Normal, Dull Days? "No!"

By Andrew Goldstein with reporting by Maureen Harrington/Littleton

As it headed into the last week before Christmas vacation, Columbine High School was enjoying its first full month without a single warning or suicide or other incident related to the April 20 killing of 12 students and a teacher. School life was returning to some semblance of normal. But then came last week's release of videotapes made by the Columbine killers, first reported in TIME. And then on Wednesday a student using an Internet chat room received an anonymous threat against the school--which moved authorities to close the school and postpone exams. Back came the horrible memories and the distractions of the public spotlight. "Just when you're beginning to heal," says math teacher Michelle DiManna, "you can't."

They keep trying. More than 4,000 people thronged to the school's parking lot on a chilly Thursday night for a long-planned concert, held to thank all the hospitals, churches, police and others who have helped Columbine recover. Despite the Internet threat, the mood was downright jolly. Principal Frank DeAngelis bunny-hopped with Snoopy. The crowd rocked when the band sang Noel to the tune of YMCA. Tim McLoone, president of Holiday Express, the concert's headline act, announced, "At 6:30 this morning they told me school was canceled. Do these people ever have a normal, dull day?" And the crowd roared, "NO!"

The response sounded almost proud and defiant, and beneath it lay a determination long evident at Columbine. In the days following the massacre, Columbine students demanded to return as soon as possible; they wouldn't let Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold take away their school. So the district, with the help of 137 contractors who donated some of their services, completed six months of construction in six weeks, replacing bloody carpeting with tiles and rebuilding the bomb-scarred cafeteria. Meanwhile, DeAngelis so effectively convinced students and parents of the school's safety that enrollment rose to 1983 students--18 more than last year.

Students and staff still suffer emotional highs and lows. "It's hard to concentrate," says junior Ashley Prinzi. "When you're bored in class, everything comes back, because this is where it happened." Yet most are learning, however slowly, to move on. Last month a student in Carol Samson's English class was so struck by something she read in the Charles Frazier novel Cold Mountain that she stayed after class to show the passage to Samson. "Your grief hasn't changed a thing," it reads. "All you can choose to do is go on or not." Frank Peterson says he now gives his biology students more in-class assignments so he can work with them one on one, "slowing down the pace" and taking "the time to get to know these sophomores as people."

DeAngelis remains fiercely optimistic. "There have been so many reasons for teachers to quit, for students to quit, for parents to be afraid to send their students here," he says. "But this is an outstanding high school." There was some relief at Columbine when authorities quickly arrested Michael Ian Campbell, 18, of Cape Coral, Fla., and charged him with sending the Internet threat. But DeAngelis also knows that April 20, 2000, is just around the corner. He is already working with a planning committee to make sure the anniversary is a memorial, not a flashback.

--By Andrew Goldstein, with reporting by Maureen Harrington/Littleton