Lesley Andujar, a seventh grader at Broadview Middle School in Danbury, found herself unable to avoid the news last fall when four people were killed and seven more were injured in a shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia.
Even now, she remembers the details.
It’s the same with the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students her age and two teachers were killed. The 14-year-old remembers the details of that one, too.
“Maybe it’s not that they want to do something bad,” Andujar said of the shooters. “They just need somebody to talk to. They feel alone and they feel isolated.
“When I see the news and things like that, people get killed, I feel kind of sad.”
Sadness, fear and anxiety over school-based gun violence are common sentiments among children and teenagers. But one Connecticut nonprofit, which was formed in Newtown after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, is helping students channel those feelings into prevention efforts through a program called “Start With Hello.” Since it launched, the program has reached nearly 450,000 Connecticut residents and more than 13 million students and adults nationwide.
Andujar and about 30 of her classmates are participating in “Start With Hello” this school year, preparing and delivering assembly presentations about social isolation and empathy.
“This program makes me feel like I am spreading the word and saying what’s supposed to be done,” Andujar said.
Sandy Hook Promise developed the program to help young people identify behaviors that could lead to incidents of violence. The nonprofit was cofounded by the parents of Dylan Hockley and Daniel Barden, two first-graders who were killed in Connecticut’s deadliest mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary on Dec. 14, 2012.
After the tragedy, Connecticut lawmakers moved quickly to pass gun reform. And in the years since, the state has consistently ranked among the top states for restrictive gun laws.
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy led the negotiation and passage of the 2022 federal Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. That led to the establishment of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention the following year. (The office was shuttered within the first few days of President Donald Trump’s second term.)
Sandy Hook Promise, meanwhile, has grown from a local effort to change gun control legislation into a national leader on gun violence prevention and advocacy.
Its programs, like “Start With Hello,” take a grassroots approach, enlisting students to take the lead in gun violence prevention. The program provides tools and guidance to help students find ways to connect with each other.
In Danbury, public schools began implementing Sandy Hook Promise’s violence prevention programs in all schools shortly after the organization launched.
Christine Miller, who grew up in Sandy Hook and raised her kids there, leads the effort at Broadview Middle School, where she works as a counselor. Her son was a student at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 but not in one of the classrooms targeted by the shooter.
Initially, Miller said she was hesitant to participate in “Start With Hello” because her memories of that day were still too painful. But she had a change of heart when she began thinking about what her community needed and how she could be part of a solution.
“Nobody owns what happened,” she said. “I could tell you my story, and I could tell you what I was wearing that day, every minute of everything that happened that day. But it hurt everyone.”
That propels her work with the students at Broadview, where she leads sensitive discussions about identifying behaviors that might lead a person to become violent and preventing school shootings by teaching students to identify troubling signs among their peers.
“They feel isolated, alone, treated badly,” she tells her students.
Andujar and her fellow students have been able to internalize the teachings and apply them to their own experiences.
Seventh grader Zoey Okunola said when a classmate made fun of her hairstyle, she immediately felt bad about herself, thinking, “‘I look weird. Like, why do I look like this?’’’ Then she recognized what was happening. “I was bullying myself,” she said.
“People don’t really, really understand that bullying can be really hard to go through,” Okunola said.
Ricardo Simpson said he has experienced racist taunts at school that were hurtful. “Everybody has feelings,” he said. “I had nobody to back me up.”
When Miller selected him to participate in the leadership program, Simpson was initially hesitant about the speaking in front of his peers. “But I actually love the fact that I agreed to do it,” he said. “I think it was great to talk about because it can help prevent a lot of problems and help a lot of people feel like they mean something and they’re not outcast, not left out.”
Miller said students — and the empathy they develop for each other — play an important role in preventing social isolation that could lead to violence.
“Gun control is an issue that adults can fight over until they turn blue and drop dead,” she said. “Those things, kids have no control over. These things, kids have control over.”
