A new school year means fresh notebooks, new classmates – and in 2022, renewed preparation. | via TexasStandard
The beginning of a new school year means fresh school supplies, excitement over classroom assignments, new teachers, new friends. Possibilities.And for today’s students, educators and school staff, there’s yet another layer of feeling baked in – a low-level, deep-in-the gut pain spawned from risk and dread. For parents, caretakers and loved ones, it can feel like a dice toss.
That’s one number. But Camille Gibson, executive director of the Texas Juvenile Crime Prevention Center at Prairie View A&M, has another: Nineteen children – just 10 and 11 years old – are gone. Nevaeh Bravo, Jackie Cazares, Annabell Rodriguez, Makenna Elrod, Jose Flores Jr., Ellie Garcia, Uziyah Garcia, Amerie Jo Garza, Xavier Lopez, Jayce Luevanos, Jailah Silguero, Tess Mata, Maranda Mathis, Alithia Ramirez, Maite Rodriguez, Lexi Rubio, Layla Salazar, Eliahna Torres, Rojelio Torres.
“Nobody could comprehend or conceive this happening,” said Milton Shoquist, who had graduated Austin’s police academy about six weeks before the tower shooting. “Therefore there were no plans to counteract something like this.”“The first one that I can like thoroughly remember is the Parkland shooting. I think I was in middle school, yeah,” said Saxena, the Houston student. “So it was the first time that I was like able to thoroughly and completely sort of digest this information.
What has Texas done since May 24, the day of the deadliest school shooting in the state’s history? Are schools at all safer now? It’s the question so many are asking, and it’s the question at the center of this special report. “We told her we loved her and we would pick her up after school. I can still see her walking with us toward the exit,” Kimberly Rubio told the U.S. House Oversight Committee. “In the reel that keeps scrolling across my memories, she turns her head and smiles back at us. And then we left. I left my daughter at that school, and that decision will haunt me for the rest of my life.”
“It is an insanely grotesque, horrible thing, and it’s just too difficult to really process it. And I mean that sincerely: I don’t think that we can totally figure it out,” Temple said. “We put it aside or distract ourselves, and, you know what, unfortunately, that might be the healthiest thing we can do right now.
Of course, there are those who don’t have to imagine what it’s like to have a shooting in their communities – because that nightmare has already happened.Law enforcement agencies are deployed at Santa Fe High School on May 18, 2018, after a mass shooting that left 10 people dead. It wasn’t until Flo tried to sit up, looked and saw a fellow substitute from her room, Ann Perkins, lying a few feet ahead of her, that she then saw the bloody bullet holes in her legs.
“The pain never goes away for her, and psychologically, she lives with every day the nightmares of the shooting; it keeps you up at night,” Scot said. “And there’s always something to re-trigger the anxiety and the trauma, with a new shooting, it seems like, every day. So it’s been a long, long four years of continuous trauma and anxiety.
“We’re going back this school year with no concrete changes from the state. Our school districts are trying to figure out how we can do it,” she said. “You know, “Schools are still the safest place for kids to be. They’re, by and large, extremely safe. And for many kids, they are the safest spot for them – safer than their homes, safer than the streets. So, you know, if I’m a parent out there, I have kids in school, I [have] full confidence that when I take my kid to school, I’m taking them to a very safe place.”Still, there’s no doubt there’s room for improvement.
“Once something so horrific like this happens – that’s all you have really left is to think, ‘Okay, we’re going to use this to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’ That’s your focus, because it’s just too horrific to think of the alternative.”In 2019, a year after a shooter injured Flo and killed 10 people at Santa Fe High School, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 11 – which was supposed to expand school safety measures.
“It just breaks your heart to see these families suffering like you did and knowing what their future holds.”When we consider how we can create long-term change to prevent mass shootings in schools, a few topics keep coming up: The hardening of schools, mental and behavioral health access and interventions, and gun laws.
“We do need to beef up security,” said Wayne Tubbs of Crockett, Texas. “We need to get everybody more involved in putting a stop to school shootings immediately. Before any more kids get hurt.”School marshal trainees go through a simulation of an active shooting at an elementary school in Pflugerville in 2018.
This point underscores what Santa Fe shooting survivor Flo Rice has said about training substitutes – even when they come on in the middle of the year or after a new training has been done. “That hasn’t always been my view. But I think that’s the day that we’re living in,” she said. “But arming teachers? No. The teacher personality and the person who’s willing to shoot somebody – they’re not the same persons. And that’s just basic psychology.”
“We are just putting the blame and the solution-finding back on our educators and our school system,” she said. “But we can’t solve this problem. We need help from the governor.” He said people with diagnosed mental health issues are much more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence. Still, Gibson says there’s an opportunity to do a lot more in schools.“In Texas, we seem to want to fool ourselves that there is mental health care going on for young people in schools,” she said. “I’m a part of the Texas Mental Health Task Force.
“So when folks in the academic environment and students see these potential trends, to whom do they communicate?” she asked. “And hopefully there’s an effective committee that knows how to make those decisions.”“We need to revamp our education system to where every year, starting in kindergarten and through high school and post-high school, into trade school and college, that every single year they get a semester-long or a year-long course related to, healthy relationship skills,” he said.
Molina: “The majority of the shooters have been young men who, if the age limit was raised to 21, would not have access.”But what’s the real appetite for this change – among everyday Texans and among elected officials?“We were rocking and rolling,” said her mother, Rhonda Hart. “She was 14 years old. She was in high school. And on May 18th, in 2018, in Santa Fe, a dad left his guns in the closet, and his son wasn’t feeling well.
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