortunate turn, the intercom system somehow came on, allowing everyone across the school to hear what was happening. Abbey wanted to rip the speaker off the wall. She knew those sounds would haunt her students—would haunt her—for the rest of their lives.
Instead, she sang Christmas songs. She passed around a blue water bottle, her hands shaking, and told the kids to drink. It seems so odd to her now, that she was so focused on keeping them hydrated, but also, maybe, in some strange way, it felt like something she could do to keep them alive. She read books, like “Go, Dog. Go!” —
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icture a classroom, wiggly-worm children sitting in a circle, because that’s where it happened. It was a Friday morning, December 14, 2012, and Abbey Clements was eager to get her group of second graders at Sandy Hook Elementary
—and tried to distract them from the violent echo of bullets. But the sounds outside her door were only getting more worrying. There was cursing, then a loud thump of footsteps on the roof. Abbey lied to the kids, told them it was the good guys coming to save them, but in her mind, she pictured another shooter.
her contractions started, she left home, but chose not to go to Al-Awda Hospital because of the danger. Instead, she went to a tent clinic newly set up in central Gaza by the International Medical Corps. Pain relief was not available for her eight-hour delivery, so she had to work through excruciating contractions. Against all odds, her baby boy was born healthy. She named him Yamen, which meant “generosity and ease,” something she longed for.
Abed stayed at the hospital for just a few hours after the birth and then went home because there wasn’t space to keep women for long. There, she groaned in pain and bled for days. But she was able to breastfeed, and Yamen thrived. Food was scarce but enough. She imagined a better future, of taking him to schools and parks and restaurants. Of having ease again.
At Al-Awda Hospital, Al-Nashef was nearing the end of her six-week medical mission. When a bomb went off, she instinctively knew to jump away from the glass because the IDF usually struck a second time. One of her fellow midwives had nearly lost her arm to shrapnel. She'd spoken to young boys who acted like men, including one who held his brother in pieces. She'd watched as more women gave birth to preterm babies, like Alreqeb’s wife had, likely from the stress of war.
One day in July, Al-Nashef heard a drone outside the hospital that she thought was a “zenana,” which means “buzzing” in Arabic—an IDF drone that is loud on purpose to let people know they’re under surveillance. But it was a quadcopter, a far more terrifying drone with four rotors that can kill people at close range. Al-Nashef was helping a woman push out her baby when the quadcopter started shooting. The woman panicked. “I said, ‘Forget about it, no one is coming close, just have the baby,’” Al-Nashef said. “I’m suturing her and hearing the firing, trying to calm her down, and you just have no idea what’s going on.”
Where before her colleagues were overworked, now “they are holding on by a thread,” she said. “They went to work, helped people have their babies…but they’re so exhausted, they kind of dissociate.” When Al-Nashef finally left Gaza for home, she immediately began thinking about returning later this year. She struggled with guilt at having left her colleagues behind. “Something about Gaza takes a piece of your heart and leaves it there,” she said.
In Cairo, Alreqeb’s daughter, Salma, received a much-needed surgery. Between shifts at the hospital, Alreqeb speaks to his wife and daughters over WhatsApp as often as he can. All he wants, all any ordinary person in Gaza wants—the mothers, the humanitarian agencies, the doctors and midwives—is a ceasefire so the war can end. Some days he sounds deeply sad, other days he speaks with fight in his voice. “Maybe you hear that people of Gaza, they love death, or they know nothing except death,” he said by voice note in June. “But actually,” he told me, “we people of Gaza, we love life.”
Abed had loved her life before the war; being a mom, working with her husband on building their own graphic design company as they saved for a house. Alreqeb loved his life, too: watching romantic movies with Issra at home, taking his daughter to restaurants, bringing life into the world without bombs. His tent clinic, he said, is the seed of a larger idea; he wants to build his own maternity hospital after the war, when all of Gaza is rebuilding—and being reborn.
her contractions started, she left home, but chose not to go to Al-Awda Hospital because of the danger. Instead, she went to a tent clinic newly set up in central Gaza by the International Medical Corps. Pain relief was not available for her eight-hour delivery, so she had to work through excruciating contractions. Against all odds, her baby boy was born healthy. She named him Yamen, which meant “generosity and ease,” something she longed for.
t first, Liesl Fressola was okay with going back to Sandy Hook. A fourth-grade teacher, she escaped through a window the day of the shooting. Liesl thought of school as her tattered cocoon. There was trauma there, yes, but there was also comfort in that she was around people who understood what she had been through.
