Slain Red Lake Teacher Mourned

While some Red Lake High School students crouched under their desks in a corner, English teacher Neva Rogers stood out in the open and began to pray.

"God be with us. God help us," 15-year-old Ashley Lajeunesse heard Rogers say after telling students to hide as Jeff Weise shot through a window and marched into the room.

"He walked up to that teacher with the shotgun and he pulled the trigger but it didn't fire," said Chongai'la Morris, 14. "Then he pulled out his pistol and he shot her three times in the side and once in the face."

Rogers, 62, was the only teacher killed by Weise, a depressed teen who shot to death his grandfather and his grandfather's girlfriend, then went to the school and killed Rogers, a security guard and five students before shooting himself.

Her funeral was scheduled for Monday.

Rogers' children were not surprised by their mother's actions. "There wasn't anything she wouldn't do for her students," said son Vern Kembitskey, 34.

Kembitskey said his mother gave clothing to needy children and helped raise money for field trips to Washington, D.C. "I think she was good at what she did," Kembitskey said. "I think she actually wanted those kids to learn."

Though she was not of American Indian descent, Rogers felt she was needed at Red Lake, a school on a northern Minnesota Indian reservation, where truancy is common alongside poverty, pregnancy and violence.

Rogers began teaching at Red Lake after attending Bemidji State University. She left teaching in the early 1980s to work in the insurance industry but returned to Red Lake about six years ago.

She had a soft spot for teens who had lost their parents or became parents at a young age, said her daughters, Cindy Anderson and Kim Kvam. But she also expected a lot from her students and would stay late to help them.

"One of the things she admired most were people who came from absolutely nothing and made something of themselves," Kembitskey said.

A state survey conducted last year found that of 56 Red Lake ninth-graders, nearly half the girls said they had tried to kill themselves. Twenty percent of boys said the same — about triple the rate statewide. The survey also said Red Lake students assaulted other classmates and used more alcohol and drugs than other students across Minnesota.

"She said you have to just give them hope and keep encouraging and try to get them to keep coming" to school, said Doris Berndt, who is Rogers' half-sister. She believed "by getting an education they are going to have a better life."