This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. .

This story was published in partnership with .

“If it bleeds it leads,” I thought as my professor barricaded me and 20 other students in her office; an armed man was running around our college town’s sewage system, and we were locking down. Emergency alert texts from Indiana University warned that he could emerge from the storm drain by the building we were in. 

It’s an unsavory fundamental of journalism: You run toward the bloodshed while everyone else tries to escape it. As a young journalist, I’ve reported consistently on gun violence. But now, it was my turn to hide.

The air was warm, almost sticky from our collective breath. Every head was down, sending or receiving updates, scouring social media for tidbits of information, anything about this potential shooter’s location. At one point, a photo of a man on Snapchat holding a large gun stirred the room. Only later did we find out he was a member of law enforcement, not the barefoot, half-naked suspect in the sewer. But in that moment, we knew nothing except Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde. These shootings follow a script, and Bloomington, Indiana, might have been the next line in the never-ending story of American carnage.

I was 20 years old when I covered my  as a freelancer for The Washington Post. The year before, I left a murder scene with a shooting victim’s blood on my shoes (my mom, to no avail, tried to wash off the stains). And before that, at 18, my first journalism byline was for The Trace’s national reporting project, “.”&�Բ�����;

The project was led by student journalists from around the country who wrote nearly 1,200 obituaries for every American child and teenager shot and killed from 2018 to 2019. Week after week, a grim cycle revealed itself: A young person alive on Monday would be dead by Friday’s deadline. We told the stories of victims forgotten after the 24/7 news cycle, focusing on who they were in life, not just how they died.

By phone, I interviewed family members of the dead from my high school library. In September of senior year, my third-period class emptied as classmates attended the funeral of a brother and sister shot by their father in a  one town over. My stomach dropped when I read their names on my weekly assignment spreadsheet.

I had 100 words to capture their lives:

He was known for playing practical jokes and being mischievous with family. A friend who enjoyed his laughter cited him as an inspiration, a “loving and compassionate human being.”

He loved fishing, reading, and, most of all, tennis. He adored playing for Zionsville High School, especially because of the camaraderie he had with teammates.

On Sept. 21, 2018, Harrison Fredric Hunn, 15, along with his sister Shelby Hunn, was shot in his sleep by his father in Zionsville, Indiana. The same week as his funeral, his tennis teammates dedicated the sectional title win to his honor.

That work — their names — flashed before me as I sat on the floor of my professor’s office, enduring the long minutes of lockdown. “If the worst happens,” I thought, “who will write my obituary?”

We were evacuated from the building an hour or so later. But the adrenaline didn’t wear off until the next day. I woke up feeling like I had just been swimming in the ocean, clobbered by waves. I was sore from yesterday’s fears. 

In the end, as my professor wrote in , our lockdown wasn’t particularly newsworthy. Though the armed man threatened police with a gun, no shots were fired. No one died. After the suspect was apprehended, officers found a machete, scythe, and rifle cartridges in the sewer, but no gun. Still, lives were interrupted. Dark imaginations — or memories — were activated as an entire town feared the worst. And in the fortunate absence of death, a complicated trauma set in. 

I know from my work and this helpless experience that we need reporting that captures the various effects of gun violence, particularly on , which grew up with more school shootings and lockdown drills than any generation before. When the carnage can be seen, we’re more willing to witness the reverberations; we want to know how the story ends. But what about the living? Who is accounting for the injured, the survivors, the young people who live with the knowledge that their lives can be threatened by gun violence at any moment? Who keeps track of the “lucky” ones?

As a reporter, I’m accustomed to not having an answer. But I do know one thing: This is a compounding, expanding, borderless pattern. Last month, it was my school. This month, it will be someone else’s. 

“It doesn’t feel safe going to school,” said Joshua Oh, a rising ninth grader from Gambrills, Maryland.

“Even if you … don’t go to the school where the shooting happened, it’s still something that’s in the back of your head,” said Mahbuba Sumiya, who grew up in Detroit and is now a sophomore at Harvard University.

On Monday evening, ����Ӱ�� convened members of its Student Council to speak about the ripple effects of the tragic event on their own school communities and to share their thoughts on the issue of gun safety more broadly. Several young people relayed anecdotes illustrating that fear and worry spurred by the shooting reverberate far beyond Texas.

Ameera Eshtewi attends an Islamic private high school in Portland, Oregon. In May alone, there have been multiple Islamophobic attacks on mosques in her community, she said. Those events plus the Texas shooting made it hard for her not to imagine the worst at her school.

