PROVIDENCE — It was supposed to be a joyful event. But a Christmas tree and menorah lighting scheduled for late Sunday afternoon at Lippitt Memorial Park was turned into a vigil for the victims of Saturday’s shooting at Brown University.

Despite the mid-20-degree weather and falling snow in Providence, over 200 people gathered to light candles to honor the two students who were killed and nine others who were wounded inside the Barus and Holley engineering building.

Councilor Sue AnderBois began the holiday event at the park near the Pawtucket line last year.

“Instead, we are gathered here to share light with one another in one of Providence’s darkest times,” AnderBois told the crowd. “We’re here together to be together and to support.”

AnderBois was joined by several of Rhode Island’s elected officials including Gov. Dan McKee, who earlier in the afternoon ordered flags at all state buildings and facilities to be lowered to half-staff as a sign of respect for the victims of the shooting.

McKee did not speak during the vigil, nor did most elected officials in attendance. Remarks during the 10-minute ceremony were given by AnderBois, Mayor Brett Smiley and Sarah Mack, senior rabbi of Temple Beth-El near Wayland Square in Providence.

Smiley, who converted to Judaism last year, invoked the first night of Hanukkah in his remarks, noting that the initial lighting of the menorah represents a small spark that grows into a bright light by the end of the eight-night festival. He said he hoped the vigil would be “the first little flicker for our community to start to heal and get better together.”

“It’s going to be a long road, but what I know about this community is that we will be here for one another,” Smiley said.

Mack similarly spoke of the need for Rhode Islanders to come together as a way to provide light in these dark times.

“We can use our light to kindle other lights — to care for one another,” she said. “That is how we get through this dark moment.”

After Mack concluded her speech, the crowd spontaneously began to sing “Amazing Grace.” Officials had no further press briefings scheduled for Sunday night on the status of their investigation.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Rhode Island Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janine L. Weisman for questions: info@rhodeislandcurrent.com.

It’s once again a harrowing week in America, as the nation grapples with yet another mass school shooting — the campus gunfire incident this year, according to a tally by the folks at the K-12 School Shooting Database. 

Two students and two teachers were killed in Wednesday’s attack at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, the latest victims in a campus firearm death toll that’s surged in the last few years. 

During a campaign stop hours after the attack, Vice President Kamala Harris called the incident “a senseless tragedy, on top of so many senseless tragedies.” 

“We’ve got to stop it.” 

‘Building leaders for 2050’

Six and a half years after David Hogg survived one the nation’s deadliest campus shootings at his Parkland, Florida, high school, his latest campaign to bolster the country’s gun laws has drawn major support from deep-pocketed donors and Democratic Party bigwigs. 

Hogg co-founded Leaders We Deserve, a political action committee that’s raised more than $8 million in the past year to help elect young Democrats who support gun control, abortion and other progressive causes. 

My analysis of Federal Election Commission filings and the PAC’s digital ads offers insight into how Hogg has leveraged the trauma and lessons of surviving Parkland to create a well-connected operation to influence state and national elections across the country in November. Leaders We Deserve has already claimed some electoral wins for candidates in Virginia and deep-red Texas.

But the effort, former education secretary and PAC adviser Arne Duncan told me, is much bigger than the upcoming high-stakes presidential election. It’s about building the next generation of Democratic lawmakers. 

“That’s what David’s play is about,” Duncan said. “It’s not about, ‘We’re going to change the entire world tomorrow,’ but it’s, ‘Can we plant a whole bunch of amazing seeds, nurture them, develop them, support them and see what happens.’” 

Read the full analysis here

More on the Georgia shooting

They lost their lives: The victims are two 14-year-old students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, and math teachers Christina Irimie and Richard Aspinwall. |

The perp: A 14-year-old student accused of carrying out the attack was taken into custody and will be charged with murder as an adult. | 

The police response: Minutes after the shooting was reported, two school resource officers and other law enforcement arrived on scene. One of the school-based cops confronted the shooter, who was armed with an AR 15-style rifle, and forced his surrender. | 

An emergency alert system created by the security vendor Centegix was credited with alerting first responders to the shooting. The system includes a lanyard with a button that teachers can push to report danger. | 

Police interviewed the alleged gunman and his father more than a year ago, after the FBI received several tips about someone threatening to “shoot up a school” on the social media platform Discord. “The father stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them,” according to the federal agency. “The subject denied making the threats online.” |/

Just months after an unprecedented parental conviction in Michigan, Georgia prosecutors allege the father’s actions led to the mass school shooting | ����Ӱ��

The shooter purportedly had a keen interest in past school shootings, most notably the 2018 attack in Parkland. | 

