Four people were killed and nine others were taken to various hospitals after a shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, the GBI said Wednesday afternoon.

One person was in custody, the state agency confirmed.

Barrow Sheriff Jud Smith said early Wednesday afternoon that “every minute” the investigation was updating. Federal and state agencies were assisting with the investigation.

“First and foremost, I want to lift up our community,” Smith said. “I want to give our sympathies to our community, our school system, our kids, our parents that had to witness this today.”

Several law enforcement agencies responded around 10:20 a.m. to the school, which was placed on lockdown following reports of an active shooting, the Barrow sheriff’s office said.

At 10:23 a.m., 11th grader Henry van der Walt texted his mother: “I think there’s a school shooting.”

Minutes later, Becky van der Walt got another message.

“I love you,” Henry wrote.

The text exchange was likely repeated hundreds of times during several chaotic hours for both students and parents. Students were led from the school outside, where parents rushed to find them.

As the details were slowly confirmed during the day, the sheriff said he expected to have more information later Wednesday.

“This is going to take multiple days to get answers,” he said during a news conference near the school shortly after 1 p.m.

Barrow Coroner Kenneth Cooper said early Wednesday afternoon he could not confirm information about those killed.

One gunshot victim was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital, the hospital confirmed Wednesday afternoon.Two other victims were taken to regional hospitals in Barrow and Gainesville, according to the Northeast Georgia Medical System. The Barrow hospital was also treating some who suffered anxiety or panic attacks.

NewsChopper 2 footage showed large crowds of students filtering into the high school’s stadium during the lockdown. Several ambulances were at the scene as well.By late morning, students were released to their families and school officials said buses would be running for those needing transportation home.

Frantic parents rushed to the school, with many forced to park and walk to reach the campus while searching for their children.

Apalachee sophomore Alexsandra Romero said she was in her second-period class when another student barged in yelling for everyone to get down.

“I wasn’t texting my family at first, because I thought it was just a drill,” Romero told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Since the school had prepared for this scenario, Romero said she and her classmates knew what to do.

“I can just remember my hands were shaking,” Romero said. “I felt bad because everybody was crying, everybody was trying to find their siblings.”

Romero caught glimpses of blood and guns lying on the ground as she was escorted from the building.

“I can still picture everything, like the blood, the shouting and everything,” Romero said.

Four people were killed and nine others were injured in a shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, the GBI said Wednesday afternoon.

Apalachee High was the only school cleared for dismissal as of midday Wednesday. Other Barrow County schools will remain in a soft lockdown “for the safety of everyone right now,” the school district said.

According to the White House, President Joe Biden was briefed on the shooting and his administration would coordinate with federal, state and local authorities. Gov. Brian Kemp said he directed all available state resources to respond to the high school, which is about 8 miles east of Dacula, southwest of Winder.

“(I) urge all Georgians to join my family in praying for the safety of those in our classrooms, both in Barrow County and across the state,” Kemp added. “We will continue to work with local, state and federal partners as we gather information and further respond to this situation.”

FBI Atlanta said it was aware of the shooting and that agents were on scene to coordinate and assist local authorities. GBI agents were also providing help, and the state agency urged everyone to stay clear of the area.

Apalachee High had an enrollment of just over 1,900 students as of March, according to the Georgia Department of Education. The department said it was also monitoring the situation.

“I am devastated by the news of the tragic shooting at Apalachee High School today,” Richard Woods, state school superintendent, said in a statement. “My heart and prayers are with the families and loved ones of those affected and the entire Barrow County community. This is an unimaginable loss for Barrow and for our entire educational community across the state.”

Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens also issued a statement after the shooting.

“My prayers are with the high school students, staff and families affected by the senseless act of violence in Winder, Georgia,” he said. “I have been in contact with Chief (Darin) Schierbaum, and the Atlanta Police Department has been working with the Atlanta Public Schools Police Department to bolster patrols around our schools for the rest of the day out of an abundance of caution.

“APD has also been on standby in case law enforcement agencies need assistance with this incident. May God comfort the victims and their loved ones in the difficult days ahead.”

Atlanta Journal-Constitution staff writers Lexi Baker and Henri Hollis contributed to this article.

He was a senior at Colorado State University and worked as chair of All The T.E.A. in Denver, an organization focused on HIV education and advocacy. Would the new outcry over teaching critical race theory — originally an academic framework used to understand structural racism, now a GOP catch-all for lessons addressing race, sex and gender — interfere with his team’s access to schools, he wondered?

“A lot of [our] historical work has been going into public schools and doing basic sex ed, HIV 101s and talking about how race and LGBT issues intersect with sexual health and with HIV specifically,” said Babcock. “So it was a really scary year to think about the ways that we might end up losing that access in certain counties.”

So far, the group has not been blocked from continuing its work in any districts, said Babcock. But in Fort Collins, his college town, some parents on May 24 against gender and sexuality alliances in local schools, underscoring to Babcock the barriers his organization is up against, especially in areas with large swaths of conservative-leaning parents.

It’s one example out of many students shared of how the hot-button issues facing education this year impacted youth nationwide. With the school year having now drawn to a close, 蜜桃影视 convened members of its Student Council to share how the key K-12 storylines played out in their own lives.

Staffing shortages

For Mia Miron in Pomona, California, staffing shortages impacted her learning. Across the U.S. this past school year, there were more open positions at K-12 schools than during any previous year going back at least a decade, according to . At Miron’s school, her math teacher left early in the year, and from then on, her class was led by a long-term substitute.

“That kind of set me behind,” the eighth grader said.

She now is attending summer classes offered by her school to catch up and prepare for the transition to high school.

Diego Camacho, who recently graduated high school in Los Angeles, also attended a school that was short a math teacher. During his junior year, they were forced to combine the pre-algebra and pre-calculus classes, with students mostly learning from online Khan Academy lessons, he said.

Mental health

Numerous students articulated struggles with mental health. Sydnee Floyd, a high schooler in Franklin, Tennessee, said that during the first year of COVID, she experienced bouts of depression as the pandemic shut down many of her favorite activities. 

To make matters worse, in her community, she felt a stigma around discussing issues like depression or anxiety. 

“It’s kind of like you shove it to the corner and you don’t really talk about it,” she said.

But fortunately, a teacher who, Floyd said, was “like my second mom” picked up on the girl’s troubled state.

“She could tell that I was struggling and she just asked me an honest question. ‘Are you OK?’ And I was like, ‘No, I’m not. I’ve been really struggling,’” Floyd recalled. “So she got in contact with our school counselors, and got me the help I needed.”

In Needham, Massachusetts, Maxwell Surprenant’s school tried to take an honest accounting of the mental health difficulties its student body was facing. The administration carried out anonymous polling during fall 2021 to better understand young people’s stress and anxiety on the heels of COVID. 

“They found that our student body was, on the whole, generally more stressed than the average stress level of high school students, but had very few cases of extreme anxiety,” said the high school senior. “Most people reported having resources and people to talk to, friends to reach out to, good support systems.”

At the same time, in his own life, Surprenant deepened several friendships as his school rolled back COVID protocols like mandatory masking. 

Because lockdown had taken away so much, “everyone wanted to make the most of the relationships that they had going forward,” he said.

School safety

Just weeks after the school shooting at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, left 19 fourth graders and two teachers dead, several students had school safety at the front of their minds.

Babcock said he personally knows two victims of mass shootings. A friend of his survived the in Douglas County, Colorado, and his older sibling’s close friend died in the of 2012. There’s a psychological impact of proximity to those sorts of tragedies, he explained. 

“It does really make you feel like you always have to look for an exit,” he said. “This year, it was really painful to see that nothing had really changed since my senior year (in high school) when the Parkland shooting had happened.”

At Za’Nia Stinson’s school in Charlotte, North Carolina, a bomb threat this year brought a SWAT team to her school, complete with a bomb-sniffing canine unit. The disruption made her reflect on just how difficult it would be to learn in an environment where such threats are more common. 

“It’s so sad that someone goes to school to learn and has to worry about, ‘Will this be my last day or not?’” said Stinson.

Missing school

High rates of absenteeism plagued school districts across the country this year, as students missed class due to quarantine and poverty-related issues exacerbated by the pandemic, such as needing to work part-time jobs. 

In Floyd’s Tennessee district, she reported that a bunch of her peers “kind of just gave up on school.” By her estimation, more people were absent than usual throughout the year, but not necessarily because of COVID — instead taking days off “to live their life a little bit more.” 

“They kind of just went and did what they wanted to after being kind of locked down for two years,” said Floyd.

For Joshua Oh, who just finished eighth grade in Gambrills, Maryland, many of his peers struggled to stay up to date with their coursework after testing positive for COVID and being forced to quarantine. He personally caught the virus over winter break when he wouldn’t fall behind in school, but infections went up this past spring amid the second Omicron surge.

“A lot of people’s grades have tanked … and the teachers haven’t really exempted them from grades,” he said. “For friends, they’ve had to either email teachers or just have a low grade or just try to get extra credit or re-do [assignments] and get a late work [penalty], which deducts a couple points.”

Devin Walton, a rising high school sophomore in South Torrance, California also struggled with missing school. But in a reminder that normal teenage life events also continued through the pandemic, his absences had nothing to do with COVID.

“I would sleep almost the entire day and whenever I did wake up, I would just go eat something and then go back to sleep. And my mom was getting worried about me because she thought I was sick or I was depressed,” Walton explained. “But it turns out, I was just going through a major growth spurt and I was getting really tired.”

Paths forward

Most of the young people on the council agreed that life is still not fully back to normal after the pandemic, and teachers can be a key support.

“Students right now are really feeling disconnected,” said Babcock. 

It goes a long way when educators find meaningful ways to connect with young people, he believes. 

“Just making sure that, from the first day, teachers are making themselves known as a safe person for a variety of issues, whether it’s bullying, LGBT issues, experiences of race in the classroom,” he said. “There are so many ways that you can make yourself open to students.”

Thoughtful personal touches can also have a big impact on improving classroom environment, reflected Mahbuba Sumiya, who finished high school in Detroit with virtual learning and is now a rising sophomore at Harvard University.

“During the remote senior year of high school, some of my teachers would play music in the background while everyone was getting into the meeting to bring the energy,” she said. “The small things that educators do inside and outside the classroom to share love mean a lot to students like me.”

Another tactic, suggested Oh, is more hands-on activities in class. At the end of the year, he designed and built a diorama of an environmentally friendly eco-city in his science class, which, he said, allowed him to feel engaged and have fun at the same time.

Educational games that encourage healthy use of phones and laptops, like can also be a good tactic to boost engagement, suggested Stinson of North Carolina.

To make up for time lost to the pandemic, teachers should encourage students to link learning to the real-world issues they care about, suggested Camacho, in L.A.

“Educators that listen to their students will quickly discover what their students are passionate about. Educators, now more than ever, should push students to explore their passions,” he said.

For all COVID robbed them of, Walton observed, it also was a potent reminder to be grateful for the day-to-day interactions that in-person school can bring.

“When I was in lockdown, I thought, ‘Oh yeah you have to stay at home all day, this is going to be a nice long break,’” the California teen said. “And the longer I was at home, I was more like, ‘This is starting to get boring. It’s not as fun as I thought it would be.’”

“The more we were in lockdown because of this pandemic virus, the more we realized how much school meant to us.”

Years from now, if Stinson has children one day, she knows what she’ll tell them about living through this extraordinary period.

“I would tell my kids that this was a very crazy time. It was a weird time.”

This story was brought to you via 蜜桃影视’s Student Council initiative, an effort to boost youth voices in our reporting. America’s Promise Alliance helped in the recruiting of our diverse 11-member council and the idea was conceived as part of Asher Lehrer-Small’s Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship.

WASHINGTON — Survivors of two mass shootings in New York and Texas will appear before the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee on Wednesday to relate their experiences. (Watch live here after 10 a.m. ET)

The witnesses will include fourth grader Miah Cerrillo of Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two adults were gunned down at Robb Elementary School on May 24. Her in order to appear dead to the 18-year-old gunman has gripped Americans, including lawmakers. 

Felix and Kimberly Rubio, parents of Lexi Rubio, in the mass shooting, will also speak before lawmakers.

Zeneta Everhart, a survivor of a mass shooting May 14 by a white supremacist in Buffalo, New York, will also testify. , Zaire Goodman, who was shot in the neck.

The hearing will be live-streamed here.?

“Our hearing will examine the terrible impact of gun violence and the urgent need to rein in the weapons of war used to perpetrate these crimes,” Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, the chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, said in a statement.

“It is my hope that all my colleagues will listen with an open heart as gun violence survivors and loved ones recount one of the darkest days of their lives,” Maloney said. “This hearing is ultimately about saving lives, and I hope it will galvanize my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to pass legislation to do just that.”

Firearm related injuries are now the for children and adolescents in the United States, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

The House Judiciary Committee held an emergency meeting Thursday to mark up a legislative package that contains eight bills related to gun control. President Joe Biden also and urged Congress to move forward on passing gun control legislation. 

The hearing will be broken into two panels of witnesses. The first panel includes survivors and victims of gun violence, and the second panel will be made up of gun safety advocates, experts and law enforcement.

The only pediatrician in Uvalde, Dr. Roy Guerrero, , will testify. 

The second panel will include Greg Jackson Jr., the executive director of the Community Justice Action Fund, which advocates to end gun violence; Joseph Gramaglia, a police commissioner in Buffalo; Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, a labor union representing public school teachers and staff; and Nick Suplina, the senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, an organization that advocates for gun control formed a year after the Sandy Hook mass school shooting. 

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Cate Folsom for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com. Follow Nebraska Examiner on and .

In just 10 months, more than 20 New York City children have been victims of gun violence, doubling data from the same time period just two years ago, according to the New York City Police Department.

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The harrowing incidents of violence are constant.

A 14-year-old boy was shot getting off an MTA bus in Harlem earlier this month. The teen, who police say was the intended target, ?was grazed in the head by the bullet.

The shooting death of a 10-year-old Queens boy became part of the political landscape when mayoral candidates attended a peace vigil to end gun violence this summer.

“Too many of our young people have been deprived of the chance to grow old and to lead the lives they deserve because of gun violence,” said U.S. Representative Yvette D. Clarke, who represents central brooklyn, on Jan. 30 after record high levels of gun violence in her district. “Our communities, our culture, and most importantly our youth, have all suffered.?

New York City’s increase in shootings involving teens and children is not unique.

Across the country, teens and children have been victims of shootings, with killed this year —?surpassing past years’ numbers and comparable to 2020’s record-high stats.?

Hundreds of teens have been gunned down in Philadelphia and Chicago alone.

According to , 362 kids have been shot this year. Forty-three of the shootings were fatal. They are teens like 16-year-old Kierra Moore, a high school basketball star who died in a drive-by shooting on Oct. 14.?

https://twitter.com/GKMC18/status/1450247620480413696

“The pandemic is undoing any progress we had been making in reducing young people’s involvement in gun violence,” said Monica Bhatt, a Senior Research Director at the University of Chicago Education Lab and Crime Lab. Youth homicides were down almost 50 percent between 2016 and 2019, Bhatt said.

More than 170 kids have been shot in Philadelphia in the past 10 months, according to .

One 13-year-old was killed right outside of an elementary school in Philadelphia this month.?

Across the country, sidewalks and street corners have become sites for vigils and memorials as communities gather to remember young lives lost — like the “well-loved student and athlete,” Xavier Louis-Jacques, who was shot and killed in April at the basketball courts near his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A memorial sits at the scene where? 6- and 7-year-old sisters were shot in August after leaving their grandmother’s home in Chicago.?

But even vigils have become locations for violence: Just last week, a 16 year old was shot in Philadelphia during a vigil for another young gun victim.

Experts said the pandemic triggered the growing gun violence nationwide.

“The pandemic brought on a lot of stressors that lead to mental health issues,” said Christopher Herrmann, an assistant professor at and a former NYPD crime analyst. “An increase in mental illness will spark the violence.”

Community members and anti-gun violence advocates are looking for answers. GoodKids MadCity, a youth organization, implored Chicago Public School officials to create plans for students’ safety and mental health care. A Chicago schools spokesman said a plan would be released Oct. 25.?

https://twitter.com/GKMC18/status/1448292322597294084

Bhatt said programs that use cognitive behavioral therapy can work to directly reduce students’ violence involvement.?

has been working with Chicago Public Schools to identify, test and scale promising programming to reduce students’ gun violence involvement and criminal justice exposure and support their success in high school and beyond.

“The average student spends about 20 percent of their time in school and 80 percent of their time outside of school,” Bhatt said. “Teachers and school staff are the frontline for those that have to address the effects of trauma exposure — including the impact of gun violence — without being able to directly reduce that exposure themselves.”

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia responded to the alarming rate of gunfire with additional counseling services for youth victims, CBS Philly .

In New York City, parents and community members rallied outside of City Hall on Oct. 10, demanding an end to gun violence.

Eve Hendricks, who lost her son to gun violence, asks for increased school safety so students can learn without worrying about being attacked.?

Hendricks said kids should be able to go to school without worrying about being shot, and had a question for the parents of perpetrators.??

“Parents,” Hendricks said at a recent rally, “how dare you raise monsters that take the lives of our kids.”