Much of Evergreen High School’s graduation ceremony sent students off with the usual fanfare and traditions of commencement: a quote from Dr. Seuss, teary parents trying to keep their emotions from spilling over, a swell of cheers and applause as each senior was handed their diploma and returned to their seat a graduate.
The afternoon was a spirited end to high school for the 207 Evergreen High Cougars. But it also roused painful memories from the start of the school year.
Evergreen High School students ran for their lives Sept. 10 when one of their classmates began firing rounds at an intersection close to the school. Kids poured out of the building and darted off campus, a stampede of them escaping into nearby woods and pounding on the front doors of neighboring homes begging to be let in to safety.
The shooting, lasting about 9 minutes, left two students with critical injuries and the 16-year-old shooter dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
It left the community of Evergreen grasping at how to salvage the sense of security stolen from their students while also helping them figure out what it means to heal. Some are still healing.
Students, friends, family and faculty attend the Evergreen High School graduation ceremony, Thursday, May 14, 2026, at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, Colorado. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)But on Thursday, as a sea of seniors in navy blue caps and gowns filed onto the stage at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, they refused to let the shooting take anything else from them — especially not a moment they’ve been working toward for most of their lives.
“This has been an unimaginable year,” class valedictorian Claire Naumer told her classmates and the crowd. “I struggled with finding the right thing to say, to not let the school shooting overshadow a day we have looked forward to for 12 years. At the same time, I knew I couldn’t pretend that this hasn’t been a difficult year and acknowledge what my classmates have overcome to get to this stage.”
During the more than 90-minute celebration of their academic accomplishments, students and educators recalled how deeply the tragedy tested them. But they focused more of their remarks on how much the community banded together in its wake and helped students rebuild their resilience.
Some of the first responders and victim advocates who helped students and teachers in the immediate aftermath and in their monthslong recovery were in the packed stands to cheer on graduates.
“Through every challenge, this community has shown up with compassion, steadiness and steadfast devotion,” Evergreen High School Principal Skyler Artes said from the stage. “Because of the way this community has cared for the school and these remarkable students, we arrive here today grounded, connected and stronger than ever. Our shared courage and commitment have not wavered. They’ve only deepened.”
Students, friends, family and faculty attend the Evergreen High School graduation ceremony, Thursday, May 14, 2026, at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, Colorado. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)Naumer called out the names of specific teachers who have modeled what it takes to restore hope, often in little ways she finds hard to forget. One teacher “remains hesitantly optimistic,” she said. Another, an avid birdwatcher, overflows with the kind of excitement that is “infectious.” And a third educator, she said, exclaims “happy Monday” at 8:25 a.m. every week “to fight Monday morning teenage exhaustion.”
Students have also rallied around one another, offering comfort that has lit the way on their path toward a new sense of normalcy. Many of them would meet up at least one Sunday a month throughout the school year, sometimes dancing at Grizzly Rose, other times attending a concert at Red Rocks. On their last day of high school, they gathered to watch the sun sink behind the mountains.
“It would have been easy to stay home, isolated and grieve by ourselves,” salutatorian Louise Laigle said during her speech. “But instead, we all chose to reach out to each other, help each other and carry each other through the finish line. We listened, we supported, we showed up together and, most importantly, we stood together, even in those hard times, especially in those hard times. That is strength.”
Students stood together once again Thursday as their classmate Matthew Silverstone walked across the stage to collect his diploma. Silverstone, one of the two students severely wounded during the shooting, spent five weeks in the hospital after he was shot in the head and chest. His heart stopped twice right after the shooting and, during his hospital stay, he faced multiple emergency surgeries.
Matthew Silverstone, survivor of the Sept. 10, 2025 Evergreen High School shooting, receives a standing ovation while getting his diploma. Students, friends, family and faculty attended the Evergreen High School graduation ceremony, Thursday, May 14, 2026, at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, Colorado. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)The audience joined students in giving him a standing ovation.
Every member of the class of 2026 also wore a new honor cord over their gowns that Artes, the principal, called the 110 Recognition. The school’s next three graduating classes will wear the same cord, a symbol of students’ “courage and unity” as they “worked so very hard to return to laughter and connection,” Artes said.
The four classes — ’26, ’27, ’28 and ’29 — add up to 110, she noted.
The cords and the tragedy link Evergreen students but are just one part of their story, seniors told The Colorado Sun.
“We’re not defined by it,” Tyler Guyton, one of two student body presidents, said the day before graduating, “but we’re bound together through it.”
Sometimes, small reminders of the day of the shooting seep through the cracks of space and time for Guyton, 18. He was not in the building during the shooting, but he vividly remembers the shock that pulsed through him amid the chaos as he frantically checked in on friends, peers and his sister.
Guyton, who plans to study political science and government, said that his generation has lived through a much different reality than others as school shootings have forced him and his peers to accept “a new normal.” He said living through a school shooting has turned his political aspirations “more personal and real.”
As much as the horror of Sept. 10 shook the tiny mountain town, it’s what came next that sticks with him — and what he chooses to hold onto.
“It’s important to not forget about that day,” he said, “but it’s also important to remember what happened after, which is our community coming together.”
Minutes before exiting the stage, Guyton and his peers ended the ceremony with one more well-worn graduation tradition, tossing their caps high into the air.
Many of them then looked up, toward the sky and their future.
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