Nearly all 500 seats in Lanigan 101 were full on Wednesday evening for a presentation on school safety and preparedness from two survivors of two of the worst school shootings in United States history.

Law enforcement officers, school officials, community members and Oswego State students attended the event titled “Lessons From Tragedy: A Conversation on School Safety and Preparedness.”

Frank DeAngelis, the principal at Columbine High school at the time of the shooting, and Kristina Anderson, a student survivor of the Virginia Tech shooting, spoke about their experiences and what schools can do to keep their students safe in the event of a school shooting.

Event coordinator and public justice professor Jaclyn Schildkraut, who studies school shootings, opened the presentation by reminding the audience that while school shootings are tragic events, they are statistically rare.

In the United States, there are 50 million students enrolled in grades K through 12 and an additional 20.5 million students enrolled in college. Of those millions of students, approximately 14 to 34 youths aged 5 to 18 are killed in schools each year, which represent 3 percent of youth homicides.

“The loss of one child in a school is absolutely one too many,” Schildkraut said.

On April 20, 1999, what DeAngelis called “a beautiful, Colorado spring day,” two students opened fire at Columbine High School, killing 12 students and one faculty member.

DeAngelis said he remembers sitting in his office around lunchtime when his secretary came in and said “Frank, there’s been a report of gunfire in the cafeteria.”

“The first thing that crossed my mind is, ‘This cannot be happening,’” DeAngelis said.

DeAngelis left his office and came face to face with one of the gunmen in the hallway. Two girls were coming down the side hallway as the gunman began to approach. DeAngelis grabbed the girls and tried to run out the door, but it was locked since the school was on lockdown.

DeAngelis had a ring of 35 keys in his pocket. The first key he tried opened the door. He and the girls were able to escape without injury.

“I’ve tried again, and in 15 years, I was never able to do it again,” he said. “On that day, someone was looking out for me.”

DeAngelis could have left Columbine, transferred to another school and tried to put the incident behind him, but he chose to stay until every student who was in the school district at the time of the shooting graduated.

“I made a promise that night, to those kids and Mr. [Dave] Sanders that, even though there was nothing I could do to bring them back, they would never be forgotten,” DeAngelis said.

The way police officers respond to school shootings now is a result of Columbine, DeAngelis said.

At the time, the protocol for school shootings was for the police officers to secure the perimeter and wait until the SWAT team arrived. DeAngelis said he saw police officers “ready to break rank because they knew there were kids being shot inside that building.”

Now, protocol is for police officers to enter the building immediately to engage the shooter as early as possible.

“Things have changed,” DeAngelis said. “These kids did not die in vain.”

Kristina Anderson was a 19-year-old college student on April 16, 2007, running late to her French class on a Monday morning at Virginia Tech.

She and her friend got to Room 211 in Norris Hall after class had already started, so they took seats toward the back of the classroom.

Moments later, the shooter entered the building, chained the doors shut and began shooting. He killed 32 people that day, 12 of them in the same room Anderson was in.

Anderson and her friend were both shot, but survived because they were in the back of the classroom and the shooter could not get to them. Anderson was shot three times: once in the back, once in the butt and once in the toe.

Anderson remembers not really knowing what was going on during the attack. She described it as “quick, intentional and methodical.”

The attack lasted around 10 to 12 minutes; from the time the shooter began firing to the time he took his own life.

“I never thought I was going to die,” Anderson said. “I just wanted the event to be over.”

Anderson returned to Virginia Tech the following semester. She and the other survivors kept in touch and acted as a support group for one another. She called them “the club you never want to belong to.”

In December 2007, Virginia Tech created a threat management program to help identify students who could be a threat to the school’s safety and get them the help they need.

“There are many events that are prevented and stopped that we never hear about, thankfully,” Anderson said. “There is somebody probably planning another Virginia Tech right now. I hate to say that. But we can intervene.”

In the years following the shooting, Anderson formed the Koshka Foundation, named after her childhood nickname meaning “little cat” in Russian, with the goal of improving campus safety and informing communities about plans for responding to tragic events, as well as how to recognize the warning signs so similar events can be stopped.

She also designed an app called “LiveSafe,” which allows individuals to anonymously report suspicious behavior and send the user’s locations to others and police for tracking.

“That ‘what if’ is not worth it in the end,” Anderson said.