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He tries to remember that — for them — all of the changes in schools are just normal.
He was horrified by videos that Marjory Stoneman Douglas students shot in Parkland, Florida, as they hid inside a classroom while a gunman moved through the halls of the high school. He has urged his own boys to always try to escape first — whatever it takes — even if the drills advise staying put.
“These are my children, and what I care about most is their safety,” he said. “And I know that for them, in a situation like that, getting away from it as quickly as possible is the best likelihood of success.”
When Kacey Ruegsegger Johnson’s daughter Mallory was 8, a classmate saw her mom on a Denver news station. Mallory had a question: Was her mother famous?
Ruegsegger Johnson knew it was time for the conversation she and her husband had anticipated for years. During a family vacation, she pulled her oldest daughter aside for a private talk — the one that finally explained the scars marking Ruegsegger Johnson’s right shoulder and why she was unable to reach up toward high shelves or use her right arm to lift the kids.
In 1999, Kacey Ruegsegger was reading a magazine in the school library when a teacher entered, shouting that someone had a gun. The junior crouched under a computer desk, pulling a chair in front of her body. She felt wellhidden, but the shooters’ taunting voices and the sound of gunshots grew louder and got closer. Then one of the gunmen leaned down and fired a shotgun at her.
The blast shredded her right shoulder. She tried not to move or cry out, praying the shooter would believe she was dead and walk away. When the pair left the library, other students helped her flee.
For the last 20 years, she has lived with post-traumatic stress disorder, along with physical pain. She worked as a nurse until the injuries to her arm forced her to stop.
Ruegsegger Johnson was thrilled to become a mother, but struggled to leave her infant daughter at daycare during church services. She considered home schooling, terrified that sending her children into a school was akin to exposing them to danger.
Leaning on her religious faith and family support, she worked hard to push the terror down as her children got older. She avoided media coverage of school violence and became a resource for other survivors of shootings. She grew tired of living in fear and unwilling to let her past affect her kids’ experience.
Though she still struggles occasionally, she resolved to make mornings before school a positive time, focused on building her children up. And she finds at least some comfort in their school’s evacuation plans and security measures. She told her children that lockdown drills were like fire drills — practice to keep them safe from an unlikely danger.
But when Mallory confessed to feeling afraid that “a bad person” could still find her in the evacuation location used during one drill, Ruegsegger Johnson flashed back to herself crouched under that computer desk in the Columbine library.
“The bad guys found me, and I thought I had a really great hiding spot,” she said. “So what am I going to say to a little girl who has that same fear that the bad guy might find her? It was a really hard moment for me.”