The big picture: This Georgia school shooting was, in many ways, a repeat of past tragedies. The most common scenario is “a surprise attack during morning classes committed by a current student who is allowed to be inside the school.” | 

In other news

California lawmakers passed a first-in-the-nation bill that would prohibit schools from serving food with artificial color additives that officials have linked to hyperactivity and other behavioral effects in children. |

A 33-year-old Latvian hacker has been extradited to the U.S. on charges of being a key player in the cybercrime group Karakurt, which has launched wide-scale ransomware attacks on K-12 schools. |

Four states suing the Education Department over new rules to protect LGBTQ+ kids from discrimination have “a substantial likelihood that they will prevail on the merits,” according to a federal appeals court. |

Meanwhile, the Justice Department and 16 states have weighed in on a lawsuit that charges a Georgia book ban targeting LGBTQ+ literature is unconstitutional. |

Nearly 4,000 “dangerous instruments” — including almost 300 weapons — were seized at New York City’s public schools last year. “Dangerous instruments” is a weird way to say stuff like box cutters and pepper spray. |

Despite school discipline reform efforts, racial disparities in student suspensions persist. |

After six people were killed in a Nashville school shooting last year, Tennessee lawmakers passed zero-tolerance rules mandating a one-year expulsion for students who threaten mass violence at school. As a result, students are being expelled “for mildly disruptive behavior,” ProPublica reported, even when officials found “the threat was not credible.” |

ICYMI @The74

• Immigrant Advocates Call on Massachusetts AG to Probe Enrollment Discrimination

• One New York District’s Old-School Approach to Support Kids’ Well-Being

• Ohio School-to-Prison Pipeline Bolstered by ‘Exclusionary Discipline,’ Absenteeism

Emotional Support

Mika, ����Ӱ�� editor Nicole Ridgway’s pup companion, found a comfy spot on the beach to soak in some of summer’s final rays. 

In the wake of the deadliest school shooting in state history, the Texas Education Agency plans to check whether hundreds of thousands of external school building doors lock properly before the next school year begins.

TEA Commissioner Mike Morath told Texas senators Tuesday that the agency will review external entry points of every school in Texas, which is about 340,000 doors. It will evaluate school facilities to determine what repairs may be needed to secure campuses. There will also be a review of each district’s safety protocols and meetings held between state officials and each district’s school safety committee.

Morath’s comments came during a Texas Senate committee hearing about the shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, during which a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers. At the same hearing, Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw said the and police could have stopped the shooter three minutes after arriving. McCraw also told lawmakers the teacher who taught in the conjoined classrooms where the shooting occurred had flagged to the school administration that the door would not lock.

The Uvalde shooter , according to school surveillance footage. Authorities said a teacher closed the door and the automatic lock failed.

There are more than 1,200 school districts in Texas and , but Morath on Tuesday promised lawmakers that his agency’s plans to review doors and safety plans will be completed this summer.

In 2019, the Legislature passed , which tasks the Texas School Safety Center with making sure school districts have adequate . The agency can call on the TEA to act as conservator to make sure plans are up to standard and school districts are compliant, Morath said.

Morath said the TEA has rule-making authority over things such as safety drills and threat exercises. The agency will come back to lawmakers once it has a dollar amount for how much hardware upgrades would cost, he said.

“We are moving with a great deal of speed on this,” he said.

In the weeks since the tragedy in Uvalde, questions have swirled around and whether some lives could have been saved if officers confronted the barricaded gunman sooner. Authorities have shared conflicting information about who was in charge, who confronted the shooter and when. A debate over whether the locked classroom doors could be breached gave way to the discovery that they may never have been locked at all.

Morath spent much of his time Tuesday talking about SB 11 and what it did to “harden” schools, plus what powers it grants to him and to the safety center. Gov. and other Republicans have touted the bill. But, the law may .

Schools didn’t receive enough state money to make the types of physical improvements lawmakers are touting publicly. Few school employees signed up to bring guns to work. And many school districts either don’t have a plan for responding to an active shooting or produced insufficient ones.

there is no indication that beefing up security in schools has prevented any violence. Plus, they said, it can be detrimental to children, especially children of color.

Morath also gave more information on the 18-year-old shooter. He started being chronically absent in the sixth grade and in his last year at Uvalde High School, he failed every class except web design. Bettencourt asked if anyone on the school’s threat assessment team should’ve noticed the chronic absenteeism and truancy as a red flag.

In Texas, it is mandated that schools have a , which determines the risk an individual poses and what the appropriate intervention is.

