By Alicia Acuna
FOX News Channel, Denver Bureau

On this day ten years ago, 12 students and a teacher went to school, not knowing they wouldn’t return home. Two other students also died at Columbine High School that day, only they arrived assured of their fate and of those they would take with them.  Today is about the victims and their families, the survivors and all those left to slowly heal. Reporters, producers and photographers have been reminded of this repeatedly as we worked to prepare for the 10 year anniversary of the worst high school massacre in U.S. history.

I was one of the hundreds of journalists there that day and beyond. On that day it was chaotic, stunning and seemed almost an impossible and improbable event.  I remember going to a nearby middle school where parents and students who had escaped were told to go. This was where parents would find out if their kid made it out. As I walked through the crowd, I watched parent after parent searching the faces in the mix…looking for their own. Some of the students were walked across the auditorium stage as desperate parents stood below and waited to see if their son or daughter would be one walking past. As the day became evening a handful of parents were left. No one had to tell them it was time to stop looking up on that auditorium stage. The worst fear imaginable had come to their family.

What we didn’t know at the time is that as two shooters continued their rampage and police, sheriffs and other first responders arrived on scene, their radios could not talk to each other. It was mayhem. Cops couldn’t talk to deputies, ambulance drivers couldn’t reach firemen. And because of this and the fact that, at that time, authorities held off from entering the school, the situation worsened. Dave Sanders, a popular teacher, who saved many, bled to death because no one could reach him. This, despite the valiant efforts of his students trapped inside a classroom.

Ten years later, many things have changed. Specifically on school campuses around the globe when it comes to safety. Some campuses decided to install metal detectors and require see through backpacks, others require ID cards on all who enter the school and there are now more surveillance cameras watching the student bodies.

SWAT teams now employ the “active shooter” protocol. Which means, if a gunman is inside a school and he is not taking hostages, but lives, the officers go in, in a v-shape formation and take take out the perp, even if it means endangering themselves. This tactic was credited for saving lives at the Virginia Tech massacre.
Radios in the hands of first responders everywhere now talk to eachother.

The  lessons learned from Columbine are many. For the families of the victims and the community of Littleton, Colorado as a whole it something they say they are determined to heal from, even as they are reminded each and everytime the news headlines relay that there has been another “Columbine-like shooting”.