Active shooter plans have become just as important as lesson plans in today’s schools.

A Knoch High School graduate recently published a book about his 34 years as a teacher, coach, counselor and administrator at a Florida middle school. A fatal shooting and its aftermath are part of his story.

Jeff Neal’s “What A Long Strange It’s Been” chronicles his experiences dealing with basketball teams, young gang members and students casually admitting they’d dropped acid 50 times before their 17th birthday.

And Neal writes about the fatal shooting of a popular teacher and assistant basketball coach on the last day of school in 2000.

At Knoch, Neal played on the basketball team that he said “almost made it to the state title” in 1981.

Neal spent 34 years as a teacher, counselor and administrator.

Neal gained an associate’s degree from Butler County Community College and a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Fredonia.

It was while he was attending SUNY Fredonia, 40 miles southwest of Buffalo, that Neal said he had a revelation.

“It was one of the coldest days on record. The wind chill was -67. I tried to walk to class in that,” said Neal. “I swore then I was going to move where there was warm weather and a beach.”

He succeeded in his goal. After attending a job fair at Buffalo State University and having one interview, he landed a job at Lake Worth Middle School in Palm Beach County, Fla.

Moving to the county, which lies in the southeastern part of the state north of Broward County and Miami-Dade County, proved to be a bit of a culture shock, Neal said.

“I grew up in Butler County. The demographics were way different down there. It was 47% Black, 45% Hispanic and 8 to 11% white,” said Neal.

There were a lot of gangs in the overcrowded school, which had with 1,600 students in three grades six through eight. There were a lot of fights, he said, and the students came from countries such as Guatemala, Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama and more. The school had four language facilitators to translate for the students and their parents.

“There were a lot of race-based gangs, and one of my jobs as counselor was to address the gang problem,” said Neal. “There was some danger involved with different gangs at the same school. I had to break up fights, and there was always the question if there was a weapon on campus.”

Neal started as an English teacher and became a guidance counselor and coached boys basketball. He went back to school and got his master’s degree in counseling before becoming an administrator and ending as assistant principal at the school.

In his book, Neal writes about some of the boys he coached on the court. There was Sammy Lee Emile who played professional basketball in Finland. There was Anthony Marshall, who got a scholarship to the University of Southwest Louisiana and Jeffrey Remington, who plays basketball in Europe.

“Emile has the raw talent. In seventh grade he could grab the rim with both hands,” Neal said. But coaching Emile, Marshall, Remington and others on his teams wasn’t easy.

“None of them went to camps. They all learned their ball on the playground. That got them into bad habits that they learned from prima donnas on the playground,” he said. “They all carried the ball, they traveled.”

One of Neal’s assistant coaches was Bob Grunow. On the last day of school, May 26, 2000, while Neal and his fellow teachers were worried about food fights breaking out in the cafeteria, Grunow was shot and killed in his classroom by a 14-year-old.

The shooter had been sent home earlier in the day for participating in a water balloon fight and had come back to the school to say goodbye to his girlfriend who was in Grunow’s class.

“We believe he had not intended to shoot him. He was trying to say goodbye to his girlfriend,” said Neal.

His book details the aftermath of the school shooting and its effect on staff and students. Neal did his doctoral dissertation on the school community’s reaction to the incident.

Part of the reason he wrote the book, Neal said, was to help readers gain insight into recovery from PTSD.

Michelle Lesniak, the library director of the South Butler Community Library, was a classmate of Neal’s at Knoch High School.

“He’s a fellow graduate. He played sports, and I was a cheerleader,” she said. “It’s great to have a classmate do something.”

In addition to getting a copy of “What A Long Strange It’s Been” for the library, Lesniak arranged for Neal to be at the library at 6 p.m. Aug. 2 at the library for a book signing and to talk about his book. Copies will be on sale at the talk and can be paid for with cash, check or credit card. No registration is required. Refreshments will be provided.

Lesniak said, “I assume it will be a great read for teachers and mentors.”

Neal began writing the book after deciding to retire from education in 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic began to surge.

“I did 34 years in Florida. I enjoyed it. It was stressful, but I was thankful I had a career, but I was ready,” said Neal.

“Everybody was going to work, and I was in quarantine,” said Neal. “I was in Italy when COVID started.”

By the time he returned, Neal said he really couldn’t go anywhere. People were always telling him “You have a lot of stories, you should write them down,” he said. So he decided to do so.

“I took (Ernest) Hemingway’s advice to novice writers: ‘Write about what you know and don’t write to become wealthy,’” Neal said.

“My friends from high school were all story tellers. We were all story tellers. If you can tell a story, you can write,” he said. “I took me over a year to write, and the editing process was another year easily.”

He started with the first chapter, Mr. Molloy and the power of a milkshake and his final day at Lake Worth Middle School.

It is published by Dorrance Publishing of Pittsburgh and is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble websites

The book’s title, “What A Long Strange It’s Been,” comes from a gift a student made for Neal, a wooden “Steal Your Face” skull made famous by the Grateful Dead album. Neal pointed out the student had mistakenly written the song lyric “what a long strange trip it’s been”on the back of the skull omitting the word trip.

These days, Neal said he spends seven months in Florida and three in Butler County with his 94-year-old mother.

It’s good to be back, he said.

“There’s something special about people from Western Pennsylvania,” said Neal. “People are friendlier.”

His plans include writing another book which he describes as a novel set in both Florida and South America.