Even before the shooting, she’d been in therapy, and so she immediately threw herself into getting better. Every week she went to solo and group therapy, while also signing up for anything that was being offered to survivors throughout the community. That included everything from yoga to Reiki healers to weight-loss classes. Counting calories, tabulating pounds, that felt like something she could control.
But the speed at which Liesl sought out mental health treatment belies the reality that it would take months, years even, before she felt like she could really function. This is true for many trauma survivors.
She dealt with PTSD, anxiety, and depression. Each one brought its own range of responses: lack of sleep, incessant crying—so much crying that even when she wasn’t crying, people still thought she was; her face a permanent sob.
The trauma had a physicalness to it. There were panic attacks and stress rashes; an anxiety that made her so hot she never wore a jacket that winter. Loud sounds—the slam of a door, a can dropping from the shelf at the supermarket, her husband burping—lodged in her body and caused pain, especially in her lower back and shoulders. This is what a bullet does to a body, even without touching you.
Other things were more invisible. A discovery that she could no longer write in pen, only pencil. A pen felt permanent in a way that made her uncomfortable. Who could be sure that there would be a future? It felt like testing fate.
The worst part was the mental fog. Liesl had always thought of herself as an intellectual person. She geeked out over anthropology and chemistry, but after the shooting, it felt like her brain had been sandpapered smooth, until it was completely blank. She had trouble recalling words and formulating thoughts. It felt like an entire part of her identity, the most important part, had been taken from her.
A desperation set in. A desire to prove she was still a good teacher. She nominated herself for a Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching, a prestigious honor that she actually went on to win. She also began sewing, showing up to school in dresses she had made herself. In her mind, she dared people to challenge her: If I’m so fucked up, tell me how I can make own my clothes? At the time, it felt like she was making a point, but now she understands it was her trauma brain.
Mass shootings continue to happen in classrooms at alarming rates. Will the educators ever be alright?
BY ANDREA STANLEY
No Teacher Left Behind
Some big dogs and some little dogs going around in cars.
Dogs in cars again. Going away. Going away fast. Look at those dogs go. Go, dogs. Go!
Then they had to go. A banging on the door and a voice telling them to open up. Abbey didn’t know what to do. The kids yelled at her to keep it closed: It’s a trick, Mrs. Clements. But it was a female voice, urgent and authoritative, claiming to be with the police. A detail that mercifully proved to be true. And so as the door opened, Abbey and her kids ran, ran out of the classroom past officers with their guns drawn, ran for their lives to the firehouse next door.
The enormity of what happened seemed so bad Abbey found she needed to process it in pieces. She called her husband from the firehouse, asking him to tell her what the news was reporting, but not everything. Eventually, she learned what we all did: They were 20 students, ages 6 and 7, and six adult staff members. They were Abbey’s colleagues, children she had passed by in the hall, names she knew. But to the shooter, they were an easy target. And he walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School that day and shot them dead.
Abbey has trouble talking about the ways in which this all has affected her. There’s a lot of survivor’s guilt. She’s alive, they’re not, who is she to complain?
But it has affected her. In the early days, she cried constantly, had trouble eating, and couldn’t sleep. The sadness seemed never-ending—and strange. She remembers there were so many funerals to attend someone added them into a spreadsheet. It felt awful, organizing lives lost into columns and rows.
At home, Abbey had two children of her own to take care of—an 11-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter. What happened was hard on them, too. It didn’t take her long to realize that in order to show up for her family, she needed help. Her therapist, a local woman who reached out and offered her services, wasn’t an expert in trauma, but she was able to help Abbey with the logistics of living: how to physically get out of bed, how to put one foot in front of the other.
This is the state she was in when just about three weeks later, classes began again at Sandy Hook. This time, in a different building. The district suggested the teachers throw their students a party. Abbey felt nervous about the idea. It didn’t seem right, a celebration of what: that they were alive?
If she had to do it, she decided she would do her own thing, and so she gathered students and their families outside of school; she ordered pizza and bought balloons. As she gave a speech about how what they’d been through had bonded them for life, a balloon popped, causing everyone to dive to the floor in a panic. She buries her face in her hands when she thinks about this now: What had she been doing?
She didn’t know. Didn’t know what she would do, what she had done. The return to teaching proved such a challenge, it’s difficult for Abbey to express how hard it truly was.
