Guest Contributor | 10 months ago | Comments (0)
By Melissa Helmbrecht
This is a story about Columbine High School. Unlike the thousands of stories that relive the horror of that day, this one is about a small group of ten troubled middle school students who transformed waves of despair into a tidal wave of hope.
In 1998 I received a grant from Youth Service America to form a mentoring program for troubled middle school students. I asked the Principal at John Dewey Middle School in Colorado to enroll his “ten worst students” into the Youth Investment Project. The students had common story arcs—parents in prison, bouts of homelessness, juvenile criminal records, low self-esteem, violent tendencies and chronic academic failure. By every objective standard, these program participants were the “worst”, the “least” and the “last."
The day after the shooting, we met at the Middle School to talk about what happened at Columbine. The students felt helpless, hopeless, despairing, and depressed. “What can we do?” “Is there anything we can do”? The world would have probably answered a resounding “no”. After all, these students could hardly show up at school on a regular basis. What could they possibly contribute? Yet, over the next days and weeks, we crafted a plan to seed service-learning and conflict resolution programs into 50 Denver/Littleton area schools. Something amazing began to happen. They, the violent, delinquent, impoverished, and self-admitted hopeless and helpless students, began to show up every day ready to work. They began to create volunteer programs and to speak at city hall meetings. They began to do the unthinkable---lead their peers and their community. On the one-year anniversary of the massacre, they woke early, arrived on-time, and fanned out offering a message of hope and healing. Partnered with nonprofit organizations and surviving Columbine students, our band of ten students inspired over 100 million people around the world through a Parade Magazine cover story, a front-page story in the Denver Post and extensive coverage on CNN. More
