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" Frank DeAngelis didn&amp;#039;t always want to be a teacher, and heaven knows he didn&amp;#039;t expect the responsibilities the job would lay upon him. When he graduated from high school in northern Colorado, he thought he would become an accountant. When he realized there wasn&amp;#039;t a future in keeping the books, he left college for a semester and worked at a grocery store. During the time spent amid fluorescent lights and the bleeping of the cash register, he considered the people who had influenced his life: his junior high baseball coach and his social studies teacher, for example.  &amp;quot;I thought about the impact they had on their students\u2014on me,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s when I decided to go back to school to pursue my degree in education.&amp;quot;  He was hired at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in October 1979, as a social studies teacher. He was twenty-four, and he took to the job immediately. He loved teaching; after school, he coached baseball and football. He spent a year or so at another middle school, but, he returned to Columbine as soon as something opened up. Over time, he climbed the ladder. From &amp;#039;92 to &amp;#039;94 he piloted a dean of students program. He rose to assistant principal. Then, in 1996, with the support of his colleagues, Mr. D, as the kids came to call him, became principal.  And for a little while, all was well. The floors at Columbine High on a recent afternoon have a sheen that suggests fresh janitorial attention. The sound of garbage cans being emptied rumbles a few hallways over, like water flooding a tunnel. Before meeting Mr. D, I waited in a lobby between the first and second set of doors. The second are locked, with signs that redirect visitors to the main office. Multiple police officers are stationed there; dozens of cameras monitor the halls.  This isn&amp;#039;t unusual\u2014lots of schools have this kind of security now. What is strange to consider is that this place is partly the reason for it. To an outsider, the massacre of twelve students and a teacher that took place fifteen years ago on April 20, 1999, suffuses the halls with a terrible power. That&amp;#039;s not a locker, you think. It&amp;#039;s a Columbine locker. That&amp;#039;s not a student sitting on the floor, texting. She&amp;#039;s a Columbine student, texting just feet from where Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold blasted through the front windows with a pump-action shotgun. This is not just a school, you think. And yet, of course, it is. It has to be. And much of the responsibility of maintaining and tempering and protecting the dichotomy that is Columbine\u2014the school and the event\u2014has long fallen to Frank DeAngelis. He is the &amp;quot;glue that holds the community together,&amp;quot; one student told me before I met him. And this year will be his last at Columbine. In June, Mr. D will retire, after thirty-five years.  He agreed to give me a tour of the school, but asked that we start out in his office, because that&amp;#039;s where he was when the shooting started. He sits at his desk, wearing a boxy black suit about a size too big. Wrinkles hug the contours of his jet-black goatee. There isn&amp;#039;t an inch of open space on the walls, between the framed photos of him and Bill Clinton, and the Olympic torch he carried in 2002, and a hat that belonged to the father of one of the victims. There&amp;#039;s a plaque that reads, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s All About the Attitude.&amp;quot; And his attitude is a thing of legend. Still, when you speak to him, you can see the decade and a half of accumulated strain: the interviews, the tours, the number of times he&amp;#039;s relived one terrible day out thousands of good ones. The hellish Groundhog Day feel of it all. &amp;quot;I was never prepared for it,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think anyone is ever prepared for some of the things we had to go through at Columbine High School. The thing that helped me was that I had been there twenty years prior to the tragedy. I had built up the foundation, and I had the support of the students and the staff and the community and the parents, and without that support I don&amp;#039;t think I would&amp;#039;ve been able to do what I did for the last fifteen years.&amp;quot;  He gets to his feet and leads me out of the office, recalling that day. &amp;quot;I thought I walked out calmly,&amp;quot; he says, shaking his head. We pass two girls with backpacks, and he nods to them. His leather loafers clap lightly with each step. &amp;quot;I just remember gunshots. I don&amp;#039;t remember the fire alarm\u2026&amp;quot; He quiets his voice so as not to disturb the students.  