The doors had been shuttered for 27 days.
And district leadership was grappling with the future of the elementary school.
They could tear down the building, as others had chosen to after Sandy Hook and Parkland . Or they could bring students back into the space where a month ago, a 16-year-old shot through the glass of Silver Rail Elementary and shattered the sense of security in the Central Oregon town, killing three special education students and a teacher.
But when the district asked, the families of Silver Rail spoke with a resounding voice: They wanted to return – over 86% of them.
They would not allow the school grounds to become an ugly stain of gun violence on Bend. They would reclaim the school, on their own terms.
So Silver Rail Elementary once again opened its doors. It welcomed students with a note of positivity on its marquee, the motto of the school: “Kindness matters.”
On October 15, the lives of 447 students were changed.
Sixteen students did not come back. Thirteen students’ families chose to leave. Three children were killed.
Returning was not simple, even for those who wanted to.
Cearrow Young’s kindergartener and third grader were excited to come back to school. But as the first day back drew closer, the mom found herself dreading it.
“The closer it got to the day we sent them back … The more anxious I started to feel,” she said.
The littlest victim of Silver Rail’s shooting, and the youngest person ever killed in a deliberate mass attack at a US school, was 5-year-old Rhoam Summer . He was the same age as Young’s daughter.
After the shooting, his parents asked people to draw in his honor. He was “not a child art prodigy,” they said, but “had the purest heart and he put love into every scribble, splash or paint, or smashed leaf he tried to shape.”
A drawing of Rhoam sits inside Hearts Unknown Education in Bend, a nonprofit that runs creative wellness programs for young people. It’s where Young brings her children.
In the days after the shooting, she knew she had to explain to them what happened.
“I don’t know that my 5-year-old was even aware that a 5-year-old could pass away,” Young said.
On the first day back, her daughter told her something she couldn’t shake.
“She said she didn’t want to be dead when she was older.”
Her youngest, Callie, had talked about not wanting her grandmother to pass away. She knew that people died when they became old. But Young had never heard her daughter talk about her own mortality before October 15.
She looked on as her 5- and 8-year-olds led horses through a stable and petted them. The family had decided to cap off the first week back at school at Healing Reins, a nonprofit for horse-centered therapies and riding lessons that had welcomed the students of Silver Rail.
Her 5-year-old commandeered a staff member to bring out more miniature horses, only to disappear for a moment and return minutes later with two by her side that barely reached her height.
Collin, 8, wearing an olive-green puffer jacket perhaps one size too big – but that he would surely grow into within the year – was apprehensive at moments, stuffing his hands into his pockets and keeping quiet. But when a staff member nudged him to grab the reins of a horse and lead it through the stables, he guided it with confidence.
Young has loved horses since she was a girl. And her children have too.
“I see kids leading ponies around on ropes and experiencing independence, power, and security, and fun and joy right now,” she said.
Steven Cook didn’t know how families would respond after the shooting. He was surprised to learn how many wanted to come back.
“The resolve that came through in the survey was palpable,” the superintendent of Bend-La Pine Schools said. “Meaningful.”
The return didn’t come without concern from parents – how would they know their child would be safe? Would they be able to access mental health services? What was being done to fortify schools?
But for Cook, who has led the school district for six years, Thursday’s reopening was one of the first steps toward a long journey of healing.
“We’re going to ride this with you,” he said.
Kindergarteners – like 5-year-old Callie – are just beginning their time in the school district.
“We’ve got an obligation and responsibility for them for the next 12 and a half years to make sure their needs are being met,” Cook said.
Nicole Ybarrondo had been straddling the fence. She didn’t know if she was ready to send her two children back to Silver Rail. But her 9-year-old, Sofia, wanted to go back to class on Thursday. When she told her daughter that school was reopening, she did a little dance. Her 6-year-old son Jack, at first, did not want to return.
By the time Friday rolled around, Jack was the happier one to be back.
“It feels like nothing is predictable these days,” she said.
She knows some Silver Rail families that have turned to homeschooling after the tragedy, and some that have switched schools. Others, she said, have packed up their boxes and moved out of Bend completely.
Ybarrondo, like Young, knew she needed to explain what happened to her children but struggled to find the right words. She started with her eldest. But when Jack saw the hushed manner in which his mom was speaking to his older sister, he refused to be left out. He demanded his parents tell him everything.
It caught his mom off guard; she hadn’t known her youngest to be so assertive.
“We sat at our kitchen table that very afternoon, and we explained to him that a bad guy came into the school with a gun, and he shot and killed three children, and harmed and hurt another one, and killed a teacher, and really hurt another one,” she said.
Rhoam, and two other children in the special education classroom, were killed on October 15. So was Megan Lambert, a 25-year-old teacher. Saylor Graham-Poarch, a 7-year-old girl who was seriously wounded in the shooting, was moved out of the ICU and was in stable condition in late October, her family said.
After the shooting, Ybarrondo said, she couldn’t keep sitting with her grief.
“I can’t look at my daughter’s sad eyes anymore,” she said.
So, she started a nonprofit for the children of Silver Rail, which works with places like Healing Reins, where Young’s kids spent Friday evening.
In the city that spans just 33 square miles, everything is a reminder of that day. Ybarrondo said most days, she has to either drive past Silver Rail or the apartment where the shooter lived.
Before Thursday’s return, on one of those drives past the school, her son told her he wasn’t going back.
“They had too many fire drills,” she recounted him saying. “And kids die at fire drills.”
The words of her youngest child have stayed with her. But for all her grief, she felt grateful she could make a choice at all about whether to send her kids back.
“It’s really heavy knowing that we get to go back, and other people don’t get to walk through those doors again,” she said.
Inside Silver Rail, the special education classroom where four lives were taken on October 15 has since been blocked off, and the wall’s facade was extended to look like a part of the hallway.
In its place is a mural from a local artist.
The art, Cook said, is an important reminder “that it is a different day.”
On a clear day in Bend, the Three Sisters are out, their three volcanic peaks rising over Central Oregon. On the mural inside Silver Rail, they’re always there, visible.