Sometimes teachers try to split the difference, staying in the profession but switching schools. Although, this too brings burdens, like lower pay and loss of seniority. When one teacher I spoke with decided to leave Sandy Hook for a new school, she realized that her crying in the break room between classes made her co-workers uncomfortable. At Sandy Hook, everyone knew. Little things like that add up.
One problem is schools not being prepared. But this one problem reveals many: Schools weren’t designed for trauma at this scale, at this frequency. Administrators tasked with picking up the pieces are carrying trauma too. Add to that, schools are often under-resourced and underfunded as it is. For many, choosing between tutoring programs and trauma preparedness is a budget question; it’s not an easy choice but perhaps a pragmatic one.
There’s also a trickier reality: Gun violence is a problem at schools, but its solution is not found at school. Not entirely, at least. It’s an American problem that exists in all the nooks of our society. There’s friction about how to solve the issue of gun violence—fewer guns, no guns, more laws, smarter laws, the list goes on—and well, perhaps that’s a problem too.
Michael J. Schultz, EdD, a psychologist and author of “Systems Consultation When Trauma Strikes: Stories of Hope, Collaboration, and Change,” showed up to Sandy Hook understanding these dynamics. He shares that while many people’s hearts are in the right place, it’s not unusual for teachers to find themselves in situations where they don’t get the support they need. Resources aren’t always timely, effective, or sustainable, leaving educators to navigate a patchwork system of aid, all while being tasked with managing the recovery of those around them, like students and parents—often before they’re ready.
The timeline for healing is long, idiosyncratic, complicated, and it rarely, if ever, matches up to the timeline for things to get back to “normal.” For some, it can take years to realize they even need help, initially feeling too overwhelmed or numb to feel their pain.
Sandy Hook was unique in that the magnitude of what happened there reverberated, causing a wave of resources to pour into the area. But one teacher I spoke to said there was still such a disconnect. She cycled through bad therapists, a wellness guru offering crystals. To her, it felt almost abusive, to show up needing help only to leave feeling so hopeless.
It was Dr. Mike, as every teacher I spoke to referred to him, who made the difference. He came with a team and decades of experience. But he only showed up after the state’s governor asked him to. What if he hadn’t?
bbey couldn’t understand why no one was talking to teachers. Where were their voices? That they had something to say was justified but also overlooked. The Teacher, in society’s narrative, often resigned to a symbol of obedient, dutiful presence.
After she finished up the school year at Sandy Hook, Abbey took a year off from teaching, then two. Administrators seemed surprised that she wasn’t healing faster. Eventually, she moved from Newtown, one town over to Danbury. She needed some distance from the darkness that hovered over everything in Sandy Hook. She wanted to be able to go to the grocery store and not be confronted by grief.
During that time, she also got involved in advocacy work with established gun reform organizations and shared her idea to organize around educators. Not only to address their specific needs, but there were so many “points” being made about shootings in schools—how early intervention could help troubled boys, how teachers should be armed, how to support families in times of crisis—and as Abbey saw it, teachers were the through line. But school shooting after school shooting happened, and nothing ever materialized.
In 2021, that changed when Abbey left her job and started Teachers Unify To End Gun Violence. It started as a resource to support teachers after a mass shooting. Since then, it’s grown, with Teachers Unify advocating for change both on a policy level, including stricter gun laws, and on a practical one. The group’s latest campaign focuses on working with schools to help distribute information to families about how to keep firearms properly stored at home. Abbey believes this is the unique role teachers can play: in educating. Teachers are trusted. They teach kids about the dangers of smoking, the importance of wearing a seat belt. It only makes sense to Abbey that they teach them about gun safety, too.
On a Zoom meeting last December, the Teachers Unify crisis intervention team comes together for their eighth meeting. It’s a chance to connect and for Abbey to fill them in on the big-picture work she’s doing to advance the group’s goals. Dr. Mike and Liesl are there. Also a handful of others: Ivy Schamis, a former teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School; her emotional support dog, Waffles; and other Sandy Hook teachers, including Amy Taylor and Robin Walker.
The meeting’s occurring just a few days after a shooting at Brown University and the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting. They go from person to person, discussing how the news has affected them. Ivy shares how the shooting made her blood boil, how all weekend she was fuming. There’s a frustration that things aren’t changing. Another shooting, really? After what happened to her, she teaches with a ballistics-proof clipboard and a huge bulletproof shield under her desk. Everyone nods, in support, and also understanding.