“Thinking that someone could go into an elementary school and murder so many kids and then they could hear about our school, and on top of that we’re Muslim … they could easily come in and do the same,” she said. “I felt terrified.”

At Devin Walton’s high school in South Torrance, California, the ninth grader began to anxiously take account of safety measures in a way he never had before. He noticed the location of school security officers, surveillance cameras, the locks on the door. He began to imagine how, if an intruder were to enter his classroom, he could use the fire extinguisher hanging on the wall as a possible weapon to defend himself.

“After hearing about this school shooting, I’ve started to consider to myself, like, ‘Am I safe enough at my school?’” he said.

For Maxwell Surprenant, a high school senior in Needham, Massachusetts, an otherwise innocuous task became clouded by worry. The day after the shooting, he was helping carry supplies outside for a pre-graduation ceremony. Having read the news that the Uvalde shooter entered through a side door propped open by a teacher, he couldn’t avoid a creeping thought.

“I was looking at some of the doors and wondering, all it takes is for one of these to be left open one day,” he told ����Ӱ�� in a phone call separate from the group meeting. 

“This shouldn’t be something that we should be concerned about,” added Sumiya, who noted that gun possession was common among her peers in high school to protect themselves from street violence, striking fear in her heart and rendering learning nearly impossible. 

“We’re going to school to get the education that we need. Why is our safety and our life on the verge of, like, you never know what can happen?”

With March For Our Lives youth organizers planning a in Washington, D.C. to demand universal background checks, students agreed that school safety and the prevention of shootings is one of the major issues on the minds of young people today.

“It’s such an important issue to us, to this generation, particularly because this generation, Gen Z, has really experienced it,” said Diego Camacho, a high school senior in Los Angeles, California.

School shootings have over the past decade. Excluding 2020 when schools were largely remote, there has not been a full calendar year since 2018 — the year of the mass shooting at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that galvanized the March For Our Lives movement — with fewer than 27 classroom attacks. The highest annual tally before that, spanning from 1999 to 2017, was 16 school shootings. Through only five months this year, there have already been 24.

There’s a cognitive dissonance to hearing about events that are as terrifying and heart wrenching as school shootings with such regularity and needing to continue going about their lives, expressed students. It’s weird, said Oh, that when a school shooting happens, it almost feels like a “normal event.”

“I felt a little numb,” added Eshtewi. “I was angry that I felt numb because this shouldn’t be something normal.”

The Uvalde shooting was the deadliest attack on a school since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, which killed 20 children and six educators. 

In the days after the shooting, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced plans to and ban military-style firearms, including a mandatory buy back program set to begin at the end of the year. Meanwhile, after visiting with survivors and families of victims in Uvalde, Texas, U.S. President Joe Biden said policy changes such as background check requirements or assault weapon bans , which remains gridlocked on the issue.

But while Washington stands still, students are mulling what they think should be the path forward. The Uvalde shooting, said Suprenant, spurred meaningful conversations within his friend group, which spans the full political spectrum.

The high school seniors thought about the stark difference between the requirements for gun ownership and for driving a car—both activities that can pose a deadly threat to oneself and others. To earn a driver’s license, young people must first take a permit test, complete a driver’s education course and log a specified number of training hours, the teenagers observed, but no comparable preparations are required to purchase a gun in this country.

The accused shooter, who didn’t have , crashed his grandparents’ car before opening fire at Robb Elementary, authorities said. A week earlier, he was able to legally purchase two AR-15-style rifles, according to authorities.

“It’s just common sense to all of us that the process should be longer in terms of obtaining a weapon,” said Surprenant. 

The accused shooter crashed his grandparents’ car before opening fire at Robb Elementary, authorities said. His grandfather that his grandson, who legally purchased two AR-15-style rifles last month, didn’t have a driver’s license.

Sumiya agreed that gun control measures are overdue, but also pointed to deeper issues like poverty and housing insecurity, which she thinks played into the high crime rates where she grew up.

“What [are] the underlying concerns making someone go out of their way and then buy a gun?” she wondered. Teachers should be raising those questions and “talking about issues like that in the classroom setting.”

Surprenant offered advice to educators looking to facilitate dialogue on gun safety: Give students access to resources through which to inform themselves, but then “encourage kids coming up with their own solutions.”

With little to show for the efforts of adult policymakers to advance gun safety measures, Eshtewi understands that young leaders may have to pick up the torch. That frustrates her, but she sees no other choice.

