Their School Has Yet to Reopen After a Shooting. They’re Unsure What to Expect.

Before “lockdown” flashed on classroom screens last Wednesday and Apalachee High School changed irrevocably, its 1,900 students were getting into the groove of a new academic year.

Seniors with cars had started decorating their assigned parking spaces, a perk available only to their class, painting them with flowers and Bible verses and a rendering of SpongeBob SquarePants. The varsity Wildcat football team had played its first three games — losses, but there was still the rest of the season. Bar-B-Cats, a student club with a mission to raise “the next generation of pitmasters,” had catered its first few events of the school year.

But on Sept. 4 — five weeks into the new academic year — a 14-year-old freshman at the school in Winder, Ga., opened fire with an AR-15 during second period, officials said, killing two students and two teachers in the deadliest school shooting in Georgia’s history. Classes and events were canceled indefinitely.

The initial horror and shock of the attack has by now given way to the probing anguish that so often follows a school shooting. Students, parents and teachers are wondering what the rest of the school year will feel like and what challenges it will entail — just as they wonder how a student’s unraveling could have turned so violent.

“I’m still trying to question that,” said Myo Naing, a junior who credited one of his friends for running across their classroom to slam the door when the shooting started.

On Thursday, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said on its website that Colt Gray, the student charged in the attack, had brought the AR-15 to school in his backpack that morning and had asked his teacher if he could leave the classroom to go to the front office and speak to someone. The teacher let him leave with his belongings, the agency said, adding: “Gray went to the restroom and hid from teachers. Later, he took out the rifle, and began shooting.”

For nine days now, Apalachee students — Chee Nation, as they call themselves — have been in a kind of limbo. Many are hanging out with friends and playing video games, but there is no mistaking this unexpected break from classes for a vacation. “I wish we could go back to school and none of this had to happen,” Jose Inciarte, a 16-year-old junior, said.

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“They feel like it’s this tight-knit little country town that nothing bad could ever happen in,’’ Ms. Sayarath said of Winder.

Apalachee has never had to confront anything like the shooting. At scattered vigils over the last week, community members have gathered to console one another and grieve those who were killed: Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and the math teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 52.

But assigning blame is also a natural urge after a tragedy. Doubts have taken root about missed opportunities to act on warning signs displayed by the student charged with carrying out the attack.

“I definitely feel this was preventable,” said Sarah Licona, a senior, who has been trying to keep herself occupied with her job at McDonalds. She was galled by reports that the father of the suspect had given him the AR-15 as a Christmas gift, months after the boy had been accused of threatening in an online post to shoot up a middle school online.

“That’s just the worst thing he could have done,” Sarah said of the suspect’s father, Colin Gray, who has been charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter in connection with the shooting. To many students, the suspect himself, is one of the biggest mysteries. He was not with them in classes on the first days of school when the year began on Aug. 1, other students said, and he had often been absent.

“I don’t really think the kid was part of our community,” said Stephen Kreyenbuhl, a social studies teacher, adding that “we didn’t get a chance” to draw him in. The school year was still so new.