“Any kind of ongoing absenteeism, I wouldn’t call it threat assessment,” Morath said. “The safe and supportive team should notice that and then begin the process of intervening.”

This article originally appeared in , a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy.

Even if Congress acts, a neutered piece of legislation, fragmented by poisonous partisanship and special interests and addressing the symptoms of just a single problem, will do little to change the status quo for America’s kids. 

At best, the being considered in the Senate in response to the mass murder at Robb Elementary School is incrementalism that doesn’t meet the moment. A dramatic social and cultural shift that mobilizes and sustains the nation’s collective consciousness on issues impacting young people is required.

Now is the moment for a new, independent coalition focused exclusively on expanding and protecting children’s rights. 

Youth rights as a movement is not a novel idea. In 1836, Massachusetts passed the first child labor law that required at least three months of school per year for factory workers under age 15. This led to campaigns focused on freedom of expression, prevention of violence and abuse, expansion of privacy and creation of equitable academic opportunities. 

But this precipice in history demands more. While this month feels particularly horrific, the savagery that has recently visited America’s children is a microcosm of the dissonance between federal leaders’ purported commitment to children and kids’ actual lives. 

Need proof? Look no further than the decade-long run of inconsequential reactions to crises and trends that have horrendously impacted children’s ability to play, learn and thrive.

In 2012, 20 kindergartners at Sandy Hook Elementary School were murdered in their classrooms. No significant federal gun control legislation has been passed in the decade since. In 2020, according to the , firearms-related injuries became the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 19.

In 2014, were exposed to lead-contaminated drinking water in Flint, Michigan. It took two years and a federal court order to ensure that every child in Flint had consistent access to safe water. Until that point, it has been up to each family to find water themselves.

In 2015, according to a by Pew, 62% of parents with infants or young children — regardless of income level — found it was difficult to find child care in their community that was both affordable and high-quality. As of 2021, families with infants or preschool-aged youngsters would need to spend, on average, approximately to cover child care costs; this represents over 20 percent of the U.S. median income for a family of three.

In 2016, Larry Nasser, team doctor for the United States women’s national gymnastic team and Michigan State University, was charged with 22 counts of sexual abuse of a minor after decades of preying on girls and young women. A U.S. Department of Justice Office of Inspector General report concluded, “senior officials in the FBI Indianapolis Field Office failed to respond to the Nasser allegations with the utmost seriousness and urgency that they deserved and required.” Between the first complaint to the FBI and Nasser’s arrest, he molested at least 70 more girls.

In 2018, The Trump administration began separating children from their families at the United States-Mexico border and housing them in chain-link enclosures. In summer 2021, the Biden administration’s Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families it had reunited 36 families, a minuscule proportion of the 5,600-plus children who had been separated from their families at the border.

In 2020, young people, ages 0-24, died of suicide. In a recent 60 Minutes segment focused on child mental health, an emergency room physician said the average wait time to get an appointment with a therapist is 48 days — and for kids, it’s usually longer.

In 2021, homeless shelters housed people who were part of a family with at least one adult and one child under the age of 18. In 2010, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness announced its goal to end youth homelessness by 2020 as part of its , the nation’s first such comprehensive strategy.

By many measures, from education to life expectancy, being born today in America provides substantially more opportunity to pursue a happy life than at any other time and place in human history. But this does not negate the trauma that has affected children in the last decade in communities urban and rural, red and blue, poor and rich. Nor does it excuse the unequal and unworthy reaction from leaders who are wholly indifferent toward children, incompetent or both.

The challenges underlying many of these issues are complex and difficult to address. But these barbarities are now more features than bugs. We simply can’t rely on top-down action because our leaders have proved unreliable at creating institutions that uniformly keep kids healthy and safe.

That is why now is the time to funnel our collective shock, sadness, disappointment and fury into a new children’s rights movement that seeks to reshape the contours of stale politics and pulls fragmented interests under new and bigger tents. To do so, this movement must be built on love — for, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.”

This movement must be built on this moral foundation, and it cannot rely only on the standard-bearers of political and organizing power. New technologies, messages and institutions must emerge to invigorate this movement, created and led by youth and families. 

This new movement must be willing to engage in nonviolent protest, boycotts and targeted civil disobedience. It must couple those tools with evidence-based policymaking and emerging technologies toward the singular goal of upholding the inalienable rights of every American child. 

Building a movement like this will be slow, expensive and hard. But the cost of inaction would be a moral bankruptcy of the most bitter and terrifying kind. 

Schools scared to death.

The truth is, one education under desks,

Stooped low from bullets;

That plunge when we ask

Where our children

Shall live

& how

& if