San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Leaders’ plans to fortify schools say, ‘Yes, we’ll accept more carnage’
We begin with those green Converse high-tops. The ones with the heart drawn over the right big toe.
Green was 10-year-old Maite Yuleana Rodriguez’s favorite color. So fitting for a girl who loved the environment and dreamed of becoming a marine biologist, one day attending Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.
Green Converse for a child to walk life’s path. Green Converse to identify Maite’s pulverized body after she was murdered at Robb Elementary School on May 24. One of 19 children and two teachers who should still be alive. One of 19 children and two teachers who should still be dreaming.
Those green Converse shoes will forever haunt us. So will a Uvalde pediatrician’s description of pulverized and decapitated bodies. So will the words from a child who spread blood on her body and played dead to stay alive.
We are nearly three weeks removed from the seconddeadliest school shooting in the United States, and it’s painfully clear there will be no major gun safety reforms. Instead, federal lawmakers are considering narrow legislation as state officials beat the drums of mental health and fortifying schools.
The gun, for many an embodiment of American freedom. The fortified school, under threat from someone with a gun. We wonder, do free societies have to resort to arming teachers and fortifying schools? In a truly free society, would parents be purchasing bulletproof backpacks?
We want our schools to be safe, and we welcome serious policies that achieve this. But arming teachers and “hardening” schools are accommodations for gun violence, not solutions to prevent gun violence. They are reactive ideas, not proactive policies. At their core, they accept mass shootings as inevitable.
Talk of “hardening” schools rings painfully hollow in a state and a nation that have refused modest gun safety measures, even though firearms were the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in 2020.
Let’s return to Robb Elementary School and the children.
At a congressional House panel Wednesday, Miah Cerrillo, 11, described how she hid behind her teacher’s desk and backpacks.
“He shot my teacher and told my teacher ‘good night,’ and shot her in the head and then he shot some of my classmates and then the whiteboard,” she said. “He shot my friend that was next to me and I thought he was going to come back to the room, so I grabbed the blood and put it all over me.”
Miah said she believed it would happen again.
Her father, Miguel Cerrillo, pleaded for change: “I thank y’all for letting me be here and speak out, but I wish something will change, not only for our kids but every single kid in the world. Because schools are not safe anymore. Something needs to really change.”
Change. Real change. We have heard a plea for this again and again.
We heard it from Dr. Roy Guerrero, Uvalde’s only pediatrician, who testified about two children “whose bodies had been pulverized by bullets fired at them, decapitated, whose flesh had been ripped apart, that the only clue as to their identities was the bloodTexas,
spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them.”
He pleaded for change: “My oath as a doctor means that I signed up to save lives. I do my job. I guess it turns out that I am here to plead. To beg. To please, please do yours.”
We heard it three days after the shooting. Standing at a makeshift memorial at
Uvalde’s Town Square, we met Mercedes Salas, a fourth grade Robb Elementary teacher.
“They’re my babies!” she wailed. She asked how an 18-year-old kid was able to purchase assault rifles.
Again, it is the access to the gun, not the school.
Inherent in our preparation for future mass shootings, coupled with our refusal to address root causes of gun violence and easy access to firearms, is an expectation of continued slaughter.
In “hardening” schools, the hope — as if we can really call it that — is that future carnage will be less horrifying. This morally flawed outlook accepts carnage while also ignoring the trauma that will haunt survivors. A child covered in her friend’s blood. A father yearning for change unlikely to come.
Our state’s response to previous mass shootings has been rooted in unyielding partisan politics, and Uvalde has proven no different. At a news conference the day after the mass shooting, Gov. Greg Abbott stressed the need for mental health resources, another failure in our state.
He also went on the defensive, noting school safety legislation passed after the 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting in which 10 people were killed, calling the 2019 legislative session “one of the most profound legislative sessions not just in
but we’ve seen in any state, in addressing school shootings.”
Abbott’s self-praise is too generous. He ignored proposals in his 2018 School and Firearm Safety Action Plan for a red flag law and a requirement to report the loss or theft of guns.
Also ignored were all gun safety bills during the 2021 legislative session, including some that would have established universal background checks or raised the age to purchase an assault weapon.
Instead, we get a familiar playbook: Lock down schools, arm teachers. Add metal detectors and provide more trained law enforcement officers with bulletproof shields.
Arming teachers is a burden few educators and districts want.
Since Texas launched the school marshal program in 2013, 84 out of more than 1,200 school districts have opted to arm staff.
There are only 256 school employees licensed as school marshals. Since the Uvalde school massacre, 30 employees from nine districts have signed up for the state grant-funded 80-hour training this summer, according to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement.
State lawmakers don’t trust educators with teaching history, but they do trust them with guns on campus. Yet while teachers must go through extensive training to carry weapons, that’s not the case for the general public. It wasn’t the case for the killer in Uvalde, who so easily purchased his guns.
We doubt a school marshal would have saved the students and teachers at Robb Elementary — look at how overwhelmed police were in their
response. A school marshal’s handgun would be no match for a gunman with an assault rifle and an abundance of ammunition.
It’s absurd this idea of arming teachers passes as a meaningful response while gun safety reforms are somehow untouchable. If teachers really need guns at school, maybe we should do something about the guns being brought to campuses.
About those campuses. Kathy Martinez-Prather, director of the Texas School Safety Center at Texas State University, which provides safety guidance for schools, told us a prior review of the Uvalde ISD’s self-reported data found the district to be in compliance. But, she added, “plans are only as effective as they are implemented.”
Schools have been reaching out for help, but MartinezPrather thinks this is likely temporary. That in a short time, the shock will fade.
“Everyone’s attention is on this issue right now, but things will go back to normal and convenience will take over,” she said.
This can’t be so. Also troubling is how most schools don’t have adequate plans. The center’s 2017-20 audit of 1,022 Texas school districts found that only 200 had viable activeshooter policies, which have been required since 2005. Martinez-Prather said she considers the 2020 audit a baseline because the plan submission wasn’t a lawful requirement until 2019.
And Martinez-Prather emphasized the importance of recognizing warning signs for potential violence.
“We have to make sure that everybody is trained and understands who to report concerning behaviors to, how to engage in the threat assessment process — really ensuring that there’s interventions in place for students who may be on a pathway to violence.”
All of this is critical: safety plans, threat recognition, enhanced counseling in schools. But we can’t ignore the guns used to murder kids and teachers, and so many others.
During a Tuesday White House press briefing, actor Matthew McConaughey, a Uvalde native whose mom was a kindergarten teacher less than a mile from Robb Elementary, invoked the dreams and memories of the children and teachers we have lost.
Alithia Ramirez, 10, who dreamed of going to art school in Paris. Ellie Garcia, murdered just days before turning 10, who loved to give hugs and “was learning to love God no matter where.”
Irma Garcia, a teacher who planned on opening a food truck with her husband, Joe, who died of a heart attack after her murder.
And Maite, who loved this Earth and whose parents refused to release balloons at her funeral because of her aversion to litter. Her green Converse high-tops with a hand-drawn heart on the right toe to represent her love of nature “turned out to be the only clear evidence used to identify her body at the shooting,” McConaughey said.
Their lives mattered.
In the name of safety, we will turn our schools into fortresses, knowing they may well become war zones. But how can schools be safe if Republican lawmakers refuse to address the guns used to murder our children and teachers?
In the long shadow of Uvalde, we cry “never again” even as we ask schools and police to plan for this to happen again and again.