The day was Sept. 24, 2003, in Cold Spring, Minnesota.

15-year-old freshman Jason McLaughlin brought a pistol to Rocori High School and killed two classmates.

“Everything I’ve done since that day is to try and make school a better place,” said educator and counselor Jerry Sparby.

Sparby was there that day.  He was the principal at the nearby elementary school and spent time with gunman Jason McLaughlin at the detention center in the days and weeks after the shooting.  The 15-year-old had him make a promise.

“He asked me, ‘Mr. Sparby if you do nothing else with your life… try and make sure no one else does what I have just done,’” said Sparby.

“It was a promise I made not only to Jason, but to the parents who lost their kids in the event,” he said.

After the Rocori shooting, Sparby became a licensed counselor, working what’s classified as “intense” cases across the country with kids who have been involved in shootings or who have been identified as possible shooters.  He says in every case, a similar portrait emerged.

“I kept hearing the same thing from kids, that they were invisible.  Their peers didn’t know they existed.  Their teachers didn’t know they existed.  I was finding that profile everywhere I was going, this ‘invisible kid,’” he said.

Now Sparby is working on a way to help every kid feel seen, and it is very simple: he wants kids in the classroom to play with each other.

He’s developing an app called “HuddLUp”.  It’s a digital library of 1,000 games categorized by age and even some of the emotions the games can teach.  The goal is social-emotional learning.

“It’s a way to give people permission to move around and sense and feel each other,” he said.

Sparby is testing the app and his theory in classrooms now.  Some 4^th graders at Cold Spring Elementary School are part of the focus group.

“It’s pretty easy to get involved.  I kind of like the one where you play rock, paper, scissors… and you play with someone who is sitting down,” said 4^th grader Kevin O’Connor.

It might sound simple, but 4^th grader teacher Greg Spanier says this approach is an easy way to make every student feel part of a group.

“When we play together and laugh together, we are enjoying each other.  We are including everybody, having fun and being healthy about it,” he said.

Sparby thinks organized activities like this could help kids like Jason Mclaughlin.

“Absolutely,” he said. “There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t have kids come up to me and tell me, ‘For the first time I have someone to play with.’  If kids play together in the classroom, it makes it that much easier to go outside and play together,” Sparby said.

Right now HuddLUp is being used in about 100 classrooms in central Minnesota.

“We are so overwhelmed, and we don’t know where to start, so we are not doing anything other than locking more doors and putting up more cameras, that just makes for more isolation,” Sparby said.