One year after a school shooting shook the small community of Mount Horeb, district leaders say they’ve been following the lead of students and staff in marking the anniversary.
Police were called to Mount Horeb Middle School at about 11:30 a.m. on May 1, 2024 for a report of a person outside with a weapon.
The scene was chaotic.
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Some students knew what was happening and ran to nearby homes. Others hid as they had been trained to, leaving parents outside for hours waiting.
Mount Horeb Police shot and killed a 14-year-old student who was pointing a gun at officers.
No one else was harmed.
But the death of an eighth grader was complicated. The gun turned out to be an air rifle. The Dane County community of just over 7,000 people lost a child.
“Over the past year, we’ve each navigated our own paths,” the district said in a statement.
The Mount Horeb Area School District has worked with the Wisconsin Office of School Safety, the U.S. Department of Education’s School Emergency Response to Violence project and local law enforcement to process what happened, said district spokesperson Aubree Hanks.
Mount Horeb Superintendent Steve Salerno was unavailable for an interview this week — he is spending time with students. But Salerno spoke with WPR previously about the upcoming anniversary.
He said as the one-year mark approached, the district looked to its students to set the tone. They’ve brought in service dogs and increased law enforcement visibility.
“None of us has a corner on the market as to what is the proper way to grieve and then move forward,” Salerno said. “We spent a lot of time with our faculty and staff, hearing from them about what they needed.”
Just seven months after the Mount Horeb shooting, three people died in a shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, including the shooter. Many others were injured.
Salerno said several staff members from Mount Horeb went to Abundant Life in the days after the shooting.
“We thought maybe to some extent, our experience could help them,” Salerno said. “We’re a little larger of a community than they are. Our counselors were able to help. And we could talk about some things they might not have thought of, like grant dollars and insurance.”
In 2024, there were 332 shootings at K-12 schools in the United States, according to the school shooting database. That was down from a 58-year high of 349 shootings in 2023.
The Abundant Life shooting appears to have had ties to other incidents. A 17-year-old who carried out a shooting in a Nashville high school appears to have had online ties to the Abundant Life shooter. And a Florida man accused of planning to carry out shootings also is alleged to have had an online relationship with the 15-year-old Madison shooter.
In the first four month of 2025, there have been 78 K-12 school shootings.
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