DENVER – Colorado high school students, from athletes to musicians, will begin wearing tiny, black-and-white patches this fall that bear a single word: respect.

The patch is designed to promote harmony among the typical school cliques whose divisions were exposed so painfully in the Columbine High School shooting that left 15 people dead. “We felt compelled to come up with a way to still have a link with that tragedy but move forward,” said Bill Reader, associate commissioner of the Colorado High School Activities Association.

Dylan Klebold, 17, and Eric Harris, 18, killed 12 students, a teacher and themselves in an April 20 rampage through their school. Twenty-three students were injured. The two were members of the Trench Coat Mafia, a group of students who shared a predilection for dark “Goth” culture, and according to diary entries, they considered themselves outcasts in the school pecking order.

Witnesses have said the young gunmen singled out those who infuriated them the most: popular athletes. Junior Aaron Cohn, 16, who was in the school library when the killers walked in and shot several people, believes he survived because a classmate jumped on his back and covered the baseball slogan on his shirt. He said he would probably wear one of the patches on his baseball uniform.

“It means people trying to unite with the whole,” he said.

The Colorado High School Activities Association, the high school governing body in the state, plans to send schools more than 200,000 of the 1-by-2-inch patches later this month, to be worn voluntarily by students at sports, music, speech, and student council activities. The patches, white with black lettering, will be free.

Association staffers came up with the idea of the patch after sports officials asked them to develop a way to honor Columbine and the victims. Bruce Beck, whose stepdaughter Lauren Townsend died in the shooting, works for the manufacturer of the patches, Denver Athletic Supply. He would like to take the idea of respect to another level by painting the word on the wall of every school gym in the state so the message would reach more students.

– Colleen Slevin – Associated Press