JOYCE — A light drizzle darkened the pavement in the Crescent School parking lot, where School District Superintendent Rich Wilson stood Thursday morning as students arrived for the day.
Dressed in a raincoat over his suit and tie, Wilson called out a joyful “Good morning!” to each student and parent who passed.
But less than 24 hours after Joe Rogers, a 13-year-old student, shot and killed himself inside a classroom with the entire seventh grade and a teacher present, a quiet had settled over Crescent School.
“You don’t know what you’re going to see today,” 15-year-old Emma Hefton, a ninth-grader and friend of Joe’s older brother, Avery, said as she arrived. “People are going to be talking about it.”
With most students and all staff back at school on Thursday, the staff and counselors debriefed the students on Wednesday’s events and put counseling at the forefront of the day’s regular class schedule.
“We’re working hard at kind of putting our arms around the reality of the death and the trauma, and working towards helping ourselves step toward a more normal kind of pattern of behavior and still maintain the appropriate and positive remembrances,” Wilson said.
In the school library, students scrawled on banners, writing messages that will be given to the Rogers family.
Joe, a seemingly happy boy who attended Crescent since preschool and often was spotted riding his bike through town, brought a junior-size .22-caliber rifle to school in his guitar case Wednesday morning.
