'You can't force things to feel normal': Annunciation parent describes return to school

NINA MOINI: Students at Annunciation Catholic School are back in the classroom this week for the first time since a mass shooting claimed the lives of two children and injured 21 other people. The school is providing mental health support for staff, students, and their families as they navigate this transition.

Joining us now is Aaron Rupar, a parent of two children who go to Annunciation. Thanks for being with us today, Aaron.

AARON RUPAR: Thanks for having me.

NINA MOINI: If it's OK with you, Aaron, I wanted to go back and start before this tragedy. Would you talk a little bit about just how old your children are, how you came to be at the school? Because I understand your family's kind of a new addition to the Annunciation community.

AARON RUPAR: Yes. My children are 3 and 5 years old, so the youngest is in preschool and the five-year-old is in kindergarten. And when the shooting occurred, it was actually just their third day at Annunciation, as they started school that week. We recently moved to South Minneapolis, and we're excited about joining the Annunciation community.

The school had come highly recommended from friends and acquaintances in the area. And so this week has the feeling of a first day all over again because of what happened two weeks ago now.

NINA MOINI: And when you think back to that time, Aaron, you were a parent new to having a kid at school, essentially, right? Just a few days in. I mean, was this anything that was top of mind for you, or anything like this that you were concerned about? Because frankly, some parents were.

AARON RUPAR: I had not been personally concerned about anything like this happening. One of the tough lessons that I've taken from this is that you can't really hide from things like this happening in our society these days because certainly, touring Annunciation, going there when they had the open house, and then going there the first two days, you really got the sense of a tight-knit community, where people seemed happy to be there.

And there was just never any inkling in my mind that something like this could happen, even though, of course, I'm aware of shootings like this occurring far too often, and the fact that gun violence is an unfortunate fact of life in our society. But even when I heard the sirens that morning blaring, since we live so close by, I didn't connect two and two or think that anything like this could possibly happen at Annunciation.

NINA MOINI: And your children being just so young, too, the entire thing is just heartbreaking. I'm so sorry, again, that you are all dealing with this. As you look back on yourself when this was happening a few weeks ago, and such a short amount of time, really, has passed, but it feels like so much has happened. I don't know what that space and time has felt like for you.

When you look back at the beginning of what happened here, because you did join us on the airwaves shortly after, which we are really grateful for, how do you reflect on the past few weeks? How has it changed you?

AARON RUPAR: To be totally honest, it's something that I'm still processing every single day. There's a bit of survivor guilt here, where you just reflect on the two families who lost children, and there's a sense of, had we been more unlucky, that could have been us. And there's really no reason that our kids survived while others didn't. It just was a matter of wrong place, wrong time on multiple levels.

I mean, in a way, our kids were in the wrong place at the wrong time, too, since they had to live through this. But I got to admit, it's still something that every day, I'm reflecting on a lot. And it's not an easy thing to come to terms with. And there's a sense, going back yesterday, that everybody was making an effort to restore a sense of normalcy, even though obviously, there was some added security, and there was a Minneapolis Police officer there in the parking lot.

But I think that's going to be something that's going to unfold over the course of the year. You can't really force things to feel normal for kids who have endured this horrific tragedy. And it's like that for the parents, too. I mean, I've never lived through anything like this, and it's something that you just grapple with day in and day out.

NINA MOINI: What were some of the words, perhaps, you were exchanging with other parents, just other people in the school community yesterday, other kids? Do you want to share just a little bit about what people were saying to each other?

AARON RUPAR: I will say there have been some very active group texts with parents. I think that has helped people process but also plan, in terms of the return to school and whatnot. That part of the day actually felt relatively normal, in that we went and dropped off the kids and, obviously, greeted the teachers.

And I know my wife actually stayed a bit longer and interacted more with some of the parents, but, for me, I dropped off the kids, I picked them up later in the day. And if you just did those experiences in a vacuum, it did kind of feel like a normal school day. I know for my wife, it was more difficult. She actually encountered one of the parents who lost a child who was there sitting on a bench, and there were some very emotional and sad scenes along those lines.

