EVERGREEN — One by one, they filtered into an empty Evergreen High gymnasium, greeted by a tunnel of pompoms and an outpouring of joy they hadn’t felt for weeks. The kids were here, and they all carried hallmarks of one of the happiest nights of small-town USA. Some wore football jerseys. Some wore blue-and-yellow Cougars face paint. Some wore blue-and-white pinstriped overalls.
Most, improbably, wore smiles.
The only reminder that there was a shooting on this campus shortly over a month ago, in fact, were the slew of Evergreen Strong shirts across the crowd. These students needed nothing else. Their town is covered in signs that remember the day: 09/10/25. They needed a shred of normalcy to rip them out of the monotony of tragedy, and so the Student Senate pulled together a homecoming assembly Friday afternoon. And the games began.
They took turns spinning on plastic bats and diving through hurdles for relay races. They scrambled through bleachers to find pairs of socks in a scavenger hunt. Each grade took turns belting out different songs in a karaoke contest, and the seniors didn’t hold back with Nicki Minaj’s “Starships”: “We’re higher than a mother(expletive!)”
Everyone laughed. No teachers objected. There have been much greater problems at play.
“I was gonna (vote for) the juniors, too,” one teacher, working as a judge for karaoke, said to the seniors. “Until you guys dropped a gratuitous ‘mofo.'”
Outside these walls, a tight-knit mountain town of fewer than 10,000 has been trying to come to terms with the event that shattered their reality, after a teenager at Evergreen brought a gun to school and shot two of his fellow classmates before shooting himself. The adults are trying to solve why. And how. And how to not let this happen again. They should be taking care of the students, as Eric Martinez says, owner of local cafe staple Java Groove.
Inside these walls, though, on Friday’s homecoming at Evergreen High, the kids were all right.
“It’s our time to come together as a school and a community and say no to the hate,” 18-year-old Tyler Guyton said. “And the violence. And the exclusion. And the heartbreak. And the grief. And say no for this week — for this weekend.
“We can have fun,” he continued. “And we can be kids again.”
Community help
On Wednesday, Sept. 10, Shellene Ellington’s son sent her a text: “Mom, shooter. Active shooter.”
Ellington thought this meant a drill. Evergreen High was supposed to have one just a few days earlier, after all, that got rescheduled. So she called her son, a freshman, to tell him this was in fact just a drill.
She heard distant screams behind him, when he picked up.
“No, mom,” her son told her, Ellington remembered. “I’m running home.”
He had sprinted out of the cafeteria and into the woods behind Evergreen, along with a handful of other classmates. Ellington hopped in her car and sped over to a stretch of Jefferson County Road 73 that ran past town, finding her son and about 10 other kids hiding between a couple of cars parked off the road. She slid open the door to her GMC Yukon, waved them all in, and sped back to her house to let their parents know they were safe.
“It’s kinda strange – I picked up 10 kids that I didn’t really know,” Ellington remembered. “Like, I knew maybe three of them.
“But now,” she said, sobs catching in her throat, “those kids hug me.”
Evergreen, Ellington noted, is an unincorporated community. It does not have its own police department. It does not have any city government. The closest hospital, she pointed, is in Lakewood. They are used to helping each other out, as Ellington said, without the help of any city infrastructure. The school debuted a new set of bleachers this fall down at the football field, which — aside from a grant of $25,000 through T-Mobile — came entirely through the community raising more than $325,000, as Evergreen’s Parent Teacher Student Association president, Cindy Mazeika, said.
Most every single business along Evergreen’s main drag has pulled its weight in some way for community relief. Chelsea Treinen, the owner of Sweetwater Boutique, came up with the idea to plant yellow, blue and white flags around the area as a show of strength. Martinez has helped raise money for shooting victim Matthew Silverstone, as Silverstone’s sisters work at Java Coffee. Community members have been donating meals every night of the week to Silverstone’s family, Ellington said, with different people signed up to deliver meals every day through New Year’s.
