Let’s include students in talks on school safety

Everything seemed normal. It was a Tuesday afternoon, and the last period had just dismissed. We watched as kids rushed out of the school, eager to get home. But amid the controlled chaos of the everyday dismissal of students, there was a difference. Something off.

There was a sense of desperation, of fear. Then the situation escalated — administrators were running in and out of the building, and police sirens were wailing. Over the intercom, one of the assistant principals warned everyone in the building to evacuate immediately. There was a tremor in her voice. No one knew what had happened. What was certain was that no one at Bellaire High School expected a member of our student body, Cesar Cortes, to be shot to death inside the JROTC building.

On Thursday, the school was quieter. We waited in line, for about 15 minutes, to be searched. We walked into school over the same ground where one of our classmates had lain dying on the concrete. We sat in our classes thinking about how a student is missing from the third row of his math class. We replayed the image branded in our brain of a high school boy being administered CPR while hundreds of students watched from 20 feet away, shocked. We walked past the sea of kids in black ribbons, the

JROTC students in their uniforms and the shrine in front of the library. Bellaire High School is shaken to its core. Why must we be burdened with this undeniable weight of grief so young?

We didn’t want to go back to school when we still didn’t know anything about what had happened. We felt like the Houston Independent School District still hadn’t told us what happened. After the shooting, they should have been transparent. They should have freely communicated with their community because the last thing we wanted to hear was a rehearsed response. But they also should have done this long ago. In fact, they should have been transparent after a gun was found on campus on Sept. 25, and then again Oct. 3.

If only parents had been reminded of the legal consequences of failing to prevent minors younger than 17 from accessing guns after those incidents, we might not be in need of this article. But the school district did not release information about whether the parents of the last students who brought firearms to school were charged. This information could have been used as a deterrent. It could have been used to encourage secure storage of firearms, which might have prevented Tuesday’s shooting.

We know that there have been at least 405 incidents of gunfire on school grounds from 2013 to 2018. We know that in incidents of gun violence on school grounds, 78 percent of shooters under the age of 18 obtained their guns from their own home, a relative’s home or from friends. We also know that one of our peers is dead. But data suggests households that locked up both firearms and ammunition were associated with a 78 percent lower risk of self-inflicted firearm injuries and an 85 percent lower risk of unintentional firearm injuries among children, compared with those that locked up neither. That’s why we need the school district to do more to raise awareness about secure firearm storage.

Here’s what we want: a seat at the table when the school district talks about these issues. If we’re old enough to be the victims of gun violence in our classrooms, we’re old enough to have opinions about the measures that can be taken to make us safe.

We can’t change what happened Tuesday. But we can work together to prevent it from happening again. We’re asking the district to give us hope, put students first and make the classroom a safer place. HISD, the ball is in your court.

Richards, Skjonsby, Narayan and Hoffer are volunteers with the Bellaire High School chapter of Students Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a national movement, created by and for teens and young adults, to channel the energy and passion of high school and college-aged students into the fight against gun violence.