But for me, just dropping my kids off and picking them up, there was that kind of sense of normalcy, which, again, was a welcome feeling after what's been a really, really difficult two weeks.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. And I know that your children are so young, but then people go to school, and it's like, what are they going to hear? I know there's a lot of support in the school, which is really great right now around mental health and helping everybody out. How are you reflecting on just the conversations that might be going on, or-- I don't how you chose to talk about this with your little ones, but how are you trying to protect and inform, I guess?

AARON RUPAR: Yeah, there isn't really any blueprint for this. And my kids have had some pretty difficult questions, kind of along the lines of, was there a bad person at school? What did the bad person do? Did he hurt people? And so we try to address those honestly without really traumatizing them or oversharing.

And I do anticipate in their classrooms, they'll have to talk about this as well. I think that's more of an issue for our kindergartner than our preschooler. The preschoolers are kind of in a separate area, and were able to be evacuated very quickly. And so I think they escaped knowledge of some of the worst things that happened, whereas the kindergarteners were a little bit closer to everything that went down.

And I'm also sure, just reflecting on my daughter's kindergarten teacher, she's a young woman, and I'm sure for her, this is really challenging, too, because I would anticipate that you're not really instructed how to handle situations like this when you're coming up through school or through training. And so I think for parents and for teachers alike, and even for the students, this is a really challenging thing.

And obviously, it's kind of a defining aspect of this school year, and so I'm sure those conversations will be happening in school. And I do trust the people at Annunciation to handle those conversations responsibly.

NINA MOINI: I want to pivot to part of your life, if you don't mind, not as much as a parent, but you are in a unique position, Aaron. For those who don't know, you have a really large social media platform as an independent journalist. How are you viewing your platform right now, and calls to action from other parents in the community? Have you thought much about where to go from here and what's next?

AARON RUPAR: To the extent I can use my platform and my presence online to illustrate just how big of a problem this is, how horrific gun violence of this sort is, and its lasting impacts. Hopefully, that can do some small part in urging public officials to take measures to prevent things like this from happening in the future to the extent possible. But I certainly wasn't planning on talking a lot about where my kids go to school or disclosing a lot of the details of my life that I've felt compelled to by living through this experience.

I mean, I am an independent journalist, but I've also been pretty transparent about my life on social media with my followers across different platforms. And so as I was just sitting there hours after the shooting two weeks ago, I felt compelled to post about it, and that led to doing media appearances like this one and talking to people across the country and world. Again, I haven't really thought through it super strategically. I'm just grappling day by day with this and trying to process it.

But I do hope that for people who maybe feel like this sort of gun violence is something that couldn't happen to them or there's ways to prevent it, you put your kid in a private school or religious school, it won't happen, I think this experience for me has really brought home that, no, that's not the case, that this can happen to anybody, anywhere, at any time. And so we really need to be serious to the extent that we can to take measures to prevent this from happening in the future.

NINA MOINI: And just lastly, Aaron, having been so new to the Annunciation school community and living through something like this with everybody, I'm curious to just your perception of this community, that you all share this experience now moving forward and this long journey toward hope and healing. What does that look like for you?

AARON RUPAR: I think this has definitely brought people together, where I feel like we are closer with a lot of other parents than we would have been probably normally, just going through the routine of bringing your kids there, dropping them off, picking them up. I think it will be something that brings people closer together throughout the school year and beyond.

It's still pretty fresh. It's still something that we're grappling with, but I think there's a certain power and connection that comes from living through something like this together. So I do anticipate, and I'm hopeful that this will lead to deeper and more personal relationships than would have been the case had this not happened. I mean, obviously, I'd give anything for it not to have happened, especially for the parents and families who are most directly hurt by this.

But maybe that is one small silver lining, that it'll bring us closer together, and not only with other parents, but some of the administrators and teachers at the school, too.

NINA MOINI: Aaron, thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.

AARON RUPAR: Yeah, thanks for having me.

NINA MOINI: Aaron Rupar is a parent of two children at Annunciation Catholic School.