The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A plan that didn’t work
School districts like that in Uvalde, Texas, pour money and effort into security measures that don’t stop guns.
A| c. 2022 The New York Times
rmed school police officers. Lockdown drills. High-tech apps for monitoring bullying and students’ social media posts. Like many school systems across the country, the school district in Uvalde, Texas, put in place a plethora of recommended safety practices meant, in part, to deter school
shootings. But they were of little use Tuesday, when a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School. The district’s detailed safety plan illustrates that despite the widespread “hardening” of schools over the past two decades, mass shootings continue with sickening frequency.
“These security measures are not effective,” said Jagdish Khubchandani, a professor of public health at New Mexico State University who has studied school violence. “And they are not catching up to the ease of access with which people are acquiring guns in the pandemic. All records are being broken in gun sales.”
In Uvalde, a district of 4,000 students, the school district police department included six officers, one of whom was involved in the police response. But there are questions about how the city and school police officers had handled the gunman.
Texas districts like Uvalde have invested heavily in school policing and other security measures in recent years. Texas responded to the 2018 mass shooting at Santa Fe High School with $100 million in school safety funding. In Uvalde, before the shooting, the city’s SWAT team visited all district schools in “full tactical uniforms,” according to the police department’s Facebook page.
But there is little evidence nationally that the dollars poured into these kinds of prevention measures have decreased gun violence in schools, according to a 2019 study by Khubchandani.
Instead, he wrote, they may be proffering “a false sense of security.”
Social-emotional strategies, including anti-bullying initiatives, also do not appear to forestall senseless tragedy. Uvalde had counselors and social workers available. Threat assessment teams at each of the district’s
schools were on the lookout for warning signs of suicide, according to the district’s safety plan.
Combating bullying was a special focus. The district website displayed the winners of a recent bilingual bullying prevention poster contest. “Kindness takes courage!” one child wrote.
The district used software called Social Sentinel, which monitors students’ social media posts for threats, and an app called STOPIT, which allows anonymous reports of bullying.
These, too, are common practices.
Ron Avi Astor, an expert on school violence at UCLA, argued that while social-emotional supports have improved school climate broadly, those strategies — as well as the presence of campus police — have been insufficient in preventing suicidal, often ideological young men from accessing guns and carrying out attacks intended to draw fame.
The focus should be on referring high-risk individuals to mental health treatment while preventing them from buying or owning guns, he said.
“We have to start talking about shooters and shootings differently,” he added.
Adding police
In the hours and days after the tragedy in Uvalde, many policymakers leaned on a familiar response: adding more policing. Officials in Georgia and Virginia deployed additional officers to schools as a precaution. And Sen. Ted Cruz, R-texas, suggested putting more armed
police in schools.
At Uvalde, the actions of local law enforcement are under scrutiny. An onlooker told The New York Times that officers remained outside the building for some time while the gunman was inside and that parents urged police to storm the school sooner. The gunman gained access to a classroom and reportedly holed up there for up to an hour. That classroom is where all the fatalities occurred, according to officials.
Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said that his organization had trained several Uvalde school officers over the course of four years and that they were typically based at secondary schools, not elementary schools. He warned against jumping to conclusions about officers’ actions.
Storming a building too quickly could allow an active shooter to escape, he said. And while capturing or killing an active shooter is “Plan A,” he said, containing them to a particular space can be an effective “Plan B” to lessen the carnage.
School policing exploded in popularity after the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, when Congress began providing federal dollars for campus officers. Nationally, 19% of elementary school students, 45% of middle schoolers and 67% of high school students attend a school with a campus police officer, according to a 2018 report from the Urban Institute.
But when the Congressional Research Service looked at the effectiveness of school policing after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, it concluded there was little evidence showing that the presence of officers affected crime rates.
Armed school officers have been present at some of the most infamous school massacres and were not able to stop those events. The officer on duty at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 has been accused of hiding during the shooting that killed 17 people.
During the Columbine shooting, a school resource officer shot at one of the gunmen but missed.
School policing is also divisive, in part because students of color are disproportionately referred to law enforcement, even for routine misbehavior.
But Canady said that school officers had prevented many instances of violence that do not gain broad attention. He pointed to a National Policing Institute database that showed 120 cases of averted school violence between 2018 and 2020.
Drills, locked doors
Almost every school in the United States holds lockdown drills, and that was true in Uvalde.
While some survivors of last year’s shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan credited the trainings with helping them quickly escape the building, there is little evidence that the drills prevent violence — and lots of concern from parents, educators and mental health experts that they cause fear and anxiety for children.
There are some simple, inexpensive measures that are protective, according to those who have studied school shootings. One of them is keeping classroom doors locked, which was a district requirement in Uvalde.
But it was not clear whether that practice was followed at Robb Elementary on the day of the shooting, when individuals were reportedly streaming in and out of the building for an awards ceremony.
The school had “perimeter fencing” designed to restrict access to the campus, according to the district. The safety plan also described the use of the Raptor Visitor Management System, which scans visitor IDS and checks them against sex offender registries and lists of noncustodial parents.
