Just over a week ago, as a crew of roofers worked on the outside of the school, a team of police officers, volunteers, school staff and trainers set up inside and practiced how they’d respond to an active shooter. 

It was a tense, noisy environment. Volunteers yelled for help, another repeated “lockdown, lockdown, lockdown,” over the intercom as they ran through the building. The man acting as the shooter shouted and fired – with simulated…

Rashah McChesney is a multimedia journalist and editor who has reported and edited newsrooms from the Deep South to the Midwest to Alaska. For the past decade, she has worked in collaborative news as the...