It took  to stop the Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooter after he killed 19 children and two teachers in 2022. 

Among the first officers to respond to what would become one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history was former campus cop Adrian Gonzalez. On Wednesday, after an emotional three-week trial, a jury found Gonzalez  Prosecutors had alleged the 52-year-old endangered children’s lives and abandoned his training when he failed to stop the 18-year-old gunman before entering Robb Elementary School and opening fire.

Big picture: It’s the second time ever that a school-based officer has faced criminal charges for their  as shots rang out inside a school. It’s also the second time the officer has walked free. 

In 2023, former school-based police officer  after he took cover outside a Parkland, Florida, high school as a gunman killed 17 people in a 2018 mass shooting.

Both cases raise the same question: Once a gunman enters a school and starts shooting indiscriminately at innocent people, 

Three for three? Gonzalez’s acquittal doesn’t mark the end of the criminal fallout from what the Justice Department determined were  Pete Arredondo, the school district’s former police chief, will stand trial on 10 child endangerment charges. A trial date for that case hasn’t yet been set.

In the news

Updates to Trump’s immigration crackdown: 

• As thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents descend on Minnesota, school communities have been pushed into chaos and fear, my Twin Cities-based colleague Beth Hawkins reports. | 
  
• The Columbia Heights school district announced that federal agents have detained four of its students over the last two weeks — including a 5-year-old boy who was used as “bait” as officers pursued his family members. The Department of Homeland Security said the elementary schooler had been “abandoned” by his father during a traffic stop. | , 
  
• The former Des Moines, Iowa, superintendent, who was arrested by federal immigration agents in September, has pleaded guilty to felony charges connected to lying about his citizenship status on school district employment forms and for possessing a gun while in the country illegally. | 
  
• Maine parents have stopped sending their kids to school as the state becomes the next immigration enforcement battleground. | 
  
• Immigrant-rights advocates have called for a Texas judge to recuse herself from a case involving an unaccompanied minor, alleging she demonstrated cruelty and bias including grilling immigrant children about whether they had “abandoned” their families in their birth countries. | 
  
• Worms and mold in the food: As the Trump administration restores the practice of family detentions, children in ICE custody are being exposed to unsanitary conditions and limited access to clean drinking water. | 

As Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta prepares for a trial over allegations it failed to protect children from sexual exploitation, the company has asked a judge to exclude from court proceedings references to research into social media’s effects on youth mental health.| 

Employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency inappropriately handled sensitive Social Security data, the Justice Department acknowledged in a court filing. The president of the American Federation of Teachers, which sued to halt DOGE’s access to such confidential information, said the revelation “confirms our worst fears” that the quasi-agency’s data practices jeopardized “American’s personal and financial security.” | 

Poor reception: Turns out, kids aren’t so hip to the idea of school cell phone bans. Fifty-one percent of teens said students should be allowed to use their devices during class. A resounding 73% oppose cell phone bans throughout the entire school day. | 

School districts across Michigan have rejected new school safety and mental health money from the state over objections to a new requirement that they waive legal privilege and submit to state investigations after mass school shootings. Some school leaders have argued the requirement creates legal uncertainties that outweigh the financial support. | 

As the Prince George’s County, Maryland, school district faces a “crisis budget” and braces for $150 million in cuts, officials plan to spend $6 million on artificial intelligence-enabled security technology, including weapons detection systems and license plate readers. | 

ICYMI @The74

Emotional Support

School (in)Security features all the news that’s fit to 

Former Uvalde schools police Chief Pete Arredondo asked a state district court on Friday to quash ten felony charges of child endangerment for his response to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting.

Arredondo is one of two law enforcement officers who face criminal charges for their response to Texas’ deadliest school shooting, which left nineteen children and two teachers dead on May 22, 2022. An indictment handed down in June by a Uvalde County grand jury called Arredondo the incident commander and accused him of to ten children by delaying law enforcement’s response to the active shooter and not responding as trained.

In their motion to toss out the indictment, Arredondo’s lawyers say school districts and their employees don’t have a duty to protect students from third-party threats. The lawyers also point out that the children were already in danger when Arredondo responded.

“The indictment does not allege that Mr. Arredondo engaged in any conduct that placed a child in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, or physical or mental impairment,” the filing states. “To the contrary, the language in the indictment itself makes clear that when Mr. Arredondo responded as part of his official duties, an active shooter incident was already in progress.”

Arredondo that he did not think he was the incident commander and that he did not give any orders. Nearly 400 local, state and federal law enforcement officers descended upon the school but failed to act decisively, instead waiting for more than an hour to confront the gunman.

Border Patrol agents ultimately decided to breach the classroom and killed the shooter.

Since the school shooting, families of Uvalde victims have called on local and state elected officials to hold officers accountable for their failures in leadership. Many said they were disappointed that the grand jury indicted only two officers.

In addition to Arredondo, former district officer Adrian Gonzales was indicted on 29 counts of child endangerment. Gonzales violating school district policy or state law. Both officers were released from Uvalde County Jail on bond.

Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As The Texas Tribune’s signature event of the year, brings Texans closer to politics, policy and the day’s news from Texas and beyond. Browse on-demand recordings and catch up on the biggest headlines from Festival events at the Tribune’s .

This article originally appeared in at . The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Relatives of 17 children killed and two kids injured in Texas’ deadliest school shooting are suing Texas Department of Public Safety officers who were among hundreds of law enforcement that the gunman at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary, lawyers announced last week.

“Nearly 100 officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety have yet to face a shred of accountability for cowering in fear while my daughter and nephew bled to death in their classroom,” Veronica Luevanos, whose daughter Jailah and nephew Jayce were killed, said in a statement.

The legal action against 92 DPS officers came days before the two-year anniversary of the shooting in which an to kill 19 students and two teachers in two adjoining fourth-grade classrooms.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

Relatives of most of those students killed and two who were injured also announced last week that they are suing Mandy Gutierrez, who was the principal at Robb at the time, and Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, who was the school district police chief, for their “inaction” that day.

The families’ attorney also announced that the city of Uvalde will pay them $2 million to avoid a lawsuit. Additionally, the city will provide enhanced training for current and future police officers, designate May 24 as an annual day of remembrance and work with victims’ families to design a permanent memorial at the city plaza, among other things.

A DPS spokesperson declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

During a press conference in Uvalde, an attorney for the families, Josh Koskoff, said the state’s failure to prevent the deaths began long before the shooting occurred. He said Texas failed to provide small communities like Uvalde with enough resources to train their officers.

“You think the city of Uvalde has enough money, or training, or resources? You think they can hire the best of the best?” Koskoff said. “As far as the state of Texas is concerned, it sounds like their position is: You’re on your own.”

Koskoff also hinted that the families could also sue state and federal agencies, but did not name which ones. He also said the families are negotiating an agreement with the county, which would also avoid a lawsuit.

Javier Cazares, the father of one of the victims, Jacklyn Cazares, said it had been an “unbearable two years” since the massacre that took his daughter.

“There was an obvious system failure out there on May 24. The whole world saw that,” Cazares said. “The time has come to do the right thing.”

The family’s lawsuit will likely need to overcome a judicial doctrine called qualified immunity, which shields government officials, including law enforcement officers, from liability in lawsuits. Overcoming that immunity will require establishing that the officers violated a constitutional right.

“We think that this situation where kids, after all, are required to lock down in their classrooms, their freedom is constrained,” Koskoff said. “In this situation we feel like qualified immunity is not applicable.”

State Sen. , a Democrat who represents Uvalde in the Legislature, filed a bill last year that sought to end qualified immunity. Like filed in response to the massacre, that bill failed to pass.

Koskoff, who has also represented the families of children killed in the , said city officials had also failed to hold their officers accountable but praised the city for working with the families to implement changes aimed at preventing another tragedy like the 2022 shooting.

Hundreds of law enforcement officers from scores of local, state and federal agencies have been heavily criticized for waiting more than an hour to confront the gunman, which conflicted with training that instructs them to confront a shooter if there is reason to believe someone is hurt. The U.S. Justice Department’s concluded that the delay likely caused some deaths and that failures in leadership and training contributed to law enforcement’s ineffective response.

Koskoff noted that law enforcement outnumbered the gunman 376 to 1.

“On paper, it should have been no contest. So what happened?” Koskoff said. “Maybe it just turns out that if a kid has a military weapon, the military weapon — the AR-15 — and you get access to it easily, maybe it’s not that simple to stop a kid like that. Of course, they didn’t give themselves a chance, these 376 officers.”

In the settlement with the city of Uvalde that families’ lawyers announced May 22, local officials will implement a new “fitness for duty” standard for Uvalde police officers, to be developed in coordination with the Justice Department and provide enhanced training for current and future police officers.

“For two long years, we have languished in pain and without any accountability from the law enforcement agencies and officers who allowed our families to be destroyed that day,” Luevanos said. “This settlement reflects a first good faith effort, particularly by the City of Uvalde, to begin rebuilding trust in the systems that failed to protect us.”

In a written statement, city officials called the 2022 shooting the “community’s greatest tragedy.”

“We will forever be grateful to the victims’ families for working with us over the past year to cultivate an environment of community-wide healing that honors the lives and memories of those we tragically lost,” city officials said.

An investigation by a Texas House committee found “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” by nearly everyone involved in the response.

That panel’s 77-page report revealed that a total of 376 law enforcement officers descended upon the school in an uncoordinated manner, disregarding their own active shooter training.

The majority of the responders were federal and state law enforcement –– 149 U.S. Border Patrol and 91 state police –– whose responsibilities include responding to “mass attacks in public places.” The other responders included 25 Uvalde police officers, 16 sheriff’s deputies, and five police officers with the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District as well as neighboring county law enforcement, U.S. marshals and federal Drug Enforcement Administration officers.

The myriad of law enforcement mistakes stemmed from an absence of leadership and effective communications, according to the House report. DPS who responded to the shooting.

A trove of recorded investigative interviews and body camera footage obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE showed that officers failed to set up a clear command structure and spread incorrect information that caused them to treat the shooter as a barricaded suspect and not an active threat — even as children and teachers inside the classrooms called 911 pleading for help. No single officer engaged the shooter for more than an hour despite training that says they should do so as quickly as possible if anyone is hurt.

Following intense criticism of their response, several law enforcement officers resigned or were fired in the months following the shooting. Arredondo, the school district police chief at the time, was fired in August 2022.

About 72% of the state and local officials who arrived at Robb Elementary before the gunman was killed received some form of active shooter training throughout their law enforcement careers. But of those who received training, most had taken it only once. After the shooting, Texas mandated that officers receive 16 hours of active shooter training every two years.

A Uvalde County grand jury is currently considering potential criminal charges against responding officers. The county’s prosecutor declined to comment this week on the status of those proceedings.

DPS is fighting the release of records from its investigation into the shooting. In the aftermath of the massacre, agency leaders that cast local law enforcement as incompetent.

Koskoff criticized DPS for deflecting blame away from state police.

“As if they didn’t know how to shoot somebody?” he said.

Pooja Salhotra contributed to this story.

This article originally appeared in at . The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Uvalde is a vibrant rural community where people truly care for one another. We have terrific businesses, educators, parents and community members who are invested in our students’ success. But all over this beautiful community, individuals are still trying to recover and rebuild from the tragedy that struck two years ago, when a gunman attacked Robb Elementary School and killed 19 children and two teachers.

In confronting the array of challenges inherent in both rebuilding and managing a public school district, I have found it crystal clear that local initiatives require reinforcement through increased federal support to effectively serve community needs.

This week is Public Schools Week. I am proud to be in Washington, D.C., advocating to members of Congress and the administration for my school district during this important celebration of public education. I have one simple message for them, one that all school superintendents nationwide would likely agree with: Our students need more support.

Even in Uvalde, where generous private donors like Charles Butt and the Uvalde Moving Forward Foundation have stepped up to help rebuild, and organizations like Camila and Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights Grant Initiative are helping us apply for federal school safety funding, we are still facing major shortfalls for critical needs. These include $20 million still needed to finish paying for the replacement for Robb Elementary.

While Congress and the administration should be credited for passing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in response to the shooting in Uvalde, the funding that was dedicated to help districts address youth mental health and to prevent school violence is insufficient for the numerous challenges the country faces. 

Currently, all federal school safety dollars must be applied for through grants, so Uvalde has to compete with districts across America for funding for essential programs and personnel. In districts that can hire a $40,000 grant writer and have completed applications before, it’s no big deal. For high-needs, low-capacity districts like mine, having to complete a 30-page application that could take 100 hours or so in hopes of persuading a bureaucrat to give us funding to buy a tracking system for behavioral threat assessments or hire another school psychologist is not good policy.

There is no greater responsibility of the federal government than protecting the next generation and equipping them with the tools necessary to succeed. Right now, it is failing on both counts.

For example, the COPS School Violence Prevention Program grant provides funding for cameras, training and other common-sense measures that every school needs. Last year, more than 1,000 districts ; only 206 grants were awarded. That means 800 educational institutions took the time and resources to apply for federal funding to protect their children but were denied support. With the threat environment as it is today, that is unacceptable. This problem can be solved with more money and better procedures that make it easier for districts of all sizes and means to apply.

Next month, the Senate will unveil the CARE for Student Mental Health Act, a measure that would make it easier for the federal government to target funding for school mental health personnel and programs to high-needs districts. It would also make it easier for districts to find out about these opportunities and apply for them, and it would designate a portion of funding for rural districts that have historically struggled to compete with large, well-resourced school systems for federal dollars.

This is a great start, but there must be significant policy and funding improvements if America hopes to secure the nation’s schools and give children the support they need to be successful. Already this year, there have been school shootings. The money and heartache it takes to recover from these tragedies is far greater than the money districts needed to prevent them.

Budgets are value statements, so as Congress finalizes federal funding levels for the 2024-25 school year, I want them to know they must do better to ensure that districts — particularly those that are small and rural, like mine — receive more aid for school safety and mental health resources to ensure student success.

I urge all those who are interested in furthering school safety to encourage their lawmakers to advocate for funding and policy changes that will make sure that the next generation of doctors, farmers, lawyers, teachers and innovators has the safe, caring environment necessary to thrive in school.

A scathing federal report on the Uvalde mass shooting released Thursday highlighted the miscommunication and lack of action between the hundreds of officers who showed up to Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022.