“With any issue I remind myself, if not us, then who?” said the high school junior.

This story was brought to you via ����Ӱ��’s Student Council initiative, an effort to boost youth voices in our reporting. America’s Promise Alliance helped in the recruiting of our diverse 11-member council and the idea was conceived as part of Asher Lehrer-Small’s Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship.

Everyone recognizes the benefits of in-person learning, but to get there requires some tough and important decisions. Former officials from the last five Administrations and health experts have joined together across political parties and sectors to lay out the best response by creating .

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Colleges and universities are well positioned to help communities and the country beat this pandemic. Higher education institutions employ over 3 million Americans and are attended by more than 19 million students. Youth ages 18-24 have some of the lowest vaccination rates in the nation. College campuses, by their nature, are “congregate settings” at high risk for infectious disease transmission, and especially those not protected by vaccines are becoming infected faster, from more limited contact.

The Delta variant represents a more dangerous threat to campus health and safety, operational continuity, and ability to meet the safety expectations of faculty, staff, students, and their parents. Campuses must re-visit 2020 strategies; last year’s plan may not prevent outbreaks from this year’s variant. 

We are asking college leaders to require vaccination. A vaccination requirement is the best way to protect students, faculty, staff, and the surrounding community. It is encouraging that nearly 700 higher education institutions already require vaccination this fall, most with some medical and religious exceptions. For campuses with medical centers and clinics, vaccination is particularly important for those who come in contact with patients. High vaccination rates provide a greater assurance of safety in other high-risk settings, where distancing or reduced contact is difficult to achieve, including residence halls, classrooms, and public indoor events.

For those colleges and universities that are unable or choose not to require vaccination, we are asking leaders to take every step possible to get as close to 100 percent of their students, faculty, and staff vaccinated early in the academic year. Colleges and universities can make vaccination easy with pop-up vaccine clinics to meet students as they return to campus, including at move-in, orientation, football games, tailgates, and other student life events. Colleges can offer paid leave for staff and faculty to get vaccinated and in the event of side effects. One of the most powerful ways to increase vaccine uptake is to engage student leaders in peer-to-peer vaccination education efforts.

Layered mitigation strategies are needed to keep students, faculty, and staff safe as they return to campus. We recommend these concrete steps:

— Screening for Infectiousness. Particularly for unvaccinated individuals, colleges and universities should require a protocol for routine COVID-19 testing, typically twice weekly. With high COVID-19 rates in their communities, many colleges are also starting to screen the vaccinated, since they too can spread the virus. More frequent testing should be done in higher-risk settings where appropriate and practical.

—Tracking Vaccine Status. As many higher education leaders have shared with us, tracking the vaccination status of their campus population, including an attestation component, is critically important and helps colleges and universities assess community immunity and adjust the campus response accordingly.

—Encouraging Mask Use. Mask use should follow the latest CDC recommendations, which currently advise face coverings in public indoor settings in substantial or high prevalence zones, including for vaccinated individuals.

—Planning to Pivot. Building on the best practices emerging around the country, higher education leaders are adapting for rapidly-evolving fall 2021 situations. As in the 2020-21 school year, leaders should ensure they have the right people at the table and make data-driven decisions. For additional guidance, The American College Health Association (ACHA) provides .

These COVIDSafeZones strategies are not a broad vaccination mandate and are consistent with established public health precedent and can be highly beneficial, including in states that prohibit vaccination requirements in their public colleges and universities. State laws that challenge any of these steps should be examined carefully, both for legality and consistency with campus safety. A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision appears to give broad support for vaccination requirements.

We recognize that any protocols create burdens and costs for colleges and universities and their students, faculty and staff. Still, higher education leaders also realize the much higher costs of ongoing disruption and uncertainty in campus operations, student learning, and people’s lives.

With bold leadership from our nation’s higher education presidents to confront the Delta challenge, campuses can remain open, students can continue to learn, and we can edge closer to beating this pandemic.

Dr. , a professor and founding director of the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke University, headed the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for President George W. Bush, and is an independent board member for Cigna and Johnson & Johnson. 

Andy Slavitt, the author of “,” was President Joe Biden’s White House senior adviser for COVID response until June and ran the Affordable Care Act and CMS from 2015 to 2017 for President Barack Obama. 

John Bridgeland (), co-founder and CEO of the , was director of the Bush White House Domestic Policy Council.

Public health experts, scientists and former elected officials of both parties have signed an open letter urging America’s higher education leaders to implement #COVIDSafeZones.