Ivy saw similarities in what she’d been through and what had happened at Brown. Two of her students were murdered in front of her at Parkland; two students were killed at Brown. So she wrote an email to the teaching assistant who was in the room that day, offering to help. Two minutes later, he wrote back: How does he get through this?
fter a year and a half, Liesl left Sandy Hook. First to teach at a nearby school in Connecticut, before moving to St. Louis, Missouri, to be closer to family. She had seen a lot of improvement in her recovery and had made the decision to stop going to therapy and taking her medication. Life was rolling on. She and her husband welcomed a baby girl, and after taking some time off to care for her, got a job teaching fifth grade. The clearest sign that Liesl was not okay involved the windows. Her new classroom didn’t have any. The school was old and brutalist in style, which meant that there weren’t a lot of windows in general. This made Liesl feel panicked. At Sandy Hook, a window was how she got out of the building. Ever since, every time she’s walked into a classroom, she’s looked around for the windows and plotted her escape. Administrators shrugged their shoulders, resigned and unsure. They couldn’t add windows, so.
So Liesl began to spiral. She found herself struggling to connect with the kids and was crying a lot again. It didn’t help that she felt disconnected from her personal support system and the therapists who had helped her back in Connecticut.
One day, the principal called Liesl into a meeting and suggested she take a leave of absence. At first, she was defiant at the suggestion, even showing back up to work that Monday. It didn’t go well, and she acknowledged that she needed to take a step back. For the next three months, she got back into therapy, back on her medication, and eventually, back to feeling okay again.
Two years ago, Liesl took on a new role at a university, one where she provides professional development and training to teachers. This position no longer requires her to be in the classroom, which has been a boon to her mental health. She still thinks about the shooting every day, but it no longer takes her breath away. There are still moments though, blue-sky winter days, just like the one at Sandy Hook, when she wonders if a shooter could appear. As if the weather could be a portent, not just of rain but of rage.
This is really why Liesl is talking to me. Sharing the “dirty” details of what she’s been through isn’t easy or pleasant. She understands that some people just want to gawk. But she remembers how isolated she felt after Sandy Hook. If there’s someone out there going through what she’s been through, she wants them to know that trauma will ebb and flow and that doesn’t mean they’re broken. She wants them to know that with time, and the right support, things can get better. They do get better. And mostly, she wants them to know that they don’t have to go it alone. For better or worse, there’s a large network of people who have had to face those same horrible circumstances—and they want to talk to you.
Getting involved has helped Sydney. When her school announced that they were going to start doing lockdown drills, she showed up with information on best practices. A list of ways to minimize trauma for teachers and their students. It didn’t erase the uncomfortable truth that she could one day be a victim, but it did give her a sense of power. The person who had pointed her in the right direction for her research was Abbey.
The next time I see Abbey, we’re gathered for a late-afternoon lunch in Newtown, joined by some of her former students—the ones who were in the classroom with her that day. They’re home from college for winter break, and Abbey greets them with hugs and a proud smile: Ashley, who’s at Suffolk University in Boston studying art; Nicole, a public policy and communications major at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Cyrena on the pre-med track at Spelman College in Atlanta.
They each describe feeling in awe of their Mrs. Clements. The one who made them take sips of water that day in the classroom, a memory they laugh about now. The one who brought them journals on their first days back at school so they could get their feelings out. Journals that she’s kept, all these years, just in case they’d ever want them. The one they can call when they’re feeling anxious because there’s been another mass shooting and need a reminder that there’s hope. When they think of her, they think of a rock; steady and strong in how she’s shown up for them.
Abbey has had 13 years to think about what happened to her that day. She tells me that pouring her heart and soul into Teachers Unify has given her purpose; it’s been healthy and critical to her healing. As Dr. Mike would say, she’s become a helper. There’s no forgetting the pain, but the trauma of it has largely disappeared.
In its place, something else. This sense that while she and her students escaped that day, she’s never escaped the feeling that she needs to protect them. That deep desire and drive to create change—to change this country for the kids—that feeling, for her, burns eternal.
"School is no longer seen as a safe place of learning, but as a war zone.”
he radius of those impacted by a mass shooting is not neat and tidy. It sprawls and permeates, seemingly leaving no place untouched. You don’t need to have experienced a mass shooting to be impacted by one. Fear floats through the loudspeaker during morning announcements; sits in the front rows of classrooms.
Sydney Chaffee, a ninth-grade humanities teacher in Dorchester, Massachusetts, has never witnessed a mass shooting but encounters the emotional realities of one nearly every day she walks into school. It’s impossible for her to ignore that her classroom is at the front of the building, surrounded by large windows, and the blinds are often up. If someone were to come in, full of hatred and a gun in their arms, they’d see her and her students first.
