Santa Fe student’s plea: Arm teachers
Honor student, many of her friends face a new back-to-school reality
SANTA FE, Texas – Ever since a gunman killed her classmates, wounded her friends and upended her quiet hometown, Erin Werner has kept busy.
She has volunteered at her local church, had long talks with friends and baked batch after batch of chocolate chip cookies (a favorite pastime). Nights have been filled with community dinners and church gatherings.
Erin, 16, a National Honor Society student, science club officer, longtime Girl Scout and varsity soccer and basketball player, knows hardships are ahead: It will take a while for the student body at Santa Fe High School and the community at large to face down their fears and heal from last week’s shooting that left 10 dead and 13 injured.
Like other students, Erin is learning to live in a new reality. She also has a few ideas about how to prevent school shootings: arm teachers, an opinion shared by many of her friends.
“If you can’t trust the teachers with a way to protect us, who are you going to trust?” Erin said. “Even with the best police force ever, you can’t get there fast enough.”
For now, everyone’s focused on next Tuesday, when classes are set to resume at Santa Fe High. Teachers and staff returned to work Wednesday.
“I have friends who were in that classroom,” Erin told USA TODAY. “They are going to have a hard time of it.”
Police said Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, opened fire with a shotgun and a .38caliber revolver in an art complex at the rear of the school about 7:30 a.m. Friday. Law enforcement agents engaged the shooter four minutes later, but the gunman stalked the two-classroom area for 30 minutes, killing students and two teachers before surrendering.
Santa Fe, 30 miles southeast of Houston, is a small town where families leave front doors unlocked and teachers know generations of family members. “I’ve had teachers tell me, ‘I had your sister, and your dad’s such a nice man,’ ” Erin said.
That tranquility was shattered Friday, and Erin has replayed the events of that day repeatedly.
How her aunt drove her to school that morning. How she handed out homemade cookies to friends before class. How she was working on an essay on Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in first-period advanced English when the fire alarm rang. How she exited the front of the school looking for smoke, then was told to keep running.
How her friend Clay Horn, a football player and pole vaulter, was shot twice but scaled a 7-foot wall to escape. How another friend, Zachary Muehe, fled the art complex, ran halfway around the school and went back inside to alert teachers, one of whom pulled the alarm.
How Kim Vaughn, a friend from the Girl Scouts, never made it out.
Raised around firearms, Erin said she
“We want to go back, and we need to go back. It’s part of our healing and part of our closure that we go back through those doors.”
Erin Werner Santa Fe student
doesn’t believe it’s fair to blame only guns. She favors strengthening mental health checks for gun owners. But an even better idea would be to train and arm teachers, making sure the weapons are stored in a safe place, she said.
After a vigil Friday evening, she approached Gov. Greg Abbott and told him how she felt.
Her mother, Marisa Werner of Monclava, Mexico, supports her daughter’s ideas. Like others in this city, she said she was still stunned something like this would happen in Santa Fe.
“I’d expect to see this in a bigger community. But us?” she said. “We do the right thing here. We know each other. ... Bad stuff doesn’t happen in our town.”
For now, Erin has mostly stayed off social media and instead busied herself with friends and family. She spends most of her days at friends’ houses or meeting with youth ministers at her church, Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in nearby Hitchcock.
She has been moved by the outpouring of support from people from around Texas and across the country. The Houston Astros baseball team has provided the school with free tickets, and even rival schools like Texas City High have produced videos of support.
The next big challenge will be Tuesday, when classes resume. She plans to be there.
“We want to go back, and we need to go back,” she said. “It’s part of our healing and part of our closure that we go back through those doors.”