DeAngelis is familiar with the heavy emotional burden carried by principals and other school leaders after mass shootings. And for the past two decades, one of his goals has been to make sure that those leaders do not have to carry it alone. DeAngelis, who is 67, soft-spoken, and reflective, is one of the founders of the Principal Recovery Network, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like—a support group for current and former principals who have experienced shootings at their schools. That there is even a need for such a deeply niche, macabre club—that enough people are affected by school shootings in America they can be sorted into subcategories—is unsettling enough. What’s worse is that every year, this group, with its unfathomable cost of entry, has more and more work to do.

The PRN is a club that no one wants to belong to. But its existence is a necessary reminder that, even after the news crews rumble out and the nation’s attention turns elsewhere, school-shooting survivors and the people who care for them do not have to pick up the pieces alone. “In the PRN, when we say we know what you’re feeling, we really do,” DeAngelis told me. “We’ve all been through it.” The PRN’s 22 members are working on a manual to help principals lead their schools through recovery after a shooting. So far, the group has mostly steered clear of politics, but it’s getting more and more desperate for some kind of action.

Although the Principal Recovery Network wasn’t officially formed until 2019, its origins date back two decades. In the days after the attack at Columbine, a man named Bill Bond called DeAngelis. Bond was the principal of Heath High School, in Paducah, Kentucky, where three students had been killed in a shooting in 1997. “He reached out and said, ‘Frank, here’s who I am. You don’t even know what you need right now, but here’s my number,’” DeAngelis remembers. When DeAngelis called him back, Bond listened to his fears and concerns, and gave him advice on how to move forward. Over the next several years, the two did the same for other principals, including Andy Fetchik, the former principal at Chardon High School, in Ohio; Kathleen Gombos, who became principal at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Connecticut, after Dawn Hochsprung was murdered in the 2012 shooting there; and Ty Thompson at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Florida. “Hi, this is Frank DeAngelis, the former principal of Columbine High School,” he always began. “I’m here if you have questions.”