20 Years After Columbine

This Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of one of the greatest tragedies in our state’s history, the April 20, 1999 Columbine High School shootings. Since then, while unfortunately school shootings do still take place, there have been many efforts to address school safety and prevent these kinds of incidents from occurring again. The Colorado School Safety Resource Center is a state agency tasked with studying and working to improve school safety in our state. They recently issued 20 Years After Columbine: Highlights of School Safety Efforts in Colorado. This document presents a year-by-year chronology of legislation, publications, conferences, strategic planning, awareness campaigns, communications technology improvements, and other efforts developed in response to the Columbine shootings and other school incidents.

Our library collection includes the state’s reports into the Columbine investigations as well as many other publications on school safety. Some relevant titles include:

Columbine investigation reports:

• The Report of Governor Bill Owens’ Columbine Review Commission (2001)
• Report of the Investigation into the 1997 Directed Report and Related Matters Concerning the Columbine High School Shootings in April 1999 (Colorado Attorney General’s Office, 2004)
• Report of the Investigation into Missing Daily Field Activity and Daily Supervisor Reports Related to Columbine High School Shootings (Colorado Attorney General’s Office, 2004)
• Summary Report, Governor’s Task Force on Victim’s Support for the Columbine High School Tragedy (2000; available for checkout in print)

General school safety resources:

• Child and Adolescent Violence in Colorado (Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, 2005)
• Colorado School Safety Guide (Colorado Attorney General’s Office, 2018)
• Colorado School Violence Prevention: A Legal Manual (Colorado Attorney General’s Office, 2018)
• Essentials of School Threat Assessment: Preventing Targeted School Violence (Colorado School Safety Resource Center, 2018)
• Introduction to Safe School Planning: Prevention, Preparedness, Response and Recovery (University of Colorado Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, 2008)
• Special Report from the Summit on School Safety and the Prevention of Youth Violence (Offices of Governor Bill Owens and Attorney General Ken Salazar, 1999)
• Summary of Law Enforcement and District Attorney Reports of Student Contacts (Colorado Division of Criminal Justice, published annually beginning in 2016)

Other Colorado school shootings:

• Lessons Learned: A Victim Assistance Perspective, 2006 Tragedy at Platte Canyon High School (Colorado Division of Criminal Justice, 2009)
• Report on the Arapahoe High School Shooting (University of Colorado Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, 2016)
• Review of the Three Arapahoe High School Shooting 2013 Reports (Colorado School Safety Resource Center, 2016)

Following the Columbine shootings, the Family and Youth Institute at Colorado State University published Grief Following Traumatic Loss, with resources to help support young people experiencing trauma and grief. Additionally, the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado (Boulder) has produced numerous brochures and fact sheets about school safety. Find these and additional resources in our digital repository or by searching our library’s online catalog.