Oct 2, 2018 By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 4 min read

For a man who lost a daughter and almost a son in what remains one of the nation’s most high-profile mass shootings, Darrell Scott can display a healthy sense of humor.

“My brother’s name is Larry, and my name is Darrell,” he told his audience at the Bible Chapel in Peters Township late last year, drawing hearty laughter from the adults in the audience. “Young people are going, what? Ask somebody old, and they’ll tell you. If I ever meet Bob Newhart, we’ll have a serious conversation.”

Even though he hasn’t chatted with the comedic legend about the characters on his ’80s sitcom, Scott has talked to U.S. presidents, members of Congress and leaders around the globe about what has become his life’s work: Rachel’s Challenge.

If his name rings a bell, go back 20 years to an April afternoon in Jefferson County, Colo. Rachel Joy Scott, his 17-year-old daughter, had chosen to eat lunch outside between her classes at Columbine High School.

She was the first of that day’s 13 shooting victims, and her brother Craig, also a Columbine student, later had a gun pointed at his head after watching two friends die right next to him.

Shortly after, Darrell Scott and his wife, Sandy, formed Rachel’s Challenge as a nonprofit, nonpolitical organization that aims to violence by encouraging kindness and compassion.

His visit last September was in conjunction with the 20th-anniversary celebration of Peters Township Character Counts, which has a similar mission in promoting the principles of respect, responsibility and honesty. Peters Township School District partnered in arranging for the program.

Scott and fellow presenters within the organization have taken Rachel’s Challenge to more than 28 million people worldwide since 2001, with one of the goals of eliminating the types of incidents that claimed his daughter’s life.

“What we’re trying to do is long-term prevention,” Scott explained. “It’s not crisis management, but it’s dealing with the hearts of young people way before it comes to a crisis level.

“And we have seen seven school shootings prevented over the last 19 years,” he continued, “young men who had guns and had pipe bombs and had plans, who either turned themselves in after Rachel’s Challenge came to their school, or their friends turned them in.”

At the heart of the program are the contents of an essay that Rachel Scott composed for a class shortly before her death. In “My Ethics, My Codes of Life,” she wrote: “I have a theory that if one person will go out of their way to show compassion, then it will start a chain reaction of the same.”

She practiced what she preached, according to her father.

“At her funeral, a line of young people for an hour told us story after story after story, stories we would have never heard,” he said. “They told it behind her casket about how she had reached out to them with kindness and compassion, and it touched and changed their lives.”

One example is of a new Columbine student who couldn’t get anyone to sit with her in the cafeteria, until Rachel did. It turned out that the girl had moved from another state after her mother died.

Another is how Rachel defended a special-needs student against bullies and encouraged her friends to show him kindness and respect. It turned out that her actions helped the boy change his mind about his intent to commit suicide.

Drawing from the essay, Rachel’s Challenge has five components:

• Look for the best in others.
• Dream big.
• Choose positive influences.
• Speak with kindness.
• Start your own chain reaction.

“You know, the best medicine ever for increasing your endorphins and making you feel good is kindness,” Darrell Scott asserted. “When someone sees an act of kindness, it triggers their endorphins, and you feel like a high. You feel good about seeing an act of kindness, even if you didn’t do it.

“And if you perform an act of kindness, it also kicks in your endorphins, so you feel good. Or if you receive an act of kindness, your endorphins kick in and you feel good,” he said. “So why don’t we do that more often? Why don’t we just show a little more kindness? Because then we’d walk around feel happy all the time.”

For more information, visit rachelschallenge.org.