$16M in aid going to Uvalde families
Donations head to still-grieving community starting in November
When school started again in Uvalde last week, students walked into a new reality — dozens of police officers standing guard outside, eight-foot fences surrounding the buildings and safety monitors regularly checking to make sure windows and doors are locked. Mental health counselors are standing ready, and new state money is funding a program to help identify troubled students.
The town is different, too. Robb Elementary, where a teenage gunman killed 19 students and two teachers in late May, has been closed. A new resiliency center offers counseling and other support inside the Uvalde County Fairplex. Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, who headed the town’s tiny school police department and had recently been elected to City Council, is without a job.
While resisting calls from families of the victims for stricter gun laws, Gov. Greg Abbott and other state leaders have focused on school security measures and mental health services — though they have not yet proposed any specific policies, throwing millions of dollars at the issue in the interim.
An Abbott spokeswoman described mental health as “the root of the problem” that led to the worst school shooting in Texas history.
Two legislative committees — the House Youth Health & Safety Committee and the Senate Committee to Protect All Texans — are preparing reports including suggested solutions, but they won’t be released until mid-November at the earliest, staffers said. A third investigative com
mittee formed by the House released an interim report in July, but the group has not met since.
Abbott and other state leaders allocated some $10.5 million to improve access to mental health resources across Texas, building on a more than $9 