By Laurie Whittier
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE
Americans were saddened by the deadly shooting at Columbine High School eight years ago, but few were as taken aback as two future Wind Crest residents who spent a good part of their careers there in the 1980s.
For nine years, Warren Hanks served as the school’s principal. Helen Hanks, who has since become his wife, was the executive secretary and office manager.
Not our Columbine …
On April 20, 1999, Warren Hanks—who had retired eight years before—was at his grandson’s church helping with his pre-school class. That morning, they got a call to lock down the facility. “We turned on the radio and heard there was a shooting at Columbine, and I thought that just had to be wrong. It couldn’t be our Columbine,” he says.
During the days and weeks that followed, the Hanks and other former Columbine administrators and faculty assisted the county’s response team by taking phone calls from the media. As the months and years passed, peace slowly returned for the Hanks and most of the people who had been touched by the incident (including myself, a 1984 Columbine graduate). But they will never forget that gut-wrenching time and how helpless they felt.
As tragic as the shooting was, the Hanks shudder to think how much worse it might have been had it happened before the school’s redesign in the early 1990s. Today’s Columbine is split into levels and has lots of space for students to spread out. “Back then, the school was all on one level and it was a lot smaller, so the hallways were much more crowded,” says Helen Hanks. “There weren’t many exits either.”
Happier times
The Hanks prefer to recall a more innocent Columbine—like the day the chickens ran amok. “As a senior prank, someone had turned about 20 chickens loose around the old library,” Helen Hanks says. “I didn’t know what to do, so I had everyone run around and catch the chickens and toss them into Warren’s office while we figured out a plan.”