“I’ve never seen a community pull together like this before,” said Brian Peluso, general manager at the Muddy Buck Cafe. “It’s absolutely amazing.
“Everybody wanted to be a part of it,” Peluso continued. “Everybody wanted to have their hand in the healing process, so to speak. And it was fabulous to watch.”
That healing process, though, has brought difficult questions. The Jefferson County Parent-Teacher Association, Ellington said, is holding an open forum this upcoming week for families to air their concerns. A full-time school resource officer has been placed on campus, after none was present at the time of the shooting. Evergreen is trying out a black Labrador named Oat on campus, as Mazeika said, to sniff out gunpowder. The community is engaged in debate over whether to introduce metal detectors.
But the reality of a potential threat is still in the back of students’ minds, as one Evergreen student told The Denver Post on Friday. And the community of Evergreen — a place where Peluso and Martinez and many more moved to for a quiet mountain paradise to raise a family — is still reeling.
“I think it kind of shattered that a little bit, that — it’s not safe,” Treinen said. “But is anywhere, really, immune from something like that happening?
“And I think no.”
Student pride
Just a few days after the shooting, the school’s Student Senate “went to every place in Evergreen” that it thought could feasibly host a homecoming dance, as Guyton said.
There was a quick decision by the student body, through conversations with administration, to try to pull together a homecoming for the weekend of Oct. 17. But all, too, quickly realized they couldn’t host a dance in Evergreen High’s gym. It would be dark. It was too soon. They moved Saturday night’s dance to Evergreen Elks Lodge, and made admission free for all students.
Students at Evergreen, Guyton said, have been “longing” for a moment to reconnect with their community at large. To feel, as he said, like a school again. This was it.
“Unfortunately, a lot of us have had to grow up super quickly. … It’s not fair that a 14-year-old has to become an adult in one day,” Guyton said.
Schools from around JeffCo pitched in, as Evergreen athletic director Maddy Hornecker told The Post. Bear Creek High designed posters. Dakota Ridge brought in a coffee cart on Tuesday morning. Ralston Valley helped plan Friday’s assembly. Columbine High helped write the halftime script for Friday night’s football game.
The Student Senate at Evergreen, too, tried to think of every conceivable angle, as memories of Sept. 10 still hit Guyton when a loud noise echoes in Evergreen’s halls. There would be no loud confetti poppers; instead, the students shot off streamers inside the gymnasium. The school provided spare rooms, too, for students to sit and talk who didn’t feel comfortable gathering for the assembly.
“It’s important that – no one feels alone,” said senior Will Carlin, who helped plan the assembly. “Obviously you can be alone, and sometimes it’s part of how people process, but it’s important that everyone knows you have someone around.”
At that moment, sitting in the bleachers after the assembly, a fellow student high-fived him.
“It’s important,” Carlin continued, “that everyone knows that people are there to care about you.”
As the sun disappeared Friday and community members bundled up Evergreen Strong T-shirts in jackets, the crowd moved down to the football field. And on the first drive of Evergreen’s Friday night matchup with Skyview, a throng of hundreds stamped their feet against the metal of the stands — the $325,000 bleachers they’d built with those own same feet.
“I don’t think anybody is 100% OK,” Guyton said. “But compared to where we were a month ago, we’re really good.”
Nicole King cook hotdogs for students before a homecoming football game at Evergreen High School in Evergreen, Colorado, on Friday, Oct. 17, 2025. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post) An officer walks outside Evergreen High School before the school's homecoming football game in Evergreen, Colorado, on Friday, Oct. 17, 2025. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post) Emma Cox, 16, prepares to cheer during Evergreen High School's homecoming football game in Evergreen, Colorado, on Friday, Oct. 17, 2025. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)Hence then, the article about month after shooting evergreen high holds emotional homecoming we can be kids again was published today ( ) and is available on The Denver Post ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
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