At a news conference in Uvalde on Wednesday, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick praised the district’s security measures but suggested an area of improvement could be limiting schools to a single entrance. And after the shooting, New York City, the nation’s largest school district, said it would consider locking school doors after students arrive for the day. Los Angeles said it would reduce points of entry into schools.
But Khubchandani questioned whether any of these measures would stop a committed killer with access to weapons.
“It’s like medication for heart attacks while continuing to eat bad instead of eating healthy,” he said. “You prevent this from happening or you don’t.”
Sliding off their backpacks as they come through the front door of the local Boys and Girls Club in Buena Park, California, a group of students grabs pool cues. Outside, children laugh as they bat around a beach ball on the lawn.
But the upbeat mood belies the more serious reason that brings many of them here: They’re missing too much school.
A short distance from Southern California’s famous theme parks, the bright blue stucco building has become an extension of the Buena Park School District’s response to soaring absenteeism. The club is a place to make friends and for many, offers the only stability they’ve had during the pandemic.
“We are serving a need that the school hasn’t been able to fill,” said Luz Valenzuela-trout, director of operations.
The district’s partnership with the club is an example of the extensive steps many educators nationally are taking to track down students missing school and reverse unprecedented levels of disengagement. But those efforts are rubbing up against the sheer scope of the problem. Chronic absenteeism has hit 40% in the nation’s two largest districts, New
York City and Los Angeles, and it is reaching dangerously high numbers in many districts in between.
“The pandemic radically changed norms about going to school,” said Emily Bailard, CEO of Everyday Labs, a company that partners with school districts to improve attendance.
Elsie Briseño Simonovski, the Buena Park district’s director of student and community services, sometimes scours apartment complexes with granola bars in her pockets to round up children who might otherwise not make it to class. She escorts families to gas stations to fill up their cars — courtesy of a state grant that covers fuel costs if parents show they’re taking their kids to school.
Yvette Cantu, the district’s chief academic officer, said even high-achieving students have racked up more absences than
usual during the pandemic. Such students often thrive on positive feedback from adults, she said, something they missed during closures and quarantine.
A growing issue
In some districts, chronic absenteeism far exceeds the 10% a year that typically defines the problem. In March, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released data showing that over a million teachers — nearly half — had at least one student during the 2020-21 school year that never showed up for class.
Some educators say they haven’t seen any improvement since then.
Jenevieve Jackson, a digital photography and video teacher in the Orange County Public Schools in Florida, has some students who have only been in class twice the entire year. Others have racked up over 80 absences.
“Many of the absences are for no reason. The students who were not that excited about school in the first place are even less motivated,” Jackson said. The district hired “intervention teachers” to help struggling students, she said, but they’re often used to cover the massive teacher and sub shortage and to proctor exams.
For the time being, schools are struggling to address the problem in front of them.
“It’s going to be really hard
in the short term until behaviors and school norms stabilize,” said Todd Rogers, a public policy professor at Harvard University who studied absenteeism and launched Everyday Labs.
“There’s no silver bullet,” he said, “so the goal is to do everything you canthat works.”
Community outreach
In the Metro Nashville Public Schools — with a 30% chronic absenteeism rate this year — Carol Lampkin, the district’s director of attendance services, said students are less likely to come to school if their teachers are absent, a problem that has intensified with staff members out because of COVID-19.
The issue has fueled creative approaches to reminding parents of the importance of keeping their children in school.
Staff members recently gathered at a local Baptist church as part of their newest strategy — offering information on COVID-19 vaccines, housing and transportation assistance in hopes of pinpointing the reasons children miss school.
Families whose children have at least half dozen absences were more likely to get an invitation or a knock on the door, urging them to attend the event.
“The idea was to take the heavy lift off of the schools,” Lampkin said. “Our schools, our teachers, our principals … are dealing with so much.”
Lampkin thought grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, served whil e DJ s spun family-friendly tunes, would be more effective at getting frequently absent students back
in class than stern warnings about truancy.
Sonya Thomas, executive director of Nashville PROPEL, a parent advocacy organization, said she appreciates what the district is trying to do, but she thinks officials could be overlooking important reasons students are absent.
“I don’t think it has anything to do with affordable housing,” she said. She urged educators to ask themselves, “What does the school culture look like when (students) enter the building?”
She has worked with families whose children have been suspended multiple times this year for dress code violations.
“We’ve got to dig deeper. Is that child being bullied at school?” Thomas asked. “Is that child feeling like they’re not doing well?”
Research backs up Thomas’s concerns.
Back in Buena Park, Simonovski has developed her own method of recognizing schools for reducing absenteeism.
Instead of just giving awards to those with the highest attendance — which meant a lot of repeat winners — she highlights schools showing the most improvement.
Winners get what she described as a sort of “Publishers Clearinghouse” ceremony — balloons, certificates and trays of treats.
That tells schools, that “we’re paying attention,” she said, “and we’re celebrating these checkpoints with you.”