Nearly a year after the mass shooting at a Christian elementary school in Nashville that left three adults and three children dead, students and their families have forged strong bonds over their shared pain. They also adopt a lot of dogs.
Among the adopters is Matthew Sullivan, who is currently caring for a Rhodesian ridgeback named Hank. He is the pastor of Covenant School. The school suffered an all-too-familiar tragedy on March 27, 2023, when a former student shot through the outside door and continued on. Sullivan isn’t allowed to talk about what happened in the building that day, but he says it and the days that followed are all a blur.
However, a few things stand out. As he and his students walked to safety in human chains, he remembers one of the students asking, “Where’s Evelyn?” He remembers the eerie feeling he felt when he realized that the principal, Katherine Koonce, was not responding to text threads between her teachers. He remembers how he waited endlessly at a nearby church while the students were slowly reunited with their parents. No one had a comprehensive list of students. It took hours to make sure everyone was named and had an appropriate guardian.
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It wasn’t until much later that night that Sullivan learned which of his students and colleagues he would never see again. Evelyn Diekhaus, Harry Scruggs, and William Kinney were all nine years old. Koonse, 60 years old. Guardian Mike Hill, 61 years old. and Cynthia Peek, a 61-year-old substitute teacher.
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Now, as the school marks the one-year anniversary of the tragedy and is moving back into the building where it happened, Sullivan says one of the positive aspects of the past year has been the bonding between families. .
“The community has become incredibly bonded,” he said. “A prayer group was formed with mothers, then fathers, and now it’s a weekly routine. They can’t miss it, they don’t want to miss it. .”
One day, a group of fathers showed up at school and asked for the teacher’s car keys. They were coming to wash and vacuum all the cars.
“That would never have happened before,” Sullivan said. “I would say our fathers were relatively estranged, but now they’re really in touch.”
Often they drop off the children but remain sitting in the back until the morning chapel.
“They bring coffee, sing songs and do silly hand movements,” Sullivan said. “It really deepened us. I mean, it would have been great if we didn’t have to go through something like this to do this, but here we are.”
Houston Phillips is one of the fathers behind the chapel.
“It’s for the community, but as long as they let me into the school, I’m going to try to be there considering what happened. I want to be close to my school.” Son ” he said.
Like many other fathers, he is heavily involved with the Covenant and is close to other families as well.
“I wasn’t really interested in making new friends because I was always like, ‘I don’t have time to spend with the friends I already have,'” he said. But after the shooting, she found other parents were people she could talk to who understood what she was going through. “And to have people who are men and women of God who believe the same things that we do, it’s like the perfect storm for healing.”
Matthew Sullivan, pastor of Covenant School, spends time with his foster dog, Hank. A year after the shooting, many of the school’s families adopted dogs to help cope with their shared pain. (AP Photo/John Amis)
Since the shooting, Covenant families have adopted more than 70 dogs.
The less expected outcome was that the family adopted many dogs. Sullivan said one of the first things the counseling group that came to help after the shooting recommended was getting a dog for the family.
“Since March, I’ve seen over 70 dogs adopted out, including my own family,” Sullivan said.
The Presbyterian pastor, who graduated from seminary in 1999, the same year as the Columbine shooting, said scenarios like this were not part of his training. He continues his learning on the go.
“All we’ve been working on is how can I go back to school again, how can I be myself, how can I relax at school? What do I do when I’m freaking out? ?What was that loud noise?” he said.
Part of his morning routine is to park his car at the far end of the lot and walk through it to school. “Because there’s definitely a kid several times a week who can’t stand it and melts down.” I don’t want to go into the building because there’s a parking lot. ”
Sullivan said her fellow teachers told her that her presence was like a security blanket for the children. One reason for this is that Sullivan’s voice is the first voice that greets children into the chapel at school each morning.
“So, you know, I never take a sick day. I haven’t taken a sick day since everything that happened, but I try to just be here as a presence, as a voice. “I’m just doing it,” he said.
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In addition to morning chapel, Sullivan teaches Bible study, and said her class, which lost three students there, has become “very kind-hearted.” Surprisingly, very few children transferred to other schools. “So a lot of them got even more depth here, which is really great.”
“We had some of the best conversations,” he said. “There are some really good questions about heaven, like, ‘What do you think Will is doing right now?'” and “Is there baseball in heaven?” Because Will loved baseball. ”
“I think it’s a lot,” Sullivan said. “There’s a lot Will wants. More than he can handle.”
Not everyone in the Covenant family agrees on the gun issue. But in addition to her work with children, Sullivan said she has supported a group of vocal gun safety parents who are trying to make their voices heard at the state Capitol. He describes it as a “very long nightmarish experience where you’re screaming for help and no one comes.”
One such parent, Melissa Alexander, has one child at Covenant and another who graduated the year before the shooting. She said about 60 parents participated in the effort, some of whom prayed on the steps of the Capitol every day for 40 days over the summer.
“The people I work with in Congress are people I never knew before, and now some of them are my best friends,” Alexander said. “We trust each other, we lean on each other, we support each other, because we know what it’s like to be in this place.”
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When asked if her family also adopted a dog, she laughed and replied, “Oh yeah! We got a rejecting Chihuahua named Aster.” Although Chihuahuas don’t usually make great comfort dogs, she said her son bonded with Aster and he became part of her family.
School will be closed on Wednesday, which marks the one-year anniversary of the shooting, but Covenant will hold a modified chapel service for families who wish to attend, Sullivan said.
“We’re holding our breath right now because we’re on the cusp of this anniversary. In a way, we’re all just waiting to see how we’re doing. I feel like it,” he said.
Then, in a few weeks, they will move back from their temporary location to the old school building. Some families go to other schools.
“They stayed here as long as they could,” he said, “but they didn’t want to be on that campus.”
