For six hours one day in April 1999, a terrified Robin Rose did an enormous amount of bargaining with God.
Pleading for the safety of her youngest daughter, Ashley. Praying the high school freshman wasn’t one of the victims in the massacre at Columbine High School.
When Rose’s flight landed in Louisville, Ky., she got a heart-stopping message on her pager from her middle daughter: Mom, call home. There’s an emergency.
While Rose was traveling to Kentucky on business, two heavily armed students had stalked the school’s hallways, killing 13 people and injuring 21 others.
Ashley attended a nearby high school but sometimes took classes at Columbine.
In an era long before the proliferation of cellphones, Rose couldn’t reach her daughter.
But, she could talk to God.
If Ashley was OK, Rose promised to commit her life to understanding how the shooting could have happened and working to try to prevent it from occurring again.
Six hours after that terrifying message, Rose finally talked to Ashley on the phone. Later, she got to hold her. It’s a wonder she let go.
The family attended so many funerals and so many vigils, it was life-changing for them, Rose said.
Then came another change. Within a year, Rose left her lucrative airline job with UPS and returned to school to get her master’s degree in conflict resolution.
How could she ask for Ashley’s life to be spared if she wasn’t willing to give back, she asked herself.
Rose then began working in the nonprofit field, a career that eventually led her to Jacksonville last month to take over the city’s Girls Inc. affiliate.
Finding Girls Inc.
Rose’s first nonprofit job was as executive director of Season for Nonviolence, started by a grandson of Mahatma Ghandi.
She and Arun Ghandi have become friends. Her doctoral dissertation was about him and she hopes to use that as the basis for a book.
In 2013, she became executive director for the Girls Inc. in Sarasota. It’s there she learned the impact of the nonprofit’s mission for girls to become strong, smart and bold.
Rose shares the story of a girl who started in the nonprofit’s programs at age 10. She had developed destructive behaviors, including being violent toward herself and others.
Eight years later, the young lady received a national Girls Inc. scholarship. She is the first in her family to graduate from high school and will be the first to attend college.
The young lady plans to pursue a career in the counseling or therapy fields.
More importantly, she is determined to end her family’s generational cycles of substances abuse and addiction.
At just 18, she’s found the strength to accept that her parents did the best they could at raising her.
“She just has learned to love and forgive them,” Rose said.
The teenager’s speech at the nonprofit’s annual luncheon brought the house down.
Rekindling an old flame
Rose knows a little about bringing the house down, as well.
Last Halloween, at a family party to celebrate the completion of her Ph.D., Rose had a surprise for her guests.
Before the kids left to go trick or treating, the adults were given a glass of champagne.
In her toast, Rose told her guests she hoped they enjoyed the treat of the party.
Then she shared the trick: She was getting married at 3 p.m. the next day, before the start of a second, larger party. And not to just anyone. Rose was remarrying the father of her children, from whom she had been divorced for 25 years.
“The room went nuts,” Rose said.
It was a similar reaction the next day when guests who thought they were attending Rose’s Ph.D. celebration party were told it was more like a wedding reception.
Rose and Wayne Ziskal had been married a couple of hours earlier in a replica of a 1,000-year-old castle in South Ponte Vedra Beach.
The couple’s three daughters — ages 33, 35 and 37 — were stunned when they learned their parents had rekindled their romance. They saw their parents were reconnecting, Rose said, but didn’t expect a second marriage to each other.
“They pretty much thought hell had frozen over because their parents got back together,” Rose said, with a laugh.
The road back down the aisle began in July 2013, when Rose was in the final year of finishing her Ph.D. and had no interest in dating.
She and Ziskal took the opportunity to talk about where they were at that point in their lives, as well as about their marriage and what caused it to end.
Within 72 hours of Nov. 1, Rose got married, celebrated the completion of her Ph.D. and turned 60.
“I stepped into my 60s with a bang,” she said. “I can’t stop smiling.”
There was a problem, though. For nearly 10 months, they lived in cities separated by nearly 250 miles.
Rose continued to work in Sarasota. Ziskal, retired from American Airlines, lived in South Ponte Vedra Beach and is an aviation professor at Jacksonville University.
That distance was eliminated when Rose was hired to replace the retiring Peg Ganger at Jacksonville’s affiliate of Girls Inc.
Expanding the mission
Rose said the 83 national and international Girls Inc. affiliates have different business models.
Sarasota’s offered programs for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. The nonprofit had a large center that housed after-school programs for kindergarten through eighth grade.
Jacksonville’s programs are for kindergarten through third grade and sixth through eighth grades. The programs are held in partnership with Duval County Public Schools.
The agency has a Jacksonville budget of just under $900,000, while Sarasota’s is $1.2 million. However, Jacksonville helps twice as many girls. It has a mix of 25 part-time and full-time employees, she said.
Rose wants to expand revenue streams in Jacksonville by adding a Champions for Girls Giving Society, as well as an endowment. And she wants to add programs for grades currently not served by the nonprofit.
She hasn’t been on the job long enough to have a timeline for those plans.
But she knows she wants to expand the mission of Girls Inc. in Jacksonville. Research shows when you educate a girl, you educate a family for generations, she said.
There’s more to her desire, though. She said she’s still working every day to honor her commitment to God.
A lot of lives were changed that day in April 1999 when so many children died.
Rose is working to change far more lives because her child lived.
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