I get what you mean about ending on the scene of them entering the school or just skipping the shooting entirely and just going straight to the memorial vandalism scene, but I don't think that would really have ended up being as chilling as you think it would be in your head, at least not without changing up a lot of previous scenes as well.
As for the library scene half of the people who watch it out of context still think it's the actual CHS library footage until corrected. In my book that's an indication of a job well done.
The audience needed to have the library scene. They needed to see Andre and Cal become the inhuman monsters they did at the end. They also paradoxically would not have felt as sad for them if they had not seen the shooting first, even though logically it would make sense to feel less sorry for them after watching them taunt and kill their victims, but human emotion is not logical. The scene was also needed to fully flush out Cal's character and demonstrate the differences in motive and attitude between him and Andre. Finally, the library scene serves to remind the audience that there is a victim side to school shootings as well that we shouldn't loose sight of.
I understand why people find the dispatcher annoying. In any other film it would sort of be like a narrator saying "the bad guy is walking over to the table. The bad guy is talking to one of his victims. The bad guy has just killed one of his victims." But I think the idea was to show the disconnect and confusion between the shooters and the outside world. The dispatcher is receiving information exactly as the actual Jefferson County operators would have, and it shows just how out of touch with what was happening the first-responders were. Remember, you can see what is happening visually in the library on the screen. The dispatcher can't. She doesn't know the layout of the library, what the shooters look like or if they even go to the school, how many people are in the room, or what their end game is. By the time you get to watching the library footage, you just watched over an hour of exposition for what is happening by the perpetrators themselves. The dispatcher hasn't, the dispatcher is completely in the dark. For example, when she says "they've got them held hostage" she doesn't realize yet that they are planning on clearing the room. And during the actual CHS shooting, a lot of the first responders did indeed believe they were responding to a hostage situation and that's part of the reason why they wren't ordered into the building until it was too late. When Andre and Cal return to the library after several minutes of roaming the school, at one point Andre takes one of his handguns and dry-fires it at his head several times, making a clicking noise. But the operator doesn't report "perpetrator is pointing gun at head; may be suicidal". She reports it as "weapon empty". She is still in the dark about exactly what is happening down to a detail like that and it's actually pretty chilling if you really think about it. To get the full impact of it and fully understand why Ben Coccio decided to include a narrator for the library scene, I would recommend listening to that scene again while not actually watching it visually. And imagine just how traumatic something like that must be, to be witnessing an event like that unfolding right in front of you but only through a non-visual medium while you are powerless to intervene or even give clear direction to the police as to what is happening.
I think the operator also serves to demonstrate how Andre probably rejected the attempts of people around him to reach out to and help him, which were offered even right up to the time of his suicide.
I think the library scene was perfectly chilling as it is. We are given no context as to who the students are, what they are doing in the library, what they did that day before they came to the library, where the library is even located within the building, etc. We just know what is about to happen to them. The fact that it's black and white also contributes to its subtle eeriness because if it wasn't for the fact that the video has a time stamp you also wouldn't be able to tell what time of day it is. The first time I watched the scene my mind kept thinking it the scene was taking place at night subconsciously.
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