The Justice Department’s also came with plenty of recommendations to improve schools safety and active shooter protocols in the state. Texas lawmakers last year passed to address many of those issues, but failed to include more mental health screenings as recommended by the report. School districts believe HB 3 was a step in the right direction, but have complained the state funding allocated to pay for the changes isn’t enough to cover the expenses they’ll have to incur. There were efforts during to add more funding, but the fight over school vouchers sank them.

The report’s recommendations include having active shooter plans for every school, regular meetings between local law enforcement and local government officials to conduct security exercises, replacing or upgrading all faulty school doors and locks, mental health screenings for victims and better communication between law enforcement, school officials and the community.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in an active shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland during a news conference on Thursday.

Gov. , who praised the police response immediately after the shooting and later said he was misled about how it transpired, released a statement Thursday thanking the Justice Department for its report. He said the state has already adopted some of the measures it recommended and would review others.

Nineteen children and two teachers were killed during the Robb Elementary . The gunman was able to enter the school through a series of unlocked doors.

When officers arrived, they retreated after coming under fire and waited for backup. The decision was counter to the active shooter doctrine developed after the 1999 Columbine High School mass shooting in Colorado, which dictates that officers must immediately confront the shooters.

Leadership was also amiss among the plethora of law enforcement officers who responded to the shooting, with no one acting as the “incident commander.” Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district’s former police chief, has said he didn’t believe he was in charge, even though the district’s active-shooter plan states he was.

The report authors also expressed concern with an active-shooter training course that Uvalde school district police officers received from the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement just months before the massacre, which states that an “active shooter event can easily morph into a hostage crisis and vice versa.” The Justice Department said that an active shooter event very rarely ceases to be a hostage situation and officers should always seek to eliminate the threat as soon as possible.

Texas is already trying to implement many of the Justice Department’s recommendations. Under HB 3, the state created a safety and security department within the Texas Education Agency and gave it the authority to compel school districts to establish and follow robust safety protocols. Those that fail to meet the agency’s standards could be put under the state’s supervision.

Since the 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting, the state has required school districts to submit those plans — which must include active-shooter strategies — for the review of the Texas School Safety Center, a think tank at Texas State University created by lawmakers in 2001.

A three-year audit in 2020 found that out of the 1,022 school districts in the state, just 200 districts had active-shooter policies as part of their safety plans. The audit revealed 626 districts did not have active-shooter policies; 196 had active-shooter policies but were deemed insufficient. Only 67 school districts had viable emergency operations plans overall, the report found.

HB3 also tasks the state with setting up teams to conduct security audits at every school district at least once a year. Districts are also required to have an armed person on campus.

In addition, the law requires the TEA to develop standards for notifying parents of “violent activity” on campus and set up school safety review teams to conduct vulnerability assessments of all the school campuses once a year.

In counties with fewer than 350,000 people, the law requires the sheriff to hold semi-annual meetings to discuss school safety and law enforcement response to “violent incidents.” The law states response plans must include a clear chain of command and that all radios must be working.

Each school district is also required to give the Texas Department of Public Safety and other law enforcement agencies in their area a walkthrough and a map of each campus in an effort to avoid confusion when responding to an incident.

To tackle mental health, school employees who regularly interact with children will need to complete an “evidence-based mental health first-aid training program.” The TEA would reimburse the employee for the time and money spent on the training.

The law gave each school district $15,000 per campus and $10 per student to pay for safety upgrades. Lawmakers also gave the TEA $1.1 billion to to administer school safety grants among the state’s school districts.

Many school officials State Sen. , a San Antonio Democrat who represents Uvalde, voted against HB 3 last year because of the funding concerns.

“It is sick and twisted that we have the largest budget surplus in Texas history and we aren’t doing a damn thing to keep our kids safe,” he said during a Senate debate on the bill referring to last year’s $32.7 billion budget surplus. “We aren’t doing anything to prevent another Uvalde.”

Lawmakers tried to give school districts more money to beef up security on campuses late last year. School districts were close to receiving an additional $1 billion for school safety but the legislation stalled after school voucher legislation failed to pass. Abbott had vowed to veto any new public education funding if it didn’t come in hand with a voucher proposal, his top legislative priority last year.

School officials were already struggling to meet the safety requirements in HB 3, like the mandate to staff every campus with an armed officer. Dallas Independent School District Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde told The Texas Tribune last month that with more than 220 campuses, the district needs $3 million annually to post trained security guards at every school. While the district did receive grants from the state, Elizalde believes they aren’t a reliable source of funding for the future. And if the district doesn’t receive more money to pay for safety improvements, it may have to cut programs and potentially lay off staff.

“That has become our biggest obstacle — how do you, time and time again, continue to make cuts to make sure that we have the safest schools possible?” Elizalde said.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at .

Nearly 44% of public K-12 schools were staffed with school resource officers at least once a week during the 2021-22 school year, by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics. Between Floyd’s murder in May 2020 and June 2022, ended their school resource officer programs or cut their budgets following widespread Black Lives Matter protests and concerns that campus policing has detrimental effects on students — and Black youth in particular. 

The data reflect an 11% decrease in school policing from the 2019-20 school year, when more than 49% of schools had a regular police presence, according to the nationally representative federal survey. That year, schools underwent an increase in campus policing after the 2018 mass school shootings in Parkland, Florida, and Santa Fe, Texas, prompted a surge in new security funding and mandates, a pattern that could repeat itself when future federal numbers capture the nation’s reaction to the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

“This is the George Floyd effect,” said criminal justice researcher Shawn Bushway, who pulled up a calculator during a telephone interview with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ and crunched the federal survey data against that removed cops from their buildings, which collectively served more than 1.7 million students. 

“It’s not seismic, but I think what’s most interesting about it is that it’s the reversal of a trend in a fairly dramatic way,” said Bushway, a University at Albany in New York professor. “It’s been going up quite a bit and now it’s dropped.”

The new federal data were published the same week as Thursday’s release of a damning U.S. Department of Justice report that cited “critical failures” by police during the May 2022 mass shooting at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School in which 19 students and two teachers were killed. During the shooting, 376 law enforcement officers responded to the scene but waited more than an hour to confront the 18-year-old shooter, a botched reaction that disregarded established police protocols and, investigators said, cost lives.

“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in an active shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in Uvalde.

“Their loved ones deserved better,” he said. 

Chris Chapman, the associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said on a press call Tuesday that the survey data didn’t make clear a definitive reason for the decline in school-based officers. Experts said that several other factors, including campus closures during the pandemic, budget constraints and a national police officer shortage, may have also contributed. 

Either way, the downward trend may be short-lived. 

Multiple districts that cut their school resource officer programs after Floyd’s murder, including those in Denver, Colorado, and Arlington, Virginia, reversed course after educators reported an uptick in classroom disorder after COVID-era remote learning. Mass school shootings have long driven efforts to bolster campus policing, a reality that has played out in the last several years as the nation experienced an unprecedented number of such attacks. 

Despite officers’ grievously mishandled response in Uvalde, the shooting led to renewed efforts in Texas and elsewhere to strengthen police presence in schools. A similar situation played out after the mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Federal data show national growth in campus policing even after the school resource officer assigned to the Broward County campus failed to confront the gunman, who killed 17 people. 

The now-former officer, Scot Peterson, was acquitted of criminal negligence and perjury charges but faces a new trial in a civil lawsuit by shooting victims’ families, who allege his failure to intervene during the six-minute attack displayed a “wanton and willful disregard” for students’ and teachers’ safety. Qualified immunity generally protects officers from liability for mistakes made on the job. 

After Parkland, a new Florida law required an armed security presence on every K-12 campus. The Uvalde shooting led to similar . In both states, a police officer labor shortage, which experts said may have contributed to the 2021-22 decline in schools, has hindered officials’ efforts to comply. In Kentucky, more than 40% of schools lack school resource officers, a reality that school officials have blamed on a lack of funding and a depleted applicant pool. 

“It wouldn’t surprise me if, when that data comes back out, we see that spike go back up,” said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, which offers a training program for campus cops. “It’s not the way I want to gain business, but some of the busiest years we’ve had training wise are 18 months after a school massacre. I can tell you that 2019 was the biggest year in our association’s history by far — and that’s coming right off the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre.”

Advocates for police-free schools recognize the headwinds they face. Tyler Whittenberg, the deputy director of the Advancement Project’s Opportunity to Learn initiative, said that while advocates “are proud of the victories that were won” after George Floyd’s murder, educators who removed police from schools “are fighting really hard to hold onto those gains,” some of which face in districts that don’t want them. 

“We’re not really rushing to a conclusion that this represents an overall reduction in police in schools, especially because for many of our partners on the ground this is not their day-to-day experience,” he said. “They’re having to fight back — especially at the state level — against efforts to increase the number of police in their schools.” 

Safety threats on the decline

In the 1970s, just 1% of schools were staffed by police. Decades of efforts since then to swell their ranks have coincided with a marked improvement in campus safety. 

During the 2021-22 school year, 67% of schools reported at least one violent crime on campus, totaling some 857,500 violent incidents. Federal data show the nation’s schools experienced a violent crime rate of 18 incidents per 1,000 students in 2021-22. That’s a steep decline from 1999-00, when schools recorded a violent crime rate of 32 incidents per 1,000, and 2009-10, when the violent crime rate was 25 per 1,000. 

Police officers’ contributions to making schools safer over the past two decades, however, remain the subject of ongoing research and heated debate. In a study last year, which was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Bushway and his colleagues found that placing . And although researchers were unable to analyze officers’ effects on mass school shootings because such tragedies are statistically rare, they were associated with an uptick in reported firearm offenses — suggesting an increased detection of guns. The officers were also associated with a stark uptick in student disciplinary actions, including suspensions and arrests, particularly among Black students and those with disabilities. 

“There’s a cost-benefit here and everybody’s calculus on how you weigh these different things is going to be different,” Bushway said. “There’s no pure answer to that question, different people are going to answer that question differently.”

Previous research suggests that suspensions or improve school safety, but have detrimental effects on punished students’ academic performance, attendance and behavior. Their effects on non-misbehaving students remain unclear. 

Other researchers have reached a much more critical conclusion about the effects of school-based police on students. In in November on the existing literature into school officers’ efficacy, researchers failed to identify evidence that school-based law enforcement promoted safety in schools but reinforced concerns that their presence “criminalizes students and schools.” 

“I think the evidence is increasingly supporting the notion that police don’t belong in schools,” report author Ben Fisher, an associate professor of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. Removing officers who have been there for years, he said, may cause problems of its own. “If we’re going to get police out of schools, which I think is the right long-term vision and short-term vision, I think we need to do it thoughtfully with plans in place to make schools welcoming and supportive.” 

The federal survey, which was conducted between Feb. 15 and July 19, 2022, also found large geographical differences in the types of tools that school-based police use on the job. Across the board, officers in urban areas were less likely than their rural and suburban counterparts to carry guns and pepper spray or to be equipped with body-worn cameras. 

Beyond data on campus policing, the new federal survey offers a comprehensive look at the state of campus safety and security, reflecting school leaders’ responses to the pandemic and record numbers of mass school shootings. Other findings include: 

• In 2021-22, about 49% of schools provided diagnostic mental health assessments to evaluate students for mental health disorders. This is a decline from 2019-20, when 55% conducted assessments. Meanwhile, 38% provided students with treatments for mental health disorders in 2021-22, down from 42% in 2019-20. 

• Restorative justice, a conflict resolution technique, was used in 59% of schools in 2021-22, which was similar to 2019-20 but an increase from the 42% that used the approach in 2017-18. 

• The latest data indicate a decline in campus drug and alcohol incidents. In 2021-22, 71% of schools reported at least one incident involving the distribution, possession or use of illegal drugs, down from 77% in 2019-20. Meanwhile, 34% reported at least one alcohol-related incident in 2021-22, down from 41% in 2019-20. 

UVALDE — U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said some victims of the 2022 Uvalde school shooting would have survived if Texas law enforcement officers — who waited more than an hour to confront the gunman — had followed “generally accepted practices.”

Those assertions came Thursday after the U.S. Justice Department into the hundreds of Texas law enforcement officers’ fumbled response to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting, finding “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training.”

The long-anticipated 575-page report detailed the many catastrophic errors of the May 24, 2022 response, but concluded the most significant was that officers should have immediately recognized that it was an active shooter situation and confronted the gunman, who was with victims in two adjoining classrooms.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

Garland called the response “a failure that should not have happened” and said he apologized to the relatives of the 21 killed and the 17 injured in the deadliest school shooting in Texas history.

“Their loved ones deserved better,” Garland said.

The report noted that since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, American law enforcement officers have been trained to prioritize stopping the shooter while everything else, including officer safety, is secondary.

“These efforts must be undertaken regardless of the equipment and personnel available,” the report found. “This did not occur during the Robb Elementary shooting response.”

Instead, officers wrongly treated the situation as a barricaded suspect, even as children and teachers . The report noted “multiple stimuli indicating that there was an active threat,” including that an Uvalde school police officer early on told other law enforcement that his wife, a teacher in Room 112, was shot. It took 77 minutes for officers to confront the shooter. died that day and 17 others were injured in one of the country’s worst school shootings.

The report also found failures in leadership, command and coordination, noting that as more officers, including supervisors from other agencies, descended on the school, no one set up an incident command structure or took charge of the scene.

Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta condemned the medical response, saying that after police breached the classroom and killed the gunman, dead victims were placed on ambulances and children with bullet wounds were put on school buses.

Gupta also criticized misinformation and conflicting accounts that officials disseminated to Uvalde residents and reporters after the shooting.

Supervisors from the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, the Uvalde Police Department, the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office, and the Texas Department of Public Safety “demonstrated no urgency” in taking control of the incident, which exacerbated the communication problems and overall confusion.

Some failures may have been partly a result of policy and training deficiencies, the report found, noting that the school district police department suggested wrongly in prior training that active shooter situations can transition into hostage or barricaded incidents. DPS lacked an active shooter policy, as did the county sheriff’s office and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the 149 Border Patrol agents who responded.

The report also found that key officers, including Uvalde Police Department Acting Chief Mariano Pargas who arrived within minutes of the shooting, had no active shooter or incident command training.

The vast majority of 380 officers from more than a dozen local, state and federal agencies who responded to the school had never trained together, “contributing to difficulties in coordination and communication.” The report said the “lack of pre-planning hampered even well-prepared agencies from functioning at their best.”