About twenty feet in, past a trophy case, we turn right toward the gymnasium doors. When Mr. D. ran toward the locked gym door that day, he somehow picked the right key out of thirty-plus on his ring. &amp;quot;On the first try,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;What are the odds?&amp;quot; He picks up his ring of keys, pauses. &amp;quot;I tried it later, but it&amp;#039;s never worked again.&amp;quot; He holds the door open for me, and points to a storage cage through a set of metal doors. It&amp;#039;s a boiler room. He tells me that after he ran into the gym with twenty or so students, fleeing from the shooters, he locked them in here until the SWAT team could retrieve them.  &amp;quot;I said to them, &amp;#039;I promise you: I will be back.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Mr. D&amp;#039;s job of reconciling the past with the present and the future is a difficult one. Because, as the students will readily attest, people are uncommonly weird about Columbine. Tour buses stop to let their riders snap pictures during the school day. Visitors take selfies in front of the school&amp;#039;s sign. Travelers who&amp;#039;ve gotten lost looking for the memorial end up wandering around the parking lot. The memorial was built in 2007, in nearby Clement Park. It was set away from the school to deter tourists from bothering students, but that didn&amp;#039;t work. They keep coming. To them, the school itself is the monument.  &amp;quot;There was a caravan of tourists,&amp;quot; says Megan, seventeen, a senior, recalling a recent instance. &amp;quot;About twenty of them right out there in the parking lot\u2014and they were wearing aloha shirts. I wondered, Why is this a tourist spot?&amp;quot;   K. Annabelle Smith Mr. D, now  The shooting happened on her third birthday, but it&amp;#039;s nonetheless a part of her life. She&amp;#039;s lost count of the times she&amp;#039;s been asked, while wearing her Columbine hoodie, if she goes to the Columbine. At first she thought, Don&amp;#039;t ask a stupid question! But after four years of that question, now she just tells them no.  &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t go to school and think about the shooting,&amp;quot; Megan says. &amp;quot;I wonder if I&amp;#039;m going to fail my math test.&amp;quot;  There will be no official town observance this year\u2014the tenth anniversary in 2009 was the last one. But in keeping with annual tradition, school will not be in session on April 20. The families of the victims will come back. Mr. D will walk them through the halls. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like therapy,&amp;quot; he tells me.  Officials close the school for two reasons: First, out of respect. Second, though, that week\u2014that whole month\u2014the threats start coming in. &amp;quot;We spend a lot of time just making sure the kids are safe,&amp;quot; says John McDonald, executive director of Safety, Security, and Emergency Planning for Jefferson County schools. I ask him how many threats they receive on average.  &amp;quot;A lot,&amp;quot; he says. Mr. D doesn&amp;#039;t hole up in his office. He knows the names of most of the sixteen hundred kids at Columbine. This has been his strategy all along\u2014especially in the aftermath of the shooting. &amp;quot;In order to build up the community, I had to be visible,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I was able to go out and be with the students and teachers.&amp;quot; Columbine needed two principals back in 1999, he says: one to deal with the daily operations, and one to oversee the healing. Mr. D oversaw the healing. They brought in extra help, but it never felt as though it was enough. How could one man pull a school\u2014indeed, a whole community\u2014up from its knees?  &amp;quot;It was hard on an individual basis,&amp;quot; Mr. D says, &amp;quot;but when you&amp;#039;re trying to rebuild a school\u2014trying to be someone for everyone\u2014it was very difficult.&amp;quot; He would be at school twelve to fifteen hours a day, and the stress, the trauma, of those first few years took their toll, ultimately breaking up his first marriage. &amp;quot;Unfortunately, my family took a back seat,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;PTSD changes you. You don&amp;#039;t know how you&amp;#039;re going to react, or what you&amp;#039;re going to do, when things like this happen.&amp;quot; The Thursday after the tragedy, a friend of his\u2014a Vietnam veteran\u2014called him. &amp;quot;He said, &amp;#039;Frank, I never got the help I needed for my post-traumatic stress disorder. If you don&amp;#039;t help yourself you&amp;#039;re not going to be able to help anyone else.