by Andrea Aldridge

Jill Davis, `96 Union graduate, could hear the sounds upstairs at Heath High School in Paducah, Ky., but she thought it just sounded like firecrackers. Pop! Pop! It didn’t dawn on this first-year school teacher that a young man had entered her high school and started shooting his fellow students. 

Not until students ran up the steps shouting that someone had been shot, did Davis realize what was happening. Not until Davis and a fellow teacher ran to the steps to see what was going on, did Davis start to understand. And not until Davis started helping do first aid on some of the victims, did she start to get a grip on her surroundings. 

“I will never forget what I saw that day,” Davis recalls. “The students lying there, just lying there on the floor, will always be on my mind.” 

Before school started on the morning of Dec. 1, 1997, Michael Cameal entered Heath High School and began firing into a prayer circle that met everyday in the school’s lobby. The fourteen-year-old killed three students and wounded five more before his shooting rampage ended.
When Davis and another teacher reached the lobby where the shootings had taken place that morning, Davis heard a coach yell her name. As a cheerleading coach at the high school, Davis is trained in CPR and first aid. That morning she used her first aid skills to help the wounded students.

While running to the victims through a crowd of unhurt but shocked students, Davis started questioning all that was happening. “The first thing that went through my mind was ‘How could something like this happen?’ and then ‘Why? Why? Why?’” she says. 

The first-year teacher mostly talked to and held the hands of victims while they waited for ambulances to arrive. One teen-age boy ran up the stairs and back down into the lobby before he realized he had been shot. “There was not a lot we could do,” she says. 

Davis explains that there was mass confusion that morning with hysterical parents who had heard on the radio what had happened and kids running around in a panic. “It was total chaos,” she adds. 

The next day, the students and teachers returned to Heath High School “to get them back into their routine schedule,” Davis says.

The young teacher says she was scared to go back to school on Tuesday. “It was just a fear of the unknown,” she says. “But I was fine after I got back and saw that the kids were OK.”

Even though the school shooting was a terrible thing to happen, Davis says positive things have occurred as a result. “Students have a better outlook about life, we appreciate each other more, teachers are closer than before, and some students have been saved as a result of the shooting,” Davis says. 

“I hope I’m a positive influence, a positive role model in their lives. I hope I can be someone to help them along the way.”

Today, Heath High School continues to heal from the school shooting that plagued their campus. Davis says the prayer circle continues to meet for 10 to 15 minutes each morning before school starts. “It has grown tremendously,” Davis adds.

Also, the school began a new program this fall called “Rising to the Challenge,” which took students out of classes for the first two days of school and helped them learn how to improve their self-esteem, how to deal with peer pressure and how to deal with conflicts. 

“This program promoted positive behavior and encourages students to be connected to each other,” Davis says. When the school started the program, NBC’s morning television show “Today” visited the school. “We’re moving on. We’re moving past this,” she says.

Now, as before, Davis says her goal as a teacher is to make a difference. “I hope I’m a positive influence, a positive role model in their lives. I hope I can be someone to help them along the way.”