Dr. Cerfolio refers to this as a secondary trauma response, which is the physical and emotional distress that results from indirectly experiencing a trauma. “Sadly, it is an increasingly common reality for teachers today,” Dr. Cerfolio says. “Even without being present for a shooting, many educators live in a state of chronic stress and fear because they are working within a system that constantly prepares for a worst-case scenario.”
She adds: “High-intensity lockdown drills, metal detectors, and active shooter training can unintentionally keep the brain’s alarm system in a permanent ‘on’ state. This creates a psychological environment where the school is no longer seen as a safe place of learning, but as a war zone.”
Teachers face a unique and compounding form of trauma because their roles require them to balance their own survival with the safety of their students.”
“This creates a complex situation where the teacher is simultaneously a victim, a protector, and a witness to the trauma of others, making their path to recovery particularly complicated.”
Read more stories from our Women and Gun series.
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Teachers often absorb the collective fear and pain of their students, acting as secondary first responders without the specialized professional training or emotional distance those roles usually provide.”
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Even without being present for a shooting, many educators live in a state of chronic stress and fear because they are working within a system that constantly prepares for a worst-case scenario.”
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(Krisanne Johnson) Abbey Clements, former Sandy Hook teacher and founder of Teachers Unify To End Gun Violence.
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(Krisanne Johnson) Items Abbey Clements saved from her students.
(Krisanne Johnson) Items Abbey Clements saved from her students.
(Krisanne Johnson) Abbey Clements in her home in Danbury, Connecticut.
(Krisanne Johnson) The Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial opened in late 2022 to honor the 26 victims.
here is little to say about school shootings that hasn’t already been said. But to set up the scale of the thing: Since Columbine, nearly 400,000 students have experienced gun violence in schools, and there have been over 400 school shootings, turning towns like Parkland and Uvalde into metonyms for tragedy. The years since Sandy Hook have seen some of the highest rates of gun violence. By the time this story publishes, those numbers will likely be outdated; they will have only gone higher.
Look at the studies, and there is a clear connection between the rise in mass shootings and the number of people who will experience PTSD and other mental health conditions after living through one. But there is a disconnect about how to best help those so deeply affected. That can be especially true for teachers.
“Teachers face a unique and compounding form of trauma because their roles require them to balance their own survival with the safety of their students,” says Nina E. Cerfolio, MD, an associate clinical professor at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. “Teachers often absorb the collective fear and pain of their students, acting as secondary first responders without the specialized professional training or emotional distance those roles usually provide. This creates a complex situation where the teacher is simultaneously a victim, a protector, and a witness to the trauma of others, making their path to recovery particularly complicated.”
And yet, a July 2021 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, which surveyed 1,500 public school employees, found that only 17 percent reported that their school had a trauma plan in place to help teachers as it relates to school shootings. The same study noted that while teachers felt there were often services put in place for students, the same was not true for educators. Even as the trauma preys on them, too. They are not absolved of it.
For many teachers, it can become too much. A paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, written in 2020 and updated in 2024, found that after a school shooting, teacher retention rates drop.
Abbey says this creates a different kind of trauma. Teachers are often called to the profession for reasons bigger than themselves, and so leaving forces them to grapple with another loss. Those who do decide to leave often face guilt—that they let their students down, that if other teachers are strong enough to stay, they should be too. Never mind that for those who do stay, sometimes it’s less a choice than a necessity. It’s not easy to start an entirely new profession out of the blue.
Content warning: The following story contains references to gun violence.
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All across the country, on any given night, ladies from a wide range of ages, beliefs, and backgrounds come together to make friends and shoot firearms. This is what it’s like.
Inside a Gun Club for Women
BY ANDREA STANLEY
Content warning: The following story contains references to gun violence.
“In the gun space, the ball is definitely in the influencer’s court.”
“Teachers face a unique and compounding form of trauma because their roles require them to balance their own survival with the safety of their students.”
“Teachers often absorb the collective fear and pain of their students, acting as secondary first responders without the specialized professional training or emotional distance those roles usually provide.”
“This creates a complex situation where the teacher is simultaneously a victim, a protector, and a witness to the trauma of others, making their path to recovery particularly complicated.”
“Even without being present for a shooting, many educators live in a state of chronic stress and fear because they are working within a system that constantly prepares for a worst-case scenario.”
Read more stories from our Women and Gun series.
month later, Amy and Robin meet me at Kind Works, something of a community art center near Newtown. After the shooting, it had become a gathering place for people to heal through painting and pottery and working with their hands.
Amy tells me how she had loved being a teacher, but after what happened at Sandy Hook, she hated it. She had been teaching second grade, and her classroom was right across the hall from where everything had happened. An experience that Robin describes for her: hell.
There was the mental and emotional toll of Amy’s healing, but also just an ambient feeling of frustration that even after what happened, people still weren’t getting it. When she returned back to teaching, at a different school, she discovered a troubling gap in how they were preparing for a fire. During the drill, students were told to hold on to a jump rope to exit the building. Amy knew this wouldn’t work. The students would scatter, trip over each other. When she spoke up, she felt like people dismissed her concerns. But she had seen it. She saw up close the fault lines that only chaos can reveal, and so she knew that survival doesn’t present itself as a straight line.
Robin reaches out for Amy’s hand and lowers her head. She knows this too. Robin and her class of third graders got out of Sandy Hook safely, but one of Robin’s students lost her sister. Robin remembers the dad coming to pick her up at the firehouse, asking where his other daughter might be. She taught for six more years, then retired.
It wasn’t one thing that helped Robin and Amy, but many: EMDR, tapping, meditation, Lexapro, Dr. Mike. But taking action has certainly been a part of it. For Amy, it was the thing that allowed her to ease back in to teaching and discover she was still deeply committed to it. Helping a student with a tough math problem, connecting with families, allowed her to make a difference. Both Amy and Robin serve on Teachers Unify crisis intervention team, too.
Dr. Mike explains that this is true for many people who have been through a traumatic event, which is why much of his work focuses on helping them move from victims to survivors to helpers. Look at Amy and Robin and Abbey. They’re all doing better today. They’re all helpers.
As we’re getting up to leave, a woman standing nearby asks Amy and Robin if she can give them a hug and then begins to cry. She’s a teacher too. She can’t imagine what they went through. From a woven basket, she hands them a ceramic flower petal pinned to a paper that reads, “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”
It is kind. It is also a reminder that the grief of Sandy Hook is buried deep within the fabric of the community, and it doesn’t take much to heave it to the surface.
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fter a year and a half, Liesl left Hook. First to teach at a nearby school in Connecticut, before moving to St. Louis, Missouri, to be closer to family. She had seen a lot of improvement in her recovery and had made the decision to stop going to therapy and taking her medication. Life was rolling on. She and her husband welcomed a baby girl, and after taking some time off to care for her, got a job teaching fifth grade. The clearest sign that Liesl was not okay involved the windows. Her new classroom didn’t have any. The school was old and brutalist in style, which meant that there weren’t a lot of windows in general. This made Liesl feel panicked. At Sandy Hook, a window was how she got out of the building. Ever since, every time she’s walked into a classroom, she’s looked around for the windows and plotted her escape. Administrators shrugged their shoulders, resigned and unsure. They couldn’t add windows, so. So Liesl began to spiral. She found herself struggling to connect with the kids and was crying a lot again. It didn’t help that she felt disconnected from her personal support system and the therapists who had helped her back in Connecticut.
One day, the principal called Liesl into a meeting and suggested she take a leave of absence. At first, she was defiant at the suggestion, even showing back up to work that Monday. It didn’t go well, and she acknowledged that she needed to take a step back. For the next three months, she got back into therapy, back on her medication, and eventually, back to feeling okay again.
Two years ago, Liesl took on a new role at a university, one where she provides professional development and training to teachers. This position no longer requires her to be in the classroom, which has been a boon to her mental health. She still thinks about the shooting every day, but it no longer takes her breath away. There are still moments though, blue-sky winter days, just like the one at Sandy Hook, when she wonders if a shooter could appear. As if the weather could be a portent, not just of rain but of rage.
This is really why Liesl is talking to me. Sharing the “dirty” details of what she’s been through isn’t easy or pleasant. She understands that some people just want to gawk. But she remembers how isolated she felt after Sandy Hook. If there’s someone out there going through what she’s been through, she wants them to know that trauma will ebb and flow and that doesn’t mean they’re broken. She wants them to know that with time, and the right support, things can get better. They do get better. And mostly, she wants them to know that they don’t have to go it alone. For better or worse, there’s a large network of people who have had to face those same horrible circumstances—and they want to talk to you.
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