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  Mr. D. began seeing a counselor immediately. Sometimes, he&amp;#039;d retrace the steps of where he ran that day. It took some time before he could leave the main office without replaying the sequence of events in his head.  &amp;quot;I was struggling because of my dear friend and faculty member Dave Sanders,&amp;quot; he says. Sanders, forty-seven, a computer and business teacher and coach, was fatally shot in the neck and back. &amp;quot;If Dave hadn&amp;#039;t gone up the stairs at the time he did, I probably would&amp;#039;ve been dead.&amp;quot;  Mr. D continues back out into the hall, and walks about fifty yards from the gym, pausing before a bank of windows along the right wall. You can see on the floor where a pair of doors once stood. The first person was shot and killed here, he says. One floor above the cafeteria, this is where the old library used to be, and where the majority of the carnage happened.  &amp;quot;We knew we couldn&amp;#039;t go back into the library,&amp;quot; he says. With $3.5 million raised by Healing of People Everywhere (HOPE), a project founded by the families of the victims, they gutted the space. The bloodstained carpet was ripped up, and lockers were installed to cover the bullet holes. The final result is a light-filled atrium. Through the windows I can see the benches where students eat lunch. I can hear the chatter of a group of girls funneling up the stairs. When we descend into the cafeteria, we see them. It&amp;#039;s the Poms team, the school&amp;#039;s competitive cheerleading group. They&amp;#039;re holding a meeting, sprawled across the cafeteria floor. They&amp;#039;ll be in Florida for nationals in a few weeks. &amp;quot;Mr. D. should come with us!&amp;quot; one of them says. Their laughter echoes through the atrium.  K. Annabelle Smith The wall in Mr. D&amp;#039;s office  The Poms team was a key player in a successful surprise for Mr. D. earlier this week. They secretly choreographed a flash mob to present during halftime at the last basketball game against Chatfield High, Columbine&amp;#039;s rival (though Mr. D would prefer to use &amp;quot;friendly&amp;quot; as a qualifier\u2014classes were held at Chatfield for the remainder of the school year following the shooting). The Poms team held rehearsals during the two weeks leading up to the game, and got T-shirts that read &amp;quot;All Aboard the D-train.&amp;quot;  Moments later, as we enter the main hall, Mr. D. points to the ceiling. There are about sixteen-hundred linked carabiners up there, one for each student. &amp;quot;What makes Columbine strong is when you connect all of the links,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t care how bad of a day you&amp;#039;ve had\u2014when you look up, you know that you&amp;#039;re connected to someone else.&amp;quot; Every year since the shooting, parents have begged Mr. D. to stay until their children graduated. He abided, because he felt it was his responsibility to pick up the pieces. It was his life&amp;#039;s work. At first, he promised to remain principal until the class of 2002 graduated (they were freshmen when the tragedy happened). But then the date kept changing.  &amp;quot;I made the decision their senior year that I was going to stay as long as I felt I was effective and could help the community to continue to heal,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s been fifteen years, and there are some students at Columbine now that weren&amp;#039;t born in &amp;#039;99. We&amp;#039;re in a place now where there is a good foundation. Now I know that what I wanted to accomplish has been accomplished.&amp;quot; We head outside through a set of glass doors bearing a &amp;quot;Not an Exit&amp;quot; sign. The color of the moment: that lovely combination of green grass and gold light that really only happens around 4:30 p.m. in March. The glow is dizzying.  We walk behind the cafeteria, and stand at the foot of a stairway that leads to the HOPE Columbine Memorial Library. Thirteen trees hug the stairs\u2014one for each of those killed. Two boys in track shorts say, &amp;quot;Hi, Mr. D,&amp;quot; when we pass them. Their buddies are still running laps by the field. It smells like rain, and I ask Mr. D what a principal does now, with less than two months left at Columbine. What happens when the bells stop ringing, and the assemblies end? &amp;quot;People ask me, &amp;#039;Am I counting the days?&amp;#039; and I say, &amp;#039;You don&amp;#039;t do something for thirty-five years without it becoming your life,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;We have a theme at Columbine High School: Once a Rebel always a Rebel. Rebels for life.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll take that with me,&amp;quot; he says. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a28308/columbine-frank-deangelis-mr-d/>