Nestled inside of a Wheat Ridge neighborhood sits a seemingly abandoned elementary school that now serves as an active training ground for police officers and school administrators.

The Frank DeAngelis Center for Community Safety, which took over the former Martensen Elementary School in 2017, allows law enforcement to replicate school-shooter situations — a mission that was started by DeAngelis, the principal of Columbine High School in Jefferson County during the world-altering shooting incident in 1999.

“The only drills we did back in 1999 were fire drills. We had school resource officers but we didn’t know what the kids know today,” DeAngelis said during a media event at the center on Thursday, highlighting the proactive changes that have been made by the Jefferson County Public Schools school district since the shooting 25 years ago.

“Look at a facility like this where they’re actually training law enforcement and Navy SEALs to come in. It’s not to scare, it’s to prepare,” he added.

The center uses actual classrooms and hallways as training sites — an environment that’s impossible to replicate due to the constant population of actual schools, according to DeAngelis.

As of 2024, the center has trained over 170,000 people, including more than 350 federal, state and local agencies, in active shooter situations.

But the simulation technology throughout the former elementary school hallways doesn’t just work to prepare officers for dire situations, it also works to prevent those situations from occurring altogether.

“We train law enforcement, but we also train parents and community members. We want to make sure that you know how to prevent things before they happen,” said Shawna Fritzler, executive director of the Jeffco DeAngelis Foundation nonprofit.

A place of hope

Twelve students and a teacher at Columbine High School were killed by two armed students on April 20, 1999 — nearly 25 years ago.

There have been 394 school shootings between Columbine and January 2024, according to the Washington Post.

DeAngelis promised the Jefferson County community that he would work to improve the safety of school children, staying as principal of the school until every child in elementary school during the shooting graduated.

Now the center named after him works to improve safety well beyond the county, providing free training to departments all over the country.

“It’s hope,” DeAngelis said of the facility. “If there’s anything I could have done to protect those kids and Mr. Sanders, that’s something I have to live with for the rest of my life. They walked into my school at seven o’clock and they never made it home. That’s something that I can’t take back, but what can I do to carry on their legacy? I think this building does that.”

Prevention and response

To DeAngelis and other members of Jefferson County Public Schools, the hands-on training the center provides isn’t enough.

“When they said, ‘What are you going to do?’ I said, ‘What are we going to do?’ because prior to Columbine, you had law enforcement, you had judicial and schools, but now they’re all working together,” DeAngelis said of the collaboration between the various local departments over the last 25 years.

“The biggest thing has become that awareness of how we connect the dots internally with our schools,” said Jeff Pierson, executive director of safety and security for Jefferson County Public Schools. “We can provide as much of a secure perimeter as we want. We can not allow visitors in. We can put up secure vestibules and lock doors. But what we’ve found is a lot of the tragedies are being done by former students or students, which tells us that we’ve got to pay attention to the internal pieces of mental health awareness.”

Both Pierson and DeAngelis noted that, while having expert response is important, prevention is key to stopping critical incidents in schools.

To Pierson, having resources and a caring environment within classrooms is conducive to lowering incidents. Having students feel safe and supported, both physically and emotionally, will help lower incidents going forward.

“If there’s a red flag, we need to flood it with resources,” Pierson said. “Figure out what it is and provide our kids with resources to help get them through whatever they’re going through.”

The center works to improve these techniques throughout the county schools, holding mandatory training for administrators on how to stay engaged, identify red flags and use the resources available to help in situations.

“We don’t just come here and talk about an active shooter situation, we talk about the steps to prevent a student from reaching a point where they feel like that’s the only way to express themselves,” said Davis Weiss, chief of schools for Jefferson County Public Schools.

Both Pierson and DeAngelis added that the addition of Safe2Tell, Colorado’s anonymous student reporting system, into JeffCo schools has certainly helped increase the awareness and prevention process.

“I can honestly tell you we’ve mitigated many threats, many issues simply because our students or our community were willing to see something and say something, but it was able to stay anonymous while they did it,” Pierson said of Safe2Tell, claiming that there has been a “staggering” amount of mitigation since the system was adopted.

Prevention can’t be measured, Pierson added. The addition of awareness and response have certainly helped, though.

The center looks to build upon these evolving tactics, combining both prevention and response training.

“The drills we do are unpleasant. I really wish that we didn’t have to do them, but they’re really, really important,” Columbine High School teacher Sam Bowersox-Daly said. “I hope that students look to their teachers and feel safe, not because I’m the one that’s going to be protecting them, but because there’s trust there. In our building, there’s so much trust and ownership over safety, and I think that’s what places like this do,” he said of the center.

He added, “Knowing that your teacher takes safety seriously and that you come first makes the students feel safer.”

“None of us want a tragic event to happen, but the worst thing we could do is not be prepared,” Weiss said. “We take that preparedness seriously. Every principal and every assistant principal is trained in this building.”