Article August 27, 2001 Issue

Counseling after Columbine

A woman learns to view children in their spiritual maturity and not as victims of the world.

Kate Mullane Oyer

The Official Internet Information page for Columbine High School offers a fairly typical profile with a listing of school colors (navy blue and silver), mascot (American Revolutionary Rebel), enrollment 1,878, and history (opened 1973, remodeled 1995).

Conspicuously absent from the facts listed is the 1999 shooting at Columbine. School officials obviously are not about to let Columbine be defined by its darkest moment—the wrenching tragedy in which two students shot and killed 12 fellow students, a teacher, and then themselves, plunging the nation into soul-searching and renewed commitment to ending school violence.

At the time of the shootings, Kate Mullane-Oyer, a Christian Science practitioner, was living about 40 miles away in Greeley, Colorado. She turned on the television to get the weather, only to find to her horror that Columbine students were being hunted down by two of their classmates. She talked to the Sentinel about her spiritual response on that April afternoon—a response that found her counseling students and parents at a church near Columbine.

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