Among its recommendations, the report said that officers should “never” treat an active shooter with access to victims as a barricaded suspect. Law enforcement training academies must ensure active shooter training instructs how officers should distinguish between active threats and barricaded or hostage situations. And officers should be prepared to approach the threat using just the tools they have with them, which is often a standard firearm, the report noted.

The federal review by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services was announced just five days after the shooting. It was led by Orange County Sheriff John Mina, the incident commander during the 2016 Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando. In that incident, officers waited three hours to take down the shooter who had barricaded himself with victims in a bathroom.

A Justice Department and National Policing Institute review of that Florida law enforcement response was far less critical than the Uvalde report. It found that Florida officers mostly followed best practices, although it stated the law enforcement agencies in Orlando should update their training and policies.

In the Uvalde review, the federal team reviewed more than 14,100 pieces of data and documentation, including policies, training logs, body camera footage, audio recordings, interview transcripts and photographs. The team visited Uvalde nine times, spending 54 days there, and conducted more than 260 interviews with people from more than 30 organizations and agencies, including law enforcement officers, school staff, medical personnel, survivors and victims’ families.

The Uvalde report’s release comes two months after ProPublica, the Texas Tribune and PBS’ Frontline published into the response after gaining access to a trove of investigative materials, including more than 150 interviews with officers and dozens of body cameras. The material showed that the children at Robb Elementary followed active shooter protocols, while many of the officers did not. It detailed how officers treated the situation as a barricaded suspect rather than an active threat even as evidence mounted quickly that children and teachers were injured and with the shooter.

The investigation also analyzed the active shooter training of the local and state police officers who responded prior to the gunman being stopped, finding some had not taken any active shooter training based on their state records. Of those who had, they most commonly only received the training once during their careers and hadn’t taken it in four years or longer.

The Tribune also revealed that to confront the gunman because he had a deadly AR-15 rifle. With the Washington Post, ProPublica and the Tribune found that and that two children and a teacher were still alive when they were rescued more than an hour later, but then died.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at .

There were a record 188 school shootings resulting in injuries or deaths in the 2021-22 school year, according to the latest available data included in . That’s twice as many shootings on campus than the previous record — set just one year earlier. 

The annual report, in its 25th iteration, leverages data from across federal agencies, including the Justice Department, to provide the public and policymakers with comprehensive insight into the safety conditions of the country’s school campuses, including cyberbullying and weapons possession. The new data offer fresh fodder in the ongoing political debate about how to thwart gun violence in schools. 

In some ways, the policy outcomes from such attacks are apparent in the data itself. As high-profile shootings and other campus safety incidents drive divisive discussions about gun control and policing, they’ve also led to a surge in — and near-universal adoption of — numerous physical security measures. By 2019-20, 97% of public schools controlled access to their campuses, 91% used surveillance cameras and 77% required district employees to wear badges. The number of campuses with security staff ballooned from 43% in 2010 to 65% by 2020. 

The spike in parental concerns over school safety seen in the aftermath of high-profile school shootings in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 and last year in Uvalde, Texas, dipped slightly this year, . Among surveyed parents, 38% reported that they fear for their child’s safety, down from 44% in 2022. Still, the percentage of people who fear for their children’s safety is still among the highest it’s been since Gallup began to poll parents on the topic in 1977. Gallup’s historical high, at 55%, was measured shortly after the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in suburban Denver. 

For the purpose of the federal report, “school shootings” include “all incidents in which a gun is brandished or fired or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims” and motive, including planned attacks, accidents and domestic violence. The methodology and collection methods used by the Education Department differ from those of other groups and media outlets that track school shootings. For example, the lists 250 school shootings in 2021 and 305 in 2022. , which only includes incidents where someone is struck by a bullet, counts 35 school shootings in 2021 and 51 in 2022. 

The federal report doesn’t include school-shooting data from the 2022-23 academic year. 

While the federal data on school gun violence incidents “is of course extremely striking,” it is just “one piece in the puzzle of our understanding of school shootings,” VĂ©ronique Irwin, an associate education research analyst with the National Center for Education Statistics, said on a press call Tuesday. “It’s important for us to examine other dimensions as well.” 

Despite the recent uptick in campus firearm incidents, the number of violent deaths of students in schools hasn’t followed a similar trendline and remains rare, the new federal report reveals. Nor have “active shootings,” a specific subset of campus gun violence, like the Parkland and Uvalde attacks, where an individual is “actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” Fourteen people were wounded or killed in active school shootings in 2021, the report revealed, compared to a high of 81 in 2018. 

Between 2000 and 2021, there were 46 active shooting incidents, resulting in 108 deaths and 168 injuries. Of the 47 people who carried out the active shootings, all but one was male. 

Beyond school shootings, the new federal report offers a mixed bag on various campus safety metrics, and at times that have sounded the alarm about an uptick in student misbehavior since the pandemic. 

Between the 2009-10 school year and 2019-20, the number of students who reported campus bullying decreased from 23% to 15% and reported gang activities dropped by more than half. School fights, weapons possession and alcohol use also declined. For some metrics, the most recent data are from 2019 and don’t capture the disruptive nature of COVID campus closures. Data captured after the pandemic began should be interpreted with these destabilizing forces in mind. 

Educators also experienced improved safety conditions in schools between 2011 and 2021, the report suggests. Six percent of teachers reported that a student had threatened to injure them in 2020-21, a decrease from 10 percent a decade earlier. Similar declines were observed in the number of teachers who fell victim to attacks. 

Still, the research revealed that educators have observed an uptick in disrespect from students, verbal abuse and overall classroom disorder. 

The Florida law led to unprecedented growth in school-based policing, though it’s part of a trend that’s played out again and again over the last several decades. In the immediate aftermath of tragic school massacres, which are statistically rare but growing more common, lawmakers have repeatedly bolstered funding for campus cops. Federal officials have spent since 1998. This spring, Texas became the following the May 2022 shooting in Uvalde, which led to the deaths of 19 elementary school children and two teachers.

Yet in Florida, former school-based officer Scot Peterson, who was stationed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School with a handgun and a bulletproof vest, was for failing to confront the teenage gunman armed with an AR-15 style assault rifle. Instead, he took cover outside as the sound of gunshots poured from the building for four minutes. In Uvalde, 375 officers from 23 law enforcement agencies responded to the elementary school but waited more than an hour to confront and kill the 18-year-old shooter. 

Police inaction in both cases has raised a similar question: Once a bad guy with a gun pops off his first shot inside a school, what level of responsibility do armed police officers have to stop them? 

In a first-of-its-kind trial to examine a school resource officer’s alleged criminal liability for failing to intervene, Peterson faced seven counts of child neglect, three counts of culpable negligence and one perjury charge. On June 29, , an outcome that experts predicted but said could in Uvalde, where officers’ inaction sparked outrage and is still under investigation. 

The Parkland verdict raises big questions about the role that police play in schools nationally — and challenges the very reason that so many were stationed at campuses in the first place. 

For Peterson, who claimed he waited outside the school because he couldn’t tell where the sounds of gunshots were coming from, the verdict reaffirmed his position that he had done nothing wrong and that the charges against him were politically motivated scapegoating. 

“We’ve got our life back after four and a half years,” Peterson while standing next to his wife. “It’s been an emotional roller coaster for so long.” 

The comment infuriated the parents of children who died while Peterson stood just 75 feet away from the building and who will never get their lives back. To them and others who have sought greater accountability from the since-fired officer, the verdict set a bad precedent. 

“For the first time in our nation’s history, prosecutors in this case have tried to hold an armed school resource officer responsible for not doing his job,” Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor said in a statement after the verdict. “We did so because we think it’s important not only to our community, but to the country as a whole.”

As head of the leading professional organization for school-based police officers, Mo Canady is the first person to defend the presence and value of having cops in schools. In an interview with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, Canady gave a sharp critique of Peterson’s inaction. Peterson, and all officers, “have a duty to protect whether you think of it in terms of being charged criminally or not,” said Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers. 

“When we became police officers and you raised your right hand, you swore an oath to protect and serve,” Canady said. “Part of that is having to deal with violent situations and potential deadly conflict.”

‘Police are not the military’ 

“To protect and serve” has been a calling card for law enforcement , yet courts on multiple occasions have made clear the slogan isn’t legally binding. This precedent foreshadowed the uphill challenge for prosecutors in Florida. 

Police are routinely charged — and on occasion found guilty — for police misconduct including excessive use of force. Charges for failing to act, however, are far less common. And in the cases that do exist, courts have . 

In 1981, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals held that police have a general duty to provide public services but “no specific legal duty exists” to protect specific individuals. In , from 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court held that police in Colorado could not be sued for failing to protect a woman whose husband violated a protective order to kidnap and kill their three children. 

To justify child neglect charges in the Peterson trial, prosecutors argued that the school-based officer was a “caregiver” under Florida law responsible for the welfare of students at the school where he was assigned. Indeed, since their introduction in schools, police officers have been cast in the role of having close protective relationships with students in a way that’s different from how officers typically interact with people on the streets. That persona is often invoked to make officers’ presence in schools more palatable. In the Parkland case, jurors had to determine whether Peterson had caregiver status legally and if that created a duty to risk his own life. 

Eugene O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, called the charges against Peterson “preposterous,” arguing that officers should not be legally required to put themselves into situations where they could be killed. 

“The police really don’t sign up for that — they really don’t,” O’Donnell said. “Some will rise to the occasion, but the police are not the military, the police are civilians with guns who have very, very basic rudimentary peacekeeping skills.”

In an email, Mark Eiglarsh, Peterson’s criminal defense attorney, maintained that his client couldn’t identify the specific locations of gunshots, and that other responding officers believed the blasts were coming from a football field hundreds of yards away. Reverberations and echoes off the concrete buildings, he said, “made knowing where the shooter was virtually impossible.” 

“Hopefully, prosecutors will choose not to pursue baseless and meritless charges like this ever again,” he said. “They put this 32-year veteran deputy through hell, solely motivated by politics.” 

Eiglarsh refuted a “false narrative” that Peterson “chose to cower and ‘do nothing’ instead of confronting the killer,” noting that he called officers for backup and scanned the area to determine the shooter’s location. 

Samuel Walker, a national expert on police misconduct and professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, believes that Peterson should have been convicted, and not just because he was assigned to protect students.

“He failed to act — he failed to act in an emergency situation where his action could have helped save a bunch of lives,” said Walker, who added that officers should be held accountable for failing to keep people safe, even if it means risking their own lives. “That’s true of all officers who are just working a regular police department job. Yes, it’s a high-risk situation.” 

In civil court, officers are often shielded by qualified immunity, which protects officers from liability for mistakes made on the job. In 2020, a by 15 Marjory Stoneman students who survived the massacre and argued that Peterson’s failure to act violated their constitutional rights. But other civil suits remain and attorney David Brill, who represents shooting victims’ families, seeks to dispel Peterson’s claims that he couldn’t determine the direction of gunshots. Brill has asked a judge to approve a recorded sound test at the site of the shooting by firing blanks from an AR-15-style rifle. 

“We don’t want to leave anything to chance for Peterson to escape justice in our civil case like he escaped justice in the criminal case,” Brill told The Associated Press. 

Peterson’s civil defense attorney Michael Piper, who acknowledged some 50 civil suits against his client, declined to comment. 

Harold Jordan, the nationwide education equity coordinator at the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said the real breakdown was in school and law enforcement officials’ failure to take preventative actions after multiple warnings suggested the gunman, now serving a life sentence, had weapons and could become violent. 

“I can’t think of any major studies that show that stationing police in schools prevents someone with high-capacity weaponry from causing carnage,” he said. “There’s definitely no evidence that adding more police to schools is going to prevent that from happening when you’re dealing with a school shooter who knows something about the school and is packing a doggone arsenal. That’s the situation that we’re in.”

Shootings bolster school policing 

Though officers have been stationed in schools , their presence has grown significantly in the last 25 years in response to mass school shootings. Since then, heated debates have explored the officers’ roles, responsibilities and efficacy.

Emerging research has begun to offer insight into officers’ ability to keep kids safe. A found that the introduction of school-based officers has led to a reduction in reported incidents of certain kinds of violence like fights. Yet they led to an increase in reported incidents of gun-related violence, a finding the authors conclude suggests that campus police “do not prevent gun-related incidents.” However, report co-author Shawn Bushway acknowledged that campus police could improve the reporting and detection of campus gun violence. 

Ultimately, officials’ decisions to place police in schools after mass shootings may not be driven by evidence, said Bushway, an adjunct policy researcher at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the University at Albany – State University of New York

“The evidence is that cops in schools make people feel safer and, you know, that’s part of the battle, right?” Bushway said. “We show that there’s an increase in firearm offenses but we don’t know whether that’s because they’re more likely to ferret them out or because somehow kids are more likely to bring guns to school if there’s a cop involved.”

A similar report, by researchers with the nonprofit Violence Project, found that officers may be ineffective at preventing bloodshed during school shootings. Researchers analyzed 133 school shootings over four decades and found that fatalities were three times higher in attacks where an armed guard was present compared to those that unfolded without a security presence. Because the perpetrators of mass shootings are often suicidal, researchers believe shooters may be drawn to locations with armed security. 

“When that’s the case, having an armed person is not a deterrent — that person may actually be part of their plan,” said David Riedman, creator of the , which tracks firearm incidents in schools. “Really, all of this is just a Band-Aid to the bigger problem, which is access to firearms and people that are able to get them who are interested and willing to commit violence.”

Though Peterson escaped criminal liability, for the last several decades school-based police have been trained to confront shooters — even at the cost of their own lives. Such standards grew out of the 1999 Columbine mass school shooting in suburban Denver, with the realization that every second counts during a mass shooting, most of which are carried out in a matter of minutes. 

Though experts said the trial against Peterson may dissuade some people from pursuing jobs as school-based cops, Canady of the National Association of School Resource Officers said that most officers will rush to danger to keep students safe.

“I don’t think most officers are going to have it in their head that, ‘Hey, if I don’t respond, I may be criminally liable,’ ” he said. “I think what they’re going to have in their head is, ‘Somebody’s killing kids in my school and I’ve got to stop it.’ ” 

As another school year defined by mass shootings ends in America, Republican-led state legislatures passed measures this session to fortify schools, create guidelines for active shooter drills and safety officer responses, and allow teachers to be armed.

Firearm restrictions, however, were a nonstarter in red states trying to curb school shootings.

The legislation pushed by GOP lawmakers in states such as Georgia, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Utah this year often ran contrary to the advice of gun safety advocates and national education experts, who remain concerned that having more guns in schools only further endangers children and educators.

But the Republican lawmakers interviewed by Stateline say the solution to preventing school shootings is not banning certain weapons or taking away guns from potentially dangerous people, but rather empowering schools to more quickly respond to an active shooter.

A little over a week after three children and three adults were killed in a Nashville elementary school in late March, the Republican-controlled Tennessee legislature passed a wide-reaching school safety bill that did not include firearm restrictions.

The requires schools to keep exterior doors locked when students are present, mandates newly built public schools to install classroom door locks and requires private schools also to conduct active shooter drills, among other elements. (The Nashville shooter, who attacked a private school, shattered a pair of locked glass doors to get inside.)

The bill passed with bipartisan support in April, with only a handful of Democrats voting against it. Republican Gov. Bill Lee signed the measure. In May, he signed that includes $230 million for all schools to have a school resource officer and allows schools to make security upgrades.

With armed personnel and properly secured school buildings, children in Tennessee will be safer, said Republican state Rep. Mark White, one of the bill’s sponsors and a former elementary school principal.

“I take it very seriously,” he said. “When you’re in the building with kids all day long, you fall in love with them, and you want to protect them.”

Hoping for a deterrent

Ensuring schools have armed personnel has been a common thread in the Republican-backed school safety laws this year.

Last month, a little over a year after a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Republicans there passed that requires an armed security guard at every school and compels school districts to adopt active shooter plans.

In Mississippi, teachers can now, with extensive training, carry guns in schools after the legislature passed a in March.

Republican state Sen. Jeff Tate, the legislation’s sponsor, argued that assailants target schools because there often is not armed security. He hopes his bill makes potential school shooters think twice.

“We need to make these people realize that, hey, look, there’s going to be a weapon if you go to the school,” Tate said. “That would deter these school shootings.”

Democratic state Sen. Rod Hickman, who voted against the measure because he thought it would make schools less safe, nonetheless wants to now focus on ensuring the state enforces robust training, not only for handling firearms but also to account for â€œimplicit biases” that might prompt armed school personnel to view people of color as a greater threat.

“I hope that the proper steps are taken to create this program,” Hickman said, “but I ultimately don’t think this is the answer to protecting our students.”

Schools in the vast rural areas of Missouri wouldn’t have time to wait for law enforcement to respond to an active shooter, said Republican state Rep. Christina Dinkins. School officials need to react immediately to save lives, she said.

While teachers and administrators already are allowed to carry firearms if they are a school’s designated school protection officer — a position earned through a permit and state-mandated training — Dinkins, after being approached by a school district administrator, offered legislation to expand that role to any school personnel. That could include janitors, she said, who have keys to all the doors and know the ins and outs of the buildings.

“We’re just providing them with other avenues to make sure our children are safe, which is the ultimate goal,” Dinkins said. “You want the person who is most trained, most confident, most comfortable in that type of situation.”

The state House passed her bill in March; the legislative session has since ended.

More firearms in schools

Julie Hutchinson, a social worker for the Clark County, Nevada, school district, responded to the October 2017 mass shooting on the Las Vegas strip, helping people who were looking for loved ones and information after a gunman opened fire. Sixty people died and 413 others were wounded.

Hutchinson has continued to deal with gun issues, whether it’s helping the school district confront students who bring weapons to school or talking with her own children concerning the increased violence.

Having more guns in schools won’t help, she said.

“It would give a false sense of security,” Hutchinson said. “Is it really going to matter when it comes down to the actual moment?”

Many experts agree with her.

Two decades of association between having school resource officers or security professionals in the building and the prevention of school violence, said Justin Heinze, co-director of the National Center for School Safety, a training and technical assistance hub for implementing evidence-based safety programs in schools.

“There is very, very little to next to no data that supports having firearms within schools are going to make those buildings safer,” said Heinze, who also is an associate professor of public health at the University of Michigan.

He continued, “I do have concerns about introducing even more firearms in the building because there is almost certainly going to be an increase in firearm-related injury.”

As more students are exposed to school shootings and the overall number of shootings grows, there’s been a more urgent need for research regarding guns in schools, Heinze added.

Despite the high-profile nature of school shootings, schools are generally safe havens from gun violence, said Allison Anderman, senior counsel and director of local policy for the Giffords Law Center, a nonpartisan gun safety organization. This is largely because guns are mostly prohibited at schools, she said.

Arming teachers does not work, Anderman said.

“The idea that someone who’s protecting students and trying to keep them safe and calm is going to go and rush out and shoot an active shooter is just, it’s so absurd,” she said. “It’s very difficult to stop a homicidal person with an AR-15 and several high-capacity magazines.”

There are policies that can prevent school shootings, she said, including banning high-capacity magazines, implementing waiting periods of firearm purchases and expanding so-called red flag laws that take away firearms from people who may be a harm to themselves or others.

But that is a tough sell in some states.

Teachers need to be able to defend themselves and others in an active shooter situation, said Utah Republican state Rep. Karianne Lisonbee, who sponsored successful this session that will waive the permitting fee for school employees to carry a concealed weapon in schools.

“It’s really important that we maintain the availability for individuals who are the good guys who are trying to protect and defend their lives and the lives of others to be able to carry,” she said. “I don’t think it’s helpful to take guns away from everybody or to try to implement extreme gun control measures.”

She also sponsored this session that empowered school resource officers to refer students to judges for violence and weapons offenses on campus. She supported another that created a state position in charge of setting standards for school resource officers. Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed all three measures into law in March.

In Tennessee, the legislature is not done with addressing gun violence.

Lee, the GOP governor, called for a special session in August in hopes of implementing a red flag law. Gun safety experts argued the Nashville shooting may have been prevented if the state had a law that allowed a court to seize firearms from people who may harm themselves or others.

White and other Republican legislators will meet with the governor over the coming months to draft a bill that would prevent “innocent people” from having their firearms confiscated under a red flag law, he said.

Gun rights advocates often argue red flag laws violate gun owners’ due process privileges, since judges in some states can temporarily sign off on an extreme risk protection order without hearing from the targeted individual in emergency situations. Gun safety advocates counter that those individuals can eventually present evidence in their defense.

“We can do what’s right for all people,” White said. “Not only protect our children and law-abiding gun owners, but also address those who have mental issues, or those who are just outright criminals. That’s the needle we have to thread right now.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on and .

With nothing but a rudimentary first aid kit filled mostly with Band Aids, Uriegas had been called to the scene of one of the nation’s worst mass school shootings — with no training for the important role she would play as the chaotic scene unfolded. 

When Uriegas and two other bus drivers, who were taking kids to a field trip at a nearby park, reached the school, the streets were swarmed with law enforcement and parents. The central office dispatcher who asked her to report to the school had warned of an “emergency” — but said no more. 

With her normal path to the building blocked, Uriegas backed her bus up and found another route. The two other school buses followed. Another driver opened her door and asked a bystander what was happening. Only then did they learn that there was an active shooter inside Robb. 

Ultimately, Uriegas’ bus became a makeshift ambulance that carried kids with gunshot wounds to the hospital. 

“We’re not first responders,” Uriegas said. “But then we were.” 

Her experience echoes many of the stories from Uvalde on that day. Chaos, unclear chains of command and confusion about protocol prevented an effective response that could have saved at least a few of the 19 children and two teachers slain by the lone gunman. Police waited 77 minutes after the shooter entered the school before they stormed the classroom where he was holed up with dying children and teachers. 

Once the classroom was breached, officials lacked the resources and coordination needed to provide the proper medical response. 

Though Uriegas did save lives, it made her aware of a glaring hole in the district’s school safety plan.

“I could have gone in knowing a little bit better,” Uriegas said. “But we’ve never been trained.” 

Other than speaking at school board meetings asking for better training, she kept her thoughts and feelings to herself, knowing what she saw and experienced could not compare to the parents who had lost children, and the survivors themselves. 

But when she ran into some of the family members of slain 9-year-old Jackie Cazares, they urged her to tell the story from the driver’s seat — the full scope of all that had gone wrong, of the mishandling and lack of preparedness needed to be made public, they said. 

As the passage of time and the levity of the holidays pushes the tragedy from the headlines, Uriegas and the families don’t want complacency to set in, for Uvalde to forget just how unprepared it had been. 

So Uriegas has decided to tell her story. 

When the buses reached Robb, no one on the outside knew the status of the situation inside, and parents were frantic during the nightmarish hour they waited for law enforcement to take control.

But for Uriegas, the nightmare began once the shooting was over and children began evacuating. “Once I saw the kids that changed everything.”

Lines of sobbing children headed for the other buses to be taken to a reunification center, but law enforcement approached Uriegas’s bus with a wounded student and told her more were on the way. The officer asked if she had any medical supplies, and Uriegas scoffed at the memory of handing over what she called her “Mickey Mouse” first aid kit with little more than Band Aids inside. 

Outside on the sidewalk another officer was performing CPR on a child. Parents had picked up on the evacuation and began searching for their children. Some were pounding on the windows of Uriegas’ bus, begging to know if their kids were inside. “They wanted to see which kids were in there, which is natural,” she said. 

Uriegas realized it was only a matter of time before a parent tried to breach the bus’s emergency exit, in the back where the officers were doing their best to administer first aid to a boy who had been shot through the thigh. She could see the potential for more damage if panicked, frantic people rushed onto the bus, so she locked the emergency exit, which went against her training. But then, she realized, nothing in her training seemed to apply to this situation. She only had her instincts. 

She’s lucky that her instincts were to stay calm, said international transportation safety instructor Bret Brooks, whose company, Gray Ram Tactical has provided school bus drivers all over the United States, including many in Texas, emergency training. â€œOur subconscious will take over in an emergency.” 

“Drivers need a different training than teachers. Your response inside of a school building is drastically different than the response on a moving vehicle moving down the highway,” Brooks said. The bus should also be equipped with more than bandaids, he added. At the very least a bus should have a tourniquet, chest seal, and Quikclot gauze. 

Bus drivers’ role as first responder is evolving. Since 2015, Gray Ram has been tracking data showing an increasing number of firearms used in school shootings arriving at school by bus. 

If the drivers are trained to identify the behavior of someone carrying a gun or intent on violence, they can notify the school to be ready. “One of the things unfortunately that we find is that a lot of administrators don’t consider the bus drivers and the buses as critical to the education system,” Brooks said.

That’s what Uriegas experienced, she said, a sense of being unprepared and then forgotten, even though she played a critical role on the day of the tragedy. Of the kids she took to the hospital, she knew two of the boys by name, but not a third, a little girl, whose face she cannot remember, but whose screams she will never forget. She drove the students and officers to the hospital, praying along the way.

After the hospital, Uriegas dropped off the bus at the district depot. It’s usually the drivers’ job to clean their own buses, but when the crew saw the blood all over the inside, they told her to stand down, they would handle it. She was grateful, but not ready to call it a day. She took another bus and returned to Robb, just in case. 

She heard later the students she transported all survived. She’s grateful for that. It gives her some comfort as she struggles to make sense of that day. 

Neither she nor the bus drivers who made multiple evacuation rounds delivering traumatized students to the reunification center were part of any counseling or outreach effort from the district. A spokesperson for the district did not respond to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s request for comment.

Uriegas sought her own counseling through the Children’s Bereavement Center, which also offers counseling for adults, but she said the depression has been hard to fight, especially with the holidays. “I am definitely more sensitive and everything makes me tear up,” she said. 

The memories are always with her in some ways, but specific moments of terror come back without warning, she said. At a Thanksgiving family gathering, the happy shouting and squealing of children put her back on the school bus with the screams of wounded children.

She noted that even a memory of her parents waking her and her siblings up to a vinyl record of Feliz Navidad on Christmas morning immediately sent her mind to the families and teachers of Robb. “This,” said Uriegas, “will be a sad Christmas for them.”

Time and again, gunmen have before opening fire in schools, including fascinations with violence and a history of trauma. As cryptic — and at times explicit — social media posts emerge post-attacks, conversations often center on missed opportunities to intervene. It takes a vigilant community, Mayorkas said, to break the cycle. 

“We’re seeing individuals potentially with mental health problems, grievances, and they have manifested their challenges outwardly, they have spoken about violence,” he told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “What we’ve seen is expressions of an interest in violence and an expression of a planning or plotting to conduct an attack. And we need to educate people on identifying those signs, those expressions and also what to do about it to seek help for those individuals.”

Amid a surge in mass school shootings, districts nationwide have pumped more than $3 billion into school security. Campus police have become commonplace, active-shooter drills have grown routine and, for students across the U.S., digital surveillance has been normalized. The Department of Homeland Security has endorsed “threat assessment,” a process where educators, mental health professionals and the police analyze a student’s behaviors and statements to determine if they, as Mayorkas put it, are “descending down a path towards violence.”

The environment has created a balancing act for school leaders who are charged with keeping schools safe while protecting students’ civil liberties. 

The department recently invited ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ to interview Mayorkas about this complicated landscape ahead of its first-ever National Summit on K-12 School Safety and Security. Mayorkas fielded questions about the sharp uptick in mass school shootings, the botched police response in Uvalde, Texas, and a massive ransomware attack that targeted the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

We’re seeing an uptick in active mass shootings, including those that are targeting schools. What are some of the trends that you’re seeing within these campus attacks and what are some of the key strategies that your agency and other federal agencies are using to combat this increase in violence? 

So, Mark, tragically 2022 saw the greatest number of school shootings in our nation’s history. I think it was just over 250. And we have a multifaceted approach to it, of course, to educate and empower schools to understand how they can be safe environments. 

Every child, every person in this country and frankly around the world, deserves a safe, secure, supportive environment in which to be educated. And so we have our Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA as it is known, that has a website that is dedicated to this critical mission set. 

We have the United States Secret Service’s’ , the NTAC, that provides resources to schools about how they can maintain a safe environment. We have critical grant programs that fund innovative efforts to really build resilience, and to help prevention models, as well as our , CP3, which is developing a one-stop shop that identifies federal resources for schools to access.

We have a lot of different efforts underway throughout our department and throughout the administration.

Absolutely. So let’s jump into the threat assessment one. You mentioned the Secret Service. They’ve done this study basically finding that mass school shooters almost always have observable traits before the attack. And it’s basically a “See Something, Say Something” kind of mantra. Can you talk a little bit about threat assessments, and identifying people who might present a serious risk, but doing so in a way that doesn’t trample on people’s civil rights?

That’s right. So it’s very important, Mark, the last part of your question. We have a statutorily created and a statutorily created . It’s very important that we keep those fundamental rights well protected and do not in any way infringe upon them. 

Indeed, if we take a look at recent events, the assailants in Uvalde, Texas, in Buffalo 
 and Highland Park, these individuals exhibited signs that were observable to individuals around them. And the key is to empower people to educate people about how to identify those characteristics when somebody’s descending down a path that has a connectivity to violence, and really intervene. And to intervene not in a way that delivers accountability, but rather assistance, support. 

We’re seeing individuals potentially with mental health problems, grievances, and they have manifested their challenges outwardly, they have spoken about violence. More generally what we’ve seen is expressions of an interest in violence and an expression of a planning or plotting to conduct an attack. And we need to educate people on identifying those signs, those expressions and also what to do about it to seek help for those individuals.

You mentioned Uvalde and I’m really curious on your thoughts about the law enforcement response to the tragedy. More than 350 officers from local, state and federal agencies descended on the school. And ultimately, officers under your watch were the ones who were able to stop the gunman. But I’m curious about the delay. It took more than an hour for law enforcement officers to ultimately confront the gunman. I’m curious if you have any insight into the factors that led to that delay, and what lessons educators, law enforcement officials and anybody in the security space can take from that police response?

I think there are going to be a lot of lessons learned from the response in Uvalde. That response has been the subject of a number of investigations and some of those investigations are, in fact, ongoing. So I think I’m going to refrain from commenting upon the reported delays in the response. 

That was an unspeakable tragedy and I think there are different responses in different situations. There is a great body of training and active shooter training and how law enforcement should respond. I think the critical part is to take a look at every incident — unfortunately they occur all too often — and to learn from them to refine those best practices, to make sure that we’re disseminating those best practices throughout the law enforcement community. And not just the law enforcement community, but the health care community and the like. 

One of the things that we’ve focused on in this administration is an all-of-government and all-of-community response to this threat. So we are engaged with the Department of Education, we’re engaged with the Department of Health and Human Services, we’re looking at local community groups, parent associations, school systems, local health, mental health networks and providers. This really requires an all-of-community response to the fact that individuals are expressing their infirmities, their challenges, through acts of violence and through acts of violence targeted at children.

One of the interesting things about the response to the shooting has been a lot of concern about law enforcement officers in schools. The federal government has put a lot of money over the last several decades into putting police officers in schools. I’m curious what your response is to advocates who’ve been calling for police-free schools? 

This is a very difficult issue and it’s an issue that we do encounter not only in the school system but also in other contexts as well. This is a conversation I’ve had with faith leaders about how to make places of congregation, of learning, of worship, welcoming, open and the like, and also safe and secure, to not be foreboding. 

I don’t think it’s a one-size-fits-all. I think we have to take a look at the safety imperative. I am not opposed to having security guards in schools, I myself. But how they are deployed, how they are integrated into the fabric of the school community, I think is vitally important. 

We’re going to talk a little bit about cybersecurity and dark corners of the internet. In Uvalde the school district used a company called Social Sentinel, basically to monitor social media and try to identify potentially threatening social media posts. School districts across the country use a large range of different surveillance tools to basically monitor how kids interact on the internet and to try to identify violence before it happens. But the White House recently came out with what they’re calling a Bill of Rights for AI, and it basically says to schools, ‘limit the continuous surveillance of students if it has a potential to infringe on their civil rights.’ I’m curious on your thoughts on this idea of monitoring students’ behaviors on social media and other internet platforms to identify threats of violence?

The key is to create with one’s children an open line of communication so that one can learn what type of online activity one’s child is engaging in. So an open, communicative environment is absolutely critical, as is digital literacy so children can understand what is credible and what is not credible. 

We can employ privacy settings — parents, not the government — the parents can employ privacy settings and understand what their children are doing and communicate about it. It’s really important that children who are online are educated with respect to their own behavior and the behavior of others. I think that is what is key, that open, communicative environment, an environment of digital literacy and an environment where if children see something, they understand what it is they are seeing and know how to respond to it. And also, for parents, friends, relatives, school teachers and the like to pick up on the signs when a child is descending down a path towards violence.

If we’re talking to parents here for a second, what do you think are some of the most critical signs that folks should be looking out for?

It gets very difficult and I would really defer to mental health professionals and the like but let me give you a few examples. If we are dealing with an individual who expresses an intent to commit violence, who expresses a fascination with violence and begins to withdraw from societal communications with friends and the like, I think it is time to communicate, to ask questions, to engage with that child to learn more.

Many communities in the last few months haven’t even experienced shootings — but have been told that they are. A bunch of schools across the country in the last few months are being subjected to swatting calls.

Swatting is a very dangerous phenomenon that we’re seeing an increase of. That prank call to emergency personnel to deploy when, in fact, they’re not needed. That’s a criminal activity and it really puts innocent people at risk.

I’m curious when you can tell us about the surge right now. It appears that many of these are connected. Can you give us any insight into what’s going on and why schools are suddenly experiencing a surge in these kinds of calls?

One of the things that’s of concern when it comes to swatting, and it’s also applicable to malicious cyber activity, is the ease of replication. That if a swatting incident occurs in one geography, others may be motivated, unfortunately, to do the very same thing in a very different venue. We seek to prevent it. We work with the state, local, tribal territorial partners, campus law enforcement, to educate students, to educate people about the danger of swatting. It’s not an innocent prank call. It’s the deployment of precious law enforcement resources and could have unintended consequences. Education and prevention are key here.

Speaking of cybersecurity, the Los Angeles school district, America’s second-largest school district, was just the victim of a ransomware attack. They ultimately did not pay the ransom and as a result had some of their data posted on the dark web. I’m curious what you can tell us about the threat actors who we’re holding LAUSD ransom and in general the threat actors who are targeting schools?

We’ve seen a tremendous rise in ransomware over the last several years by criminal actors. They target not only schools, they target hospitals, law enforcement organizations, businesses, the range of victims is quite wide. We caution, we recommend that victim entities not pay the ransom. We are very well aware of the precarious situation in which they find themselves when they’re held hostage to a ransomware actor. But we have only increased our defenses, really only enhanced our defenses, and also strengthened law enforcement’s response to it.

Now, if I’m a school leader and I’m the victim of a ransomware attack or some sort of cyber threat, what kind of assistance can I receive from the federal government? What role do you play in helping school districts respond to this?

Our Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, is very well equipped to assist a ransomware victim as is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Secret Service. We have a whole suite of capable agencies that can assist in identifying the intrusion, assisting in expelling the intruder, helping in patching the vulnerability that the intruder exploited and, of course, holding hopefully the intruder accountable. And the FBI has done an extraordinary job in investigating and identifying bad actors.

A recent Pew poll found that about a third of parents are very or extremely worried about a school shooting occurring at their child’s school. You’re a parent. I’m curious, have you had these similar concerns from a parental perspective? And to what degree do you think that parents should be concerned about a shooting unfolding at their school?

It’s a tragic state of affairs when parents are concerned about sending their children to school because of a potential attack that impairs the safety and security of their children. 

It is important for schools to train their personnel and their students on how to respond in the case of an active shooter. When I was a child in Los Angeles, California, where I spent much of my youth, we were trained on responding to fires, to earthquakes, even to a bomb. School shooting was not in the panoply of threats to which we were trained to respond. Now, tragically, it is, and schools need to train and parents need to communicate in an informed way with their children — not in a way to create hysteria — but in a way to create vigilance and alertness.

Online platforms like forums have been used over the last several years to radicalize young people, whether that be to become mass school shooters, or to go down a path of white nationalism. I’m curious if you can elaborate a little bit on the landscape of these online forums and ways that we can combat that without stepping on the First Amendment? 

So the threats, the diversity of the threats is much broader than what you identified, of course. And this is where I spoke earlier about the need to communicate with children, with youth, who are impressionable, to be able to create a safe environment where they feel comfortable communicating with what they’re seeing. For parents to be vigilant in terms of privacy settings, to really develop digital literacy amongst our youth so that they can understand what is credible, what is not credible, what is threatening, and what is innocent.

We really have to do that, and we’re working in partnership with industry, with the private sector, with think tanks about how to best build that digital literacy. This also requires an all-of-community response, it is not for the government exclusively to engage in this. 

We are working with online gaming companies to really build a safe environment to really instruct children about the perils of the online environment, to really guard against cyberbullying as well as extremism that seeks to draw people to violence.

What is it about the gaming community? It’s interesting that you’re specifically reaching out to people in that space. Why? 

Well, we’re reaching out much more broadly. We engage with social media companies, we engage with thought leaders that are important voices. The gaming community reaches so many children, they’re a critical partner in developing a safe and secure ecosystem so people can understand the benefits of, as well as the perils of, the online environment. 

Our increased connectivity is a tremendous tool for achieving prosperity. It also brings risks to it.

Thank you so much for taking the time to field these questions and talk about this really important topic. Is there anything else that I haven’t asked, that you think is important? 

I want to return to a point of sadness and a point of vigilance. The point of sadness is, of course, we’re speaking about school safety and the fact that it is such a phenomenon right now. 

On the other hand, the community — and the federal government is a member of that community, but the community is much broader — is very, very alert to this phenomenon, and very vigilant in addressing it in a really productive and constructive way.

The win secures the GOP trifecta in Austin that, over the last several years, has fought COVID-19 restrictions, enacted classroom censorship policies and blocked gun safety measures after the elementary school mass shooting in Uvalde.

The Associated Press called the race for Abbott at 11 p.m. Eastern Time Tuesday.

“Tonight, Texans sent a very resounding message,” Abbott said in a victory speech from the southern border city of McAllen.

Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke sought to cast the contest as a referendum on the Republican incumbent’s last four years in office, which included a statewide power grid failure that killed hundreds, new restrictions on abortion and controversy over school safety after the killing of 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School. 

The result confirmed Abbott’s strong support within the growing and rapidly diversifying state of 29 million people, but came as Democrats nationwide fought off what was widely predicted to be a red wave, outperforming pre-election polling.

Following the May 24 tragedy in Uvalde, which was carried out by an 18-year-old gunman who bought two AR-15-style rifles immediately after turning the legal purchasing age, Abbott made no moves to reform gun laws. The inaction was by the victims’ family members.

Meanwhile, O’Rourke pressed the issue, arguing that the mass shooting was preventable. That produced a memorable moment at an August  , when an Abbott supporter laughed while the Democrat described the damage done by an AR-15.

“It may be funny to you, motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me,” O’Rourke said.

Still, Abbott carried the mostly Hispanic Uvalde County by a 22-point margin, a slight increase beyond former President Donald Trump’s advantage there in 2020.

Capitalizing on anxieties over crime and inflation, the incumbent won majorities in nearly every county except those on the border and those representing the urban centers of Houston, Austin, San Antonio and Dallas. More than 4 in 10 Texans named the economy as their chief concern, according to an Associated Press .

Facing his third defeat in four years, this time after breaking state fundraising records and outraising his opponent, O’Rourke did not specify his future plans. The high-profile candidate has become a fixture in Texas Democratic politics since his surprisingly close race against U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018.

“I don’t know what my role or yours will be going forward, but I’m in this fight for life,” he said.

With over 95% of the ballots accounted for, Abbott received 54.8% of the vote and O’Rourke received 43.8%. 

A Democrat has not been elected to state office in the Lone Star State for nearly three decades.

The Texas Education Agency a plethora of proposals that would, among other changes, require public schools to install silent panic alarms and automatic locks on exterior doors.

Other proposals include inspecting doors on a weekly basis to make sure they lock and can be opened from the outside only with a key. Two-way emergency radios would also have to be tested regularly. Schools would need to add some sort of vestibules so visitors can wait before being let in, and all ground-level windows would have to be made with bulletproof glass.

These proposed requirements come about five months after a gunman killed 21 people, including 19 children, at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. The gunman entered a door that had been closed by a teacher, but the automatic lock failed.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

If approved, schools would have to start putting in place these safety measures starting in 2023. Before the end of this year, the education department will collect on the proposed rules.

The state has $400 million for increased safety measures that will be disbursed to districts. In the coming weeks, the education department will make a grant application available to districts. Districts will receive those grants based on enrollment, while smaller, rural schools will receive the minimum $200,000.

Proposing these safety measures is the latest action the state has taken to secure schools in the wake of the Uvalde shooting. In June, the education department that it would check all the locks on exterior doors prior to the start of the 2022-2023 school year and review every district’s school safety plans.

Matthew Gutierrez, superintendent of the Seguin Independent School District, said the safety measures that the state would require are needed, but he’s not sure smaller school districts like his would be able to meet a 2023 implementation date.

The 7,000-student district is located about 36 miles east from San Antonio.

Gutierrez also said he’s not sure if the funding available would be enough for the state’s 1,026 school districts that vary dramatically in size.

“We had the opportunity to look at costs and just how significant it would be when you think of [adding] shatterproof glass,” he said.

Upgrading aging schools will prove to be another monetary issue as they don’t have the infrastructure to be easily upgraded, Gutierrez said. As part of the midterm elections, the Seguin school district is asking its voters to approve a $15 million package that will go to upgrading security features on several campuses, but that’s nowhere near enough to cover what the district needs.

Brian Woods, superintendent of the Northside Independent School District, echoed Gutierrez and said his main concern is cost.

“What appears to be perhaps affordable given the size of the grant today may not be in six months because so many districts will be out spending money,” Woods said.

His school district includes the northwestern neighborhoods in San Antonio and serves about 102,000 students.

As Texas moves forward with different safety measures, there is no indication that beefing up security in schools has prevented violence. Rather, they can can be detrimental to children, especially Black and Hispanic children. Black students are overrepresented in all types of disciplinary referrals and than their white peers.

Advocates and Uvalde parents have criticized the state’s response in the months after the shooting, demanding state lawmakers raise the minimum age to purchase a semi-automatic rifle in the state from 18 to 21 years old.

They have to call a special session to make this happen. , who has signed legislation to expand gun rights, hasn’t budged.

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

In the wake of the devastating shooting in Uvalde, Texas, one of the latest tragedies in a decades-long surge of violence in schools, some state lawmakers are embracing a bipartisan measure that skirts divisive gun debates: school maps and blueprints.

Police, firefighters and emergency technicians often reference those maps when responding to school emergencies. But law enforcement and school safety experts say the maps are frequently inaccurate and out-of-date — potentially lengthening emergency response times.

In the past six months, states including Iowa, New Jersey, Virginia and Wisconsin have launched multimillion-dollar initiatives to correct and digitize school maps and get them in the hands of local law enforcement. An additional 18 states are “actively investing” in digital maps, according to Critical Response Group, Inc., the country’s largest school-mapping contractor.

“For any type of incident — it could be a bee sting — time is of the essence,” said Wisconsin state Rep. Jesse James, a Republican and former police chief who last year co-sponsored a successful bill that encouraged schools to adopt digital maps. “The floor plans that we have now just aren’t adequate.”

But cost and limited awareness remain barriers to adoption for many schools, several education and school safety experts said. And the new mapping initiatives, while often touted as common sense, have not been studied or evaluated the way that other school-safety measures have.

“From a tactical standpoint, there is clearly some value in officers having these maps,” said Cheryl Lero Jonson, an associate professor of criminal justice at Xavier University who researches school shooting interventions. “But I would like to see more research 
 before we funnel millions of dollars to them.”

To be clear, while the Uvalde massacre has raised interest in digital mapping, there is nothing to indicate the failed multi-agency response there related to officers’ ability to navigate the building.

Outdated Blueprints

Many states have long required that schools share blueprints with law enforcement, a precaution dating back to the aftermath of the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. These new programs update that approach by incentivizing schools to create digital or “critical incident” maps — a technique modeled on maps used in special operations missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A critical incident map might include, for example, an aerial view of a school, an overlaid atlas grid, and markers that flag entrances, stairwells, electronic door locks, utility lines, roof access points and bleeding control kits. Once integrated into first responders’ digital systems, both dispatchers and law enforcement can see the exact classroom a 911 caller is in.

“These days, if you look inside a patrol car, more often than not, you’ll see a laptop or other device in there,” said Mo Canady, the executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers. “Being able to pull up digital images and maps right on that device — there’s an advantage, no doubt about it.”

School officials and law enforcement say they can easily update these digital maps to reflect recent changes to school buildings — a stubborn problem with traditional floor plans, which may exist only on microfiche, as PDFs, or as physical drawings in blueprint tubes. Less than 1% of the 1,000 schools Critical Response Group has mapped had accurate floor plans already, said Mike Rodgers, the company’s chief executive.

The labels on conventional blueprints also can cause confusion: They typically use the official names for classrooms and other facilities, instead of the casual or colloquial names used by teachers and students.

“When someone calls 911 and says, ‘Someone has chest pain in the teachers lounge,’ neither the dispatcher nor the officer knows where that is,” Rodgers said. “But under stress, on a 911 call, that’s how people refer to it.”

Leading law enforcement and school safety organizations — including the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Partner Alliance for Safer Schools — recommend that administrators routinely update, share and review maps with law enforcement. But many schools have not shared any blueprints with law enforcement, let alone digital ones.

In 2020, a U.S. Department of Justice working group found that school maps often go “overlooked” in plans to protect students. As recently as 2019, a survey by the National Center for School Safety found that 1 in 3 Virginia schools had not provided any kind of electronic floor plan to law enforcement.

Cost has proved a barrier for some districts. A digital or critical incident map by a third-party contractor can cost between roughly $3,500 and $5,000, according to figures released as part of the new state initiatives. And to create such maps in-house, districts may have to invest in costly software and other tools — such as 3D scanners that measure building dimensions and retail for tens of thousands of dollars.

Many districts also “forgot” about mapping after an initial wave of projects in the early 2000s, Canady said. Interest flared up again after the Uvalde massacre, he added.

“Schools aren’t thinking of these things — they’re busy teaching,” said Donna Michaelis, the manager of the Virginia Center for School and Campus Safety and Public Safety Services, which is part of a state agency. “They’re not law enforcement. They’re not thinking of the worst day of their lives. It’s not their job to do that.”

New State Efforts

Virginia’s Digital Mapping Program, which Michaelis oversees, is one of several new initiatives meant to address that gap. In April, the state legislature passed a law requiring that school districts maintain up-to-date maps and floor plans.

Later that month, the state’s Department of Criminal Justice Services announced a $6.5 million grant program that will reimburse school districts up to $3,500 per building to contract for new critical incident maps. “Paper and one-dimensional digital maps are obsolete for today’s school emergencies,” reads one promotion for the program.

So far, 90 of the state’s 132 school divisions — representing about 1,200 of its 1,976 schools — have requested funding or otherwise expressed interest in the program, Michaelis said.

Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin also has touted schools’ strong response to the project: Now “several other states are rushing to address this vital issue as well,” he said in a late September statement.

Those states include Iowa, New Jersey and Wisconsin, all of which have earmarked millions of dollars toward school mapping projects in the past year. In June, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds announced Iowa would direct $6 million of COVID-19 relief funds to a new school mapping project. Two months later, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, announced a similar $6.5 million grant program. New Jersey State Police plan to map 1,320 public and charter schools by the start of the 2023-2024 school year, a spokesperson said.

In Wisconsin, meanwhile, where school districts already are required to share blueprints with law enforcement, a December 2021 law allowed schools to submit critical incident maps instead — and created a $2 million grant program to incentivize the switch. The program, launched in July, will run for two years and grant up to $5,000 per school.

“It’s an opportunity to have the most up-to-date technology available in our schools,” said James, one of the bill’s sponsors. “A lot of schools didn’t know this existed, but they want to take advantage of it now.”

Digital maps have not been studied as a school safety measure, however — a gap that gives some experts and legislators pause. Mapping initiatives seem sensible on their face, said Xavier University’s Cheryl Jonson — particularly in incidents such as fires, where multiple agencies need to coordinate their response. 

But under modern police protocol, Jonson added, the first officer on the scene of a mass shooting enters the school and engages the gunman without first coordinating with other agencies or an incident command center.

In May 2021, Washington state terminated its 19-year-old school mapping program after a study concluded that among other issues, law enforcement responding to school shootings no longer “look at floor plans and move in as one unit.”

Instead of mandating a switch to digital maps, Washington redirected funding to new threat assessment teams, which train teachers and staff to identify at-risk students and intervene before an attack occurs. Some education advocates argue that social-emotional supports make a better investment in school safety, especially with COVID-19 relief dollars.

“We weren’t trying to get rid of a safety feature for kids,” said Washington state Rep. Laurie Dolan, a Democrat and former school district administrator who co-sponsored the legislation. “We’re trying to spend that money more wisely. Mapping is expensive.”

Still, at a time when lawmakers and school officials have intensified efforts to keep schools safe, interest in digital maps appears to be growing.

Michigan also considered a bipartisan critical response mapping bill during the 2022 legislative session. And officials who recently piloted a mapping project in rural Concho Valley, Texas, said they’ve begun meeting with interested state legislators ahead of next year’s session.

They also are in touch with school district administrators in Uvalde, said John Austin Stokes, the executive director of the Concho Valley Council of Governments, which oversaw the pilot project. Administrators there expressed interest in digital mapping after the massacre and failed police response at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School, he added.

“I think there’s a lot of interest at the state level because this is something that could get a lot of non-controversial support,” Stokes said. “Mental health gets a lot of attention because everyone can support that. This is one of those solutions that could garner a lot of support, as well.” 

Texas school districts are set to receive nearly $8 million from the Justice Department to improve campus security this year through funding from the bipartisan gun safety law passed this summer. That includes nearly half a million for Uvalde.

The gun safety law allocates $100 million for a DOJ grant program for school districts to invest in safety programs and technology. Twenty-eight Texas school districts were awarded grants through the program, totaling $7,923,719. The grants are distributed via the DOJ’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services based on districts’ fiscal needs and security proposals.

More school districts were awarded grants in Texas than in any other state. Still, with over 1,000 public school districts in the state, the grants touched only a sliver of Texas’ schools.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

But for some of the recipients, the grants are a major boost in security funding. Uvalde received $442,400 from the grant program — more than the $435,270 the school district allocated for security and monitoring in its 2021-22 budget. In addition to Uvalde, the recipients include some of the biggest urban school districts in the state, such as Austin, San Antonio and Fort Worth. Houston-area school districts received a total of over $1 million, as did North Texas districts.

Uvalde received $69,000 in 2020 to “harden” its schools from a Texas Education Agency grant program as part of a after the deadly shooting at Santa Fe High School. Those efforts , but Republicans in both Congress and Texas are digging their heels into school-hardening efforts to prevent future tragedies.

Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath that the agency planned to review the entry points of every school in the state — which amounts to over 3,000 campuses and as many as 80,000 buildings. U.S. Rep. , R-Los Indios, introduced legislation just before the October recess to redirect $11 billion from the Internal Revenue Service toward state grants for school mental health programs, security and other violence-prevention measures. That includes an additional $300 million for the COPS grants program.

Democrats, on the other hand, have criticized school hardening as secondary to gun control reform. Bridging the two priorities was a central pillar in the bipartisan gun safety legislation, spearheaded by Sen. . It was the and goes far beyond the scope of school safety, including a provision to tighten access to guns for those convicted of domestic abuse. Still, it fell short on several Democratic priorities, including universal background checks, raising the legal age to purchase firearms and the a ban on assault weapons. The bill passed in the Senate on a wide bipartisan basis.

Other Texas Republicans, however, were less supportive of the legislation. Sen. did not vote for the bill, nor did any Texas Republicans in the House except for Rep. , R-San Antonio. Gonzales’ district includes Uvalde.

The gun safety law also allocates a further $200 million to help schools with student and faculty training and other violence-prevention efforts.

“No parent should fear for the safety of their student when they drop them off at school, and no student should be afraid when they walk into the classroom,” Cornyn said in a statement. “In the aftermath of the tragedy in Uvalde, I’m grateful that meaningful solutions are starting to be delivered through this funding to prevent violence, provide training to school personnel and students, and apply evidence-based threat assessments in Texas schools.”

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

Gov.  on Monday appointed former U.S. Secret Service agent John P. Scott as the Texas Education Agency’s first chief of school safety and security, a position the governor created in response to the Uvalde mass school shooting that left 19 students and two teachers dead.

Scott formerly served as a Secret Service agent in the Vice Presidential Protective Division from 2006 and 2010 during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, according to his LinkedIn profile. He later helped lead the Secret Service field office in Dallas.

In his new role, which started Monday, Scott will “take every action possible to ensure schools are using best practices to safeguard against school shootings or other dangers,” according to from Abbott’s office.

Abbott to create the position four months ago in June, just over two weeks after the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde.

Abbott’s press release on Monday listed other actions the governor has taken since the Uvalde shooting, including his to “enhance school safety and mental health services” in Uvalde and across the state.

Since the shooting in May, Uvalde parents have called to raise the age to buy semi-automatic rifles — the kind of guns that the Uvalde gunman bought immediately after his 18th birthday in May — from 18 to 21. In August, to raise the age, that Texas cannot ban 18- to 20-year-olds from carrying handguns. Since then, Texas has started the process to , but Abbott has not said whether a successful appeal would change his stance on the constitutionality of raising the age to buy semi-automatic rifles.

On Friday, publicly endorsed Beto O’Rourke, who is running against Abbott in November, just hours ahead of the two candidates’ only planned debate. O’Rourke that he would focus on raising the age to buy semi-automatic rifles to 21 if he were elected next month in addition to supporting universal background checks and red-flag laws, which would allow judges to seize firearms from people deemed dangerous.

O’Rourke attacked Abbott at the debate for refusing to call a special legislative session to discuss school safety and gun laws after the Uvalde shooting. He also for expanding gun access in Texas by signing a law allowing Texans who can legally carry guns to carry handguns without a license or training and for sending a video message to the National Rifle Association’s conference in Houston just days after the shooting in Uvalde.

Scott and the TEA could not be immediately reached for comment.

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

Just two days before students returned to classes at the coastal district east of Orlando, Ivey plans to equip his team of school-based deputies with collapsible rifles strapped to their chests. The move was a direct response to the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which resulted in the deaths of 19 children and two teachers and brought a tragic end to the last school year. Now, as students file back into classrooms across the country, this back-to-school season has come with a heightened focus on school security, with districts increasing the presence of police, installing new and, in one district, bringing in a gun-detecting dog. 

Ivey took the back-to-school security rush further than most, arguing in the video that “if you do not meet violence with violence, you will be violently killed.” 

To help campus cops fight back against any would-be gunmen, Ivey announced that his department with collapsible stocks. Kel-Tec, a Brevard County-based firearm manufacturer, says semi-automatic 9mm rifle “picks up where handguns leave off,” utilizing a folding carbine with “more pistol magazine options than a cat has lives.”  The weapons retail for about $600 each. 

“Sun Tzu says in The Art of War that every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought,” said Ivey, a group of extremist law enforcement officers with . “What Sun Tzu meant was that you must outsmart, out strategize, outtrain and out prepare your opponent long before the battle is ever fought.” 

Mass school shootings have long motivated efforts to bolster the ranks of campus cops and school security, yet as the tragedies continue unabated, there’s little evidence to suggest the strategies are effective in mitigating or preventing bloodshed. Ben Fisher, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin whose research focuses on the intersection of education and criminal justice, questioned the efficacy of rifle-toting school resource officers and other school-hardening measures.

“It seems to me like yet another overreaction to the issue of gun violence in schools, one that feels like putting a Band-Aid on a problem that keeps happening rather than addressing the source,” Fisher said. 

In Uvalde, a close-knit, predominantly Hispanic town still reeling from the May rampage, to buildings with 8-foot “non-scalable” perimeter fences, new surveillance cameras and upgraded doors and locks after the security apparatus at Robb Elementary School was criticized for a fatal collapse at multiple levels. Meanwhile, the state Department of Public Safety in Uvalde schools at the district’s request.

The changes come after a into the Uvalde shooting found “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making,” including a culture where doors were routinely left unlocked and a disorganized, chaotic police response. In total, 376 law enforcement officers from the local, state and federal levels — many of them heavily armed — descended on the campus but failed to subdue the gunman for more than an hour, a delay that may have cost lives. Last month, the Uvalde school , the disgraced chief of the district’s tiny police force, and officials “intruder detection audits” at every district across Texas. Last week, state officials announced an investigation into the actions of five Texas Department of Public Safety officers who responded to the shooting, two of whom have been suspended. 

The school security rush this summer stretched across every corner of the country. In Ohio, lawmakers passed a policy that allows teachers to carry guns in class after just 24 hours of training. In Marion County, Florida, the sheriff’s office — a German short-haired pointer that was trained to sniff out firearms and ammunition on campuses. At America’s largest school district, in New York City, officials last week and training of additional unarmed school safety agents and enhance emergency preparedness training for school leaders. It also conducted audits of 1,400 campuses, identifying some 1,300 issues with security features like door locks, panic buttons and public address systems, pledging all would be fixed when schools opened Sept. 8. 

In late June, President Joe Biden signed into law the nation’s first new gun control measures in 30 years, which include an additional $300 million in federal grants for campus security while also allocating more money for student mental health services. 

Meanwhile, Ivey said the in-your-face weaponry being deployed in Brevard County Schools was meant to send a message, offering a “tactical appearance that clearly signifies that we mean business.” 

Yet, the rifles were nowhere to be found on students’ first day of school on Aug. 10. Activists with the local group Families for Safe Schools surveyed parents from across the county about whether they’d seen school-based officers with the new rifles and “so far it’s been a resounding no,” said Jabari Hosey, the group’s president and a father of three elementary school-aged children in the district. 

“It’s just a joke,” said Hosey, who favors armed police in schools but believes the move to equip them with rifles is a step too far. “He put the cart before the horse. Apparently they don’t have all of the equipment they need.”

In an interview, sheriff’s office spokesperson Tod Goodyear acknowledged the rifles hadn’t yet been implemented but will “probably roll out in stages.” 

“It may have been announced out a little bit before everything was really ready,” said Goodyear, who blamed the delay partly on the need to train deputies on how to use the weapons. “All of the rifles weren’t produced and all of that, so that may be a little bit of the holdup.”

‘Do something’

The rush to harden schools post-Uvalde is, in many ways, the continuation of a decades-long trend. Mass school shootings — which are devastating but statistically rare — have consistently prompted increases in school-based police and security infrastructure. 

School security and policing measures generally see widespread support from the public. A recent poll by the education nonprofit PDK International found a resounding 80% of adults favor the presence of armed police in schools, including 94% of Republicans and 70% of Democrats. 

Whether such efforts make kids safer, however, remains a contentious debate. Existing research “does not, as a whole, yield support for school policing as an effective strategy to improve safety and security,” the National Institute of Justice, the Department of Justice’s research arm, . Similarly, there’s a dearth of research to suggest that school hardening efforts have made schools safer, of security technology by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. As the tragedies generate headlines and fierce political debates, local education officials often face significant pressure to act — often on quick timelines. 

“If horrific enough, these incidents can lead to increases in funding with a short spending window,” the Johns Hopkins report notes. “This curbs the ability of districts to conduct even limited evaluation and frequently results in the purchase of technology to demonstrate a strong commitment to ‘doing something.’” 

The school security industry was with business growth largely dependent on the frequency and severity of mass school shootings, according to a recent report by the market research firm .

While armed police have become a regular presence in U.S. schools, officers are generally equipped with pistols, a reality their proponents argue leaves campus cops at a tactical disadvantage during active shootings. That has led to a push, in Brevard County and elsewhere, to fight firepower with firepower. Leading supporters of school-based police say the development is necessary to ensure officers aren’t out-gunned, but critics say it’s the latest escalation of school militarization and could put students at greater risk of harm. 

The collapsible stock on the rifles being deployed in Brevard County schools puts the deputies “on par with what we’re facing,” without being overly cumbersome, sheriff spokesperson Goodyear said. Goodyear went a step further in contemplating the everyday drawbacks to arming school police with heavy weaponry, including AR-15s, the assault-style rifle favored by many mass shooters. 

“Unless you go down to a submachine gun, maybe you could carry that, but then now you’re talking about putting an automatic rifle into somebody’s hands,” Goodyear said. “But with an AR-15 or along those lines of that type of weapon, it’s a fairly large weapon and the only way you can carry it is on a sling over your shoulder. It’s not practical, your hands aren’t free, it’s going to get in the way.”

In Madison County, North Carolina, the sheriff found a compromise, AR-15 rifles in safes at each of the county’s six campuses — a move that gun control advocates “absolute insanity.” But Sheriff Buddy Harwood said the semi-automatic rifles were critical to keep kids safe. 

“Having just a deputy armed with a handgun isn’t enough to stop these animals,” Harwood said in . With the AR-15s, “my school resource officers will not have to wait, retreat or have to leave the situation to get the weaponry to deal with the threat.”

The approaches in Brevard and Madison counties each have pros and cons, said Mo Canady, executive director of the Alabama-based National Association of School Resource Officers. 

“I’m not sure that, as a society, we’re generally ready to see law enforcement officers on a consistent basis walking around with a long gun strapped onto one shoulder” while patrolling school hallways, he said. Storing rifles in safes gives school-based police additional weaponry during an active shooting — but only if they have a chance to retrieve them. While he opposes giving school-based officers an “overly militaristic look,” he said a collapsible rifle like the Kel-Tec could be a “happy medium” if it’s “not something that’s sticking out there obvious all of the time.” 

But he said that rifles, which are generally more accurate than pistols, could grow more common as schools continue to be confronted by heavily armed gunmen. 

“If you have to take a shot in a school environment,” he said, “you’d darn well better hit your target.” 

‘A militarized vibe’

Kel-Tec markets its collapsible SUB2000 rifle for its convenience, noting on the company website that “it tucks away nicely in situations where space is limited, but it’s quick to deploy in situations where time is of the essence.” 

But the same features that could make it an attractive option for school-based police could be exploited by mass shooters. In fact, the weapon has already made an appearance at . After a gunman opened fire on an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle, authorities found the suspect also had . Last year, a student at Daytona’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University — just 60 miles north of the Kel-Tec headquarters in Cocoa —  was to “enact a Columbine” on campus. When police stopped the suspect outside his apartment, he reportedly had a SUB2000 concealed in his backpack that he’d recently purchased on Facebook Marketplace. 

Kel-Tec executives didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Hosey, of the Brevard Families for Safe Schools group, said he generally supports school-based police, but he and other parents were caught off guard when the sheriff announced the new Kel-Tecs. 

“It gave us a militarized vibe,” he said, and could lead students to fear their school resource officers because people often associate heavily armed police officers with active-shooter situations. “What we don’t want is kids to see this and assume that they’re in danger and that there’s an imminent threat.” 

When asked about the presence of rifles in Brevard County schools, district spokesperson Russell Bruhn said in an email that “the sheriff’s office is our security expert,” and declined to comment further. 

School-based police have long been positioned as members of school communities who foster positive relationships with students. But having a rifle so visibly present on deputies’ chests sends “messages about aggression and the potential for violence when we know that violence in schools, especially with guns, is exceedingly rare,” said Fisher of the University of Wisconsin.  

In fact, there’s a lack of research to suggest that a school shooting was particularly fatal because campus police lacked “military weaponry,” said attorney Miriam Rollin, a director at the National Center for Youth Law. Despite the police failures in Uvalde, she said the push to arm school-based officers with rifles is just the latest escalation in campus hardening and isn’t a far leap from “tanks going down school hallways.” 

“Generally with an arms race, nobody wins,” Rollin said. “I have to say, this is no exception.”

UVALDE — The Uvalde school board agreed Wednesday to fire Pete Arredondo, the school district police chief broadly criticized for his response to the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, in a vote that came shortly after he asked to be taken off of suspension and receive backpay.

Arredondo, widely blamed for law enforcement’s delayed response in confronting the gunman who killed 21 people at Robb Elementary, through his attorney, George E. Hyde. The meeting came exactly three months after a at the school.

“Chief Arredondo will not participate in his own illegal and unconstitutional public lynching and respectfully requests the Board immediately reinstate him, with all backpay and benefits and close the complaint as unfounded,” Hyde .

Arredondo didn’t attend the meeting, citing death threats made against him.

But about 100 people, including relatives of the shooting victims, showed up for the vote. Many chanted “coward” and “no justice, no peace.” Four people spoke during a public comment period before the seven-member board went into closed session to deliberate Arredondo’s employment, criticizing the decision to not discuss the matter in front of the public.

“I hope they do right by us,” Brett Cross, whose son was killed in the massacre, told other attendees as trustees met behind closed doors.

For months, school officials faced intense public pressure to fire Arredondo, who was one of the first law enforcement officers to respond to the shooting at Robb Elementary on May 24. waited more than an hour to confront the 18-year-old gunman after he entered the school.

Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Superintendent Hal Harrell recommended that Arredondo be fired “for good cause.” Hyde asked school officials to read a statement on Arredondo’s behalf at the meeting. They did not comply with the request.

As board members began discussing Arredondo, Felicha Lopez, whose son was killed in the massacre, told people attending the meeting that the school board needed to “protect our kids” as she wiped tears from her face.

A released in July said the responding officers lacked clear leadership, basic communications and sufficient urgency to more quickly confront the gunman, who was shot and killed after a U.S. Border Patrol tactical team entered the classroom where most of the victims were shot.

In his statement Wednesday, Arredondo’s lawyer said that the school district violated his constitutional due process rights by failing to provide him notice of the complaints against him and conduct an investigation of his response to the mass shooting ahead of the termination hearing.

Arredondo’s lawyer said that he received an email from the district on July 19, recommending his termination based on his failure to establish himself as the incident commander during the shooting, but argued the letter should have been sent earlier and in a physical format.

Arredondo was listed in the district’s active-shooter plan as the commanding officer, but the consensus of those interviewed by the House committee was that Arredondo did not assume that role and no one else took over for him, which resulted in a chaotic law enforcement response.

Reference:

In a June 9 with The Texas Tribune, Arredondo said he did not think he was the incident commander on the scene. He said he never gave any order, instead only called for assistance. Arredondo did not have his police radio while he was inside Robb Elementary because he wanted both of his arms free to engage the shooter, he said.

Arredondo testified to the House committee that he believed the shooter was a “barricaded subject” instead of an “active shooter” after seeing an empty classroom next to the one where the shooter was hiding.

“With the benefit of hindsight, we now know this was a terrible, tragic mistake,” the House report stated.

Training for active-shooter scenarios directs law enforcement responders to prioritize the lives of innocent victims over those of officers. For a barricaded suspect, officers are not advised to rush in.

The report criticized Arredondo’s focus on trying to find a key to open the door to the room the shooter was in, which “consumed his attention and wasted precious time, delaying the breach of the classrooms.” The report said the classroom door didn’t lock properly and likely wasn’t locked as police waited to confront the shooter.

Hyde, Arredondo’s lawyer, asserted that his client should not have been assigned as the incident commander. He argued the Uvalde County sheriff should have been in charge of the incident given that this office was the only law enforcement agency that knew the gunman had shot his grandmother prior to traveling to Robb Elementary.

Vicente Salazar, whose granddaughter was killed in the attack, told other meeting attendees Wednesday that, in addition to Arredondo, the Uvalde County sheriff should also be fired. He encouraged residents to be more civically engaged.

“We need to take Uvalde back for our people,” he said.

State Sen. , a San Antonio Democrat whose district includes Uvalde, also attended the meeting.

“It’s 90 days too long to do the right thing,” he said before the school board’s vote.

Gutierrez said other law enforcement agencies also failed in their response and urged residents to keep pushing for accountability.

“I encourage you to keep fighting,” Gutierrez said.

In the Wednesday letter to trustees, Arredondo’s legal team also directed blame back at the school district for allegedly not taking the police chief’s security advice.

“If the school district would have prioritized Chief Arredondo’s request over a year prior to the incident, for key-card locks, better fencing, better training, and more equipment, [it] could have been different,” the letter said.

The Texas House committee’s report investigating the shooting also cited the school’s lack of preparedness for an armed intruder. Some Uvalde residents have also pushed for the termination or resignation of Harrell, the superintendent who recommended Arredondo’s termination. Trustees met behind closed doors on Monday to discuss complaints about Harrell but took no action on the matter. On Wednesday, school board members did not speak about their decision to fire Arredondo and quickly adjourned the meeting after their vote.

Arredondo was elected to the Uvalde City Council a few weeks before the shooting but wasn’t sworn in until after the massacre. After missing several meetings, Arredondo stepped down from his District 3 seat to “minimize further distractions,” he said.

Jesse Rizo, whose niece was killed in the shooting, said Arredondo’s termination would help people begin healing. But he also said that other law enforcement officers and agencies should be held accountable.

Rizo also expressed shock that Arredondo asked to be reinstated from suspension with backpay.

“The audacity,” he said. “Who would come up with that? You didn’t have a car wreck into a stop sign. You had a loss of life. Twenty-one of them.”

Zach Despart contributed to this story.

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

“He called me up and said, ‘Frank, you don’t even know what you need, but here’s my number,’” DeAngelis said during an event Monday at the Columbine Memorial in Littleton, Colorado. The road to recovery, DeAngelis would soon learn, isn’t a sprint but a marathon. Help from others who had lived through similar tragedies was instrumental.

DeAngelis hoped he’d never have to make a similar phone call, but in the decades since Columbine, the retired principal has reached out to traumatized educators across the country who similarly became part of “a club in which no one wants to be a member.” 

“Unfortunately, that membership continues to grow,” DeAngelis said. “But we can’t give up hope.”

On Monday, DeAngelis and nearly two dozen school leaders before their schools became crime scenes. While campus shootings remain statistically rare — and no two tragedies are identical — the guide aims to provide practical tips for principals as they begin to lead their communities to recovery. 

The guide was produced by the Principal Recovery Network, a group of current and former school leaders who have experienced school gun violence. “I wish, when that horrific event happened, that we had that recovery guide,” DeAngelis said. “When those events happen, your mind is spinning, and this guide, hopefully, will provide that strength.”

The recovery network was formed by the National Association of Secondary School Principals in 2019, a year after the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, reignited a national conversation on the effects of gun violence. Though the guide was years in the making, its release took on new urgency after the May school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 elementary school students and two teachers were killed. 

Following such tragedies, network members reach out to the affected school leaders to offer advice and a place to vent. After all, nobody knows what’s needed in the aftermath of a campus shooting better than school leaders who’ve survived one, said Ronn Nozoe, the association’s CEO.

“This is something that nobody wants to go through, and there is no step-by-step manual on how to handle it,” said recovery network member Michelle Keford, principal of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. But, “Having their advice, having their input and having their shared experiences really helps me as a leader, and I hope to pass that along.”

The 16-page guide spells out things to consider before reopening a school, the importance of attending to students’ and staff mental health, how to include student input in district plans and practical advice on managing offers of help from outside groups. 

In the immediate aftermath of a tragedy, the guide recommends that school leaders meet with faculty at the school to explain what happened and assess their needs. Principals should quickly provide mental health supports, from trauma-informed counselors to therapy dogs. And they should consider keeping school closed until all funerals have taken place and all physical damage to the building is repaired. 

Among the network’s members is Michael Bennett, superintendent of Greenville Central School District in upstate New York, who was shot in 2004 as an assistant principal wrestled a gun-wielding 16-year-old student to the ground. Shotgun pellets remain lodged in Bennett’s calf. 

“That’s going to be a permanent part of who I am,” Bennett, who was a teacher at Columbia High School at the time, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “One of the things you start to learn as you go through this process of recovery is that it’s an ongoing process. It will ebb and flow based on some of your own experiences and how you’re dealing with those.” 

Bennett said he recently offered support to a high school band director in Highland Park, Illinois, who reached out after seven died in a mass shooting at an Independence Day parade. The high school band had marched in the parade, and their teacher was concerned that students’ return to classrooms this fall and their performances at football games could be traumatizing. After getting shot, Bennett said, the sound of fireworks at a homecoming game was alarming. 

In his contributions to the guide, Bennett noted the importance of meeting with staff after a shooting to ensure that everyone is up to speed about what happened and has a chance to ask questions. This is a lesson he learned from personal experience: When Bennett returned to work weeks after the 2004 shooting, some colleagues approached him unsure about what had happened.

“The challenge there for me is that it was reliving the moment again,” he said. “It became a bit of a confusing time for me, and it slowed my process of healing down quite a bit.” 

Following the Uvalde shooting, President Joe Biden signed the most substantive gun-control law in decades. But if history tells us anything, the shootings will continue, the group warned. That’s why it’s so important, DeAngelis said, that educators have each others’ backs. 

“I’ve been doing this for 23 years, and sometimes my wife says, ‘Why do you continue?’ ” he said. “But I made a promise that I was going to do it in memory of our beloved 13.”

Just 43% of parents with children in public schools are in favor of teachers and other school staff carrying guns on campus, conducted in response to the May 24 mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers. That’s , when 36% of parents supported the measure in the aftermath of the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, where a gunman killed 17 people. 

Among all poll respondents, including those without school-aged children, 45% opposed arming teachers. That’s a sharp contrast from other school security measures, like metal detectors and armed police, which have wide support among the general public. Broadly speaking, the public’s opinion on school safety efforts have remained stable over the last four years despite an increase in spending on campus security after the Parkland and Uvalde tragedies. Following the Uvalde shooting, President Joe Biden signed a law that included new gun control measures and an for student mental health care and campus security. 

On the question of arming teachers, respondents’ perspectives varied widely based on their political affiliation, noted Teresa Preston, PDK’s director of publications. Efforts to put more guns in schools mirrors broader partisanship around gun control, she said. While three-fourths of Republicans support arming teachers, just a quarter of Democrats agree. 

“Some of it has to do with how the divisions in our country about the presence of guns in public spaces has sort of continued to inform peoples’ opinions about the presence of guns in schools,” Preston said. “If they are inclined to be against more gun control measures they might be more inclined to say ‘Well yes, I support having guns in public spaces.” 

More than half of states allow schools to arm teachers or staff in at least some circumstances, by the RAND Corporation. In Ohio, a law approved this year made it easier for educators to carry guns in their classrooms by requiring just 24 hours of training. Meanwhile in North Carolina, a school district for a decision to equip campuses with AR-15 rifles for school-based police to use in the event of an active shooting. 

Arming teachers is even less popular among educators themselves, by the American Federation of Teachers. Among union members, 75% of respondents said they oppose arming teachers. In a press release, union President Randi Weingarten said “the answer to gun violence is not more guns.” 

“Educators, parents, administrators, counselors and students want teachers to teach, not engage in a shootout with AR-15s,” Weingarten said. “Especially now, as kids are headed back to school with more stress and trauma, and teachers are facing interference from politicians trying to ban books and single out certain students — we want to be focused on solutions, not sharpshooting. Arm us with books and resources, not guns.” 

Yet the AFT poll also showed high support for armed police in schools — putting educators on the same page as the general public. Despite police failures in Uvalde, and an ongoing debate about their ability to keep kids safe from mass school shootings, the PDK poll found an overwhelming 80% of people support school resource officers, including 94% of Republicans and 70% of Democrats. 

Preston said she was surprised to see such high support for school-based police among Democrats. After George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, leading Democratic lawmakers embraced calls for police-free schools and some school districts removed officers from their campuses. 

“Perhaps it has to do with people being willing to try anything, being willing to be open to lots of different possibilities,” she said. 

Similarly, 78% of people said they support metal detectors in schools and 80% said they support mental health screenings for students. School-hardening efforts like metal detectors and armed teachers saw markedly higher support among less-educated Americans compared to those with college degrees. Compared to postgraduates, those without college degrees were 29 percentage points more likely to have strong support for metal detectors and 12 percentage points more likely to strongly support armed teachers. 

Despite the overall support for school security efforts, the results suggest that the public does not see the measures as a panacea, with a minority of respondents expressing strong support for each of the measures. Just 21% of respondents said they “strongly support” armed teachers and 45% said they “strongly support” armed police on campus. This dynamic suggests that people are generally interested in a range of strategies that could keep kids safe at school “but they’re not necessarily passionately committed to them.” 

The poll, which has a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points, was conducted June 17-25 and includes a national random sample of 1,008 adults. PDK plans to release additional poll results on Americans’ attitudes toward public schools on Aug 29. 

UVALDE — Brianna Gonzales, fresh off her nursing shift, sat quietly alongside her two sons in Uvalde High School’s auditorium this past week as school district officials laid out for parents new safety measures for the upcoming school year.

Gonzales has decided to keep her two sons, a kindergartner and a fifth grader, in the district. But it wasn’t the easiest decision. Her oldest was at Robb Elementary on May 24, the day an armed teenager entered the school and killed two teachers and 19 children. Fortunately, she had taken her son home before the shooter entered the building.

But a summer of conflicting government narratives has set Uvalde parents on edge, particularly after a that 376 law enforcement officers showed up at Robb on May 24 but did not engage the shooter for more than an hour.

Parents are now trying to plan for the back-to-school season and facing tough choices over their children’s education and safety. Some are keeping their kids in the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District when school starts on Sept. 6. Some are choosing homeschooling and others are looking at private schools.

“I just didn’t see what the point of going to another district would do for me,” Gonzales said. “If it could happen here, it could happen there.”

Gonzales, like other parents in this working-class community, doesn’t have the time or money to look for other options right now. She has a full-time job and she’s usually up earlier to get herself and her kids ready for the day. Their dad works out of town and is usually home only during the weekends, she said. That rules out trying to get her kids to nearby districts or pay for private school or even consider online school.

“COVID affected them a lot and I saw how that affected their education and I don’t want them to have to go to virtual again,” she said. “I don’t have the time of day to do things with them for school so I feel like I would be failing them on that part of their education.”

At least in Uvalde, she said, the district is working toward making the school more secure as the first day approaches.

In the high school auditorium, the Uvalde schools superintendent, Hal Harrell, laid out for parents and students the district’s plans to make schools here secure as well as offer more access to mental health resources. He discussed the district’s partnership with , also known as TCHATT, which helps identify behavioral health needs of children and adolescents.

The district is also contracting , a company with an app that allows staff and students to log how they are feeling. , a nonprofit organization focused on connecting students with resources, is also sending teams to the district to provide additional behavioral health support to students.

The district is upgrading security on its seven campuses. Fencing is being installed at some schools. But Harrell couldn’t promise that Uvalde High School would be secure with fencing before the first day because of the sheer size and openness of that campus.

There will be 33 Texas Department of Public Safety officers deployed across the Uvalde school district throughout the school year. The district is also accepting applications for campus monitors, who would check locks on doors and gates and provide reports to the administration. Some 500 cameras will be installed at campuses before the first day of school.

The district has spent about $4.5 million so far in security upgrades, with some of the money coming from donations and grants.

Uvalde CISD will offer an for students who want to stay in the district but not attend in-person classroom instruction. Students who opt for online instruction will receive brand-new iPads, Harrell said.

The Texas Education Agency is in the process of approving Uvalde’s virtual school and making sure it complies with , the virtual education bill that passed during last year’s second special session.

The bill also caps the number of students in the district that can be enrolled in a district’s online alternative. The school district will need a waiver from TEA if more than 10% of all enrolled students want to be in the online school.

But for Gonzales, Uvalde’s new security plans seem to satisfy her, and her children will return to the district’s in-person classes.

“[Uvalde is] implementing new security features, having the troopers there — that brings another sense of added security,” she said.

Gonzales made the decision two weeks ago to send her kids back to Uvalde CISD. It’s something that parents here don’t usually question in this small town of 15,000, about 85 miles west of San Antonio, she said.

As a lifelong Uvalde resident, Gonzales wanted her children to have the same experience she did attending district schools. She also wants her children to regain a sense of normalcy after two years of school disruption from the pandemic.

But as a result of the shooting, Gonzales still has a sense of fear and concern as the first day approaches. She bought her oldest son, who is 10, a cellphone. She hadn’t planned to get him a phone until he was 13. She also plans to buy them bulletproof backpacks, which she sees as an investment.

“Last year it was just ‘I have to buy school clothes’ and that was it,” she said. “This year is completely different.”

Adam Martinez, the father of two students, will send his kids to the online school that Uvalde is offering. It wasn’t his first choice but as he spoke with his kids, it was obvious they were still scared.

“I was telling my son, ‘there’s gonna be a tall fence, and they’re gonna have state troopers on all the locations,’” Martinez said. “And he told me, ‘Who cares if there’s cops? They’re not going to do anything anyway, they’re scared.’”

Others, though, still have not regained the trust of the school district. Angeli Gomez, a parent who had two children at Robb the day of the shooting, was handcuffed that day trying to get answers from law enforcement about her children.

Now, she and 19 other women have been in touch with a woman in San Marcos who has offered to homeschool their children for free.

Uvalde’s mayor has said Robb Elementary will be demolished and another school will be built in its place. But until that happens, no student will have to return to the school. Instead, students will be spread out to different Uvalde CISD campuses.

One of those is Flores Elementary. Gomez doesn’t think it’s a good idea to transfer the children from Robb there.

“They’re trying to stuff our kids — third, fourth, fifth and sixth [grade] — in Flores, since they want to demolish Robb, but Flores won’t fit our kids,” she said. “We’re gonna have, what, 33 kids in a class? They’re not gonna pay attention or learn.”

Jeremy Newman, deputy director of the Texas Home School Coalition, advised that parents considering withdrawing their kids from the public school system in favor of homeschooling don’t need to recreate what a public school does.

“People feel like they have to be a master in all academic subjects,” Newman said. “The parent’s job is not as much to transfer knowledge from their head to the students’ head as it is for them to provide a learning environment where the student wants to learn.”

For people who haven’t been in charge of homeschooling their child, it can be an overwhelming task to find the right resources for their child. Newman suggests they contact , which helps families who have always homeschooled or those who are just starting out.

The number of families homeschooling at least one child has tripled in Texas since the start of the pandemic, Newman said. According to Texas Education Agency data, nearly 30,000 students between grades 7-12 withdrew from Texas public schools to homeschool in the 2020-2021 school semester, a 40% increase over the prior year.

Topping the reasons people are choosing homeschooling are safety and academics, he said.

Still other Uvalde parents will send their children to Sacred Heart Catholic School, one of three private schools in the city. Principal Joseph Olan said interest in his school has increased from previous years. During the last school year, he had about 55 students enrolled. This year, that number has ballooned to 120, and he expects it to grow as the school year goes on.

The school has received donations to put up a fence around the campus, bulletproof the windows and door and install a new security camera system.

“These are the primary reasons why families are coming,” Olan said.

It’s not clear how many students Uvalde CISD will be losing this next school year. In Texas, schools are funded based on the number of students enrolled and the daily attendance on campus. a base allotment of $6,160 per student each year. Any dip in enrollment means less money for the school district.

Diana Olvedo-Karau, who works in the school district’s transportation department, said homeschooling in Uvalde has not been common. But more people are talking about it now.

Olvedo-Karau is concerned over the funding the district will lose if children are pulled out, but she understands why parents might do it.

Uvalde school officials did not immediately respond to The Texas Tribune’s request for enrollment numbers for this upcoming school year.

Uvalde parent Tina Quintanilla, 41, plans to use a private online school company, , for her daughter’s instruction this next year. She also has a son who requires special education classes, and she still hasn’t found a school for him. Quintanilla is a graduate of Uvalde High School, home of the “Fighting Coyotes & Lobos,” so the decision to look at alternatives wasn’t easy.

“It’s heart-wrenching because we’re coyote pride here,” she said, referring to the high school’s mascot. “We’re loyal and true.”

Reporter Ariana Perez-Castells contributed to this story.

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

Three days after the Uvalde superintendent placed the principal of Robb Elementary School on paid administrative leave, Mandy Gutierrez is back in her leadership position, according to her lawyer. The reinstatement came one day after in a about security at her school.

According to a letter from Superintendent Hal Harrell that Gutierrez’s attorney released July 28, she resumed her duties as principal after her submission of additional information to the investigative committee.

Gutierrez was July 25, more than two months after a shooting at Robb left 19 students and two teachers dead. It was the worst school shooting in Texas history.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

The letter to Gutierrez from Harrell suggested that her leave was related to the House committee’s investigation.

“Thank you for responding to our request for information by submitting your response to the House Investigative Report. As a result of our review, you will be allowed to return to work,” Harrell wrote.

In a statement responding to the reinstatement, Ricardo Cedillo, Gutierrez’s lawyer, said, “she has been fully reinstated to her position, where she will continue to discharge her duties and continue to serve all the families of the [Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District].”

The House committee’s report pointed to several systemic failures in law enforcement’s response to the shooting. The committee also alleged that issues at Robb Elementary, including a culture of complacency with security measures, allowed the shooter to enter the school unobstructed.

In to the House committee, she rejected assertions that she created an environment of complacency regarding school safety. She said that by not announcing a lockdown alert over the intercom system she had followed her training, and that the door through which the shooter is believed to have entered the classroom had a functioning lock, two areas of investigation by the House committee.

Harrell did not respond to a request for comment. Anne Marie Espinoza, a spokesperson for the district, said the “Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District follows a practice of not addressing personnel matters.”

Uriel J. GarcĂ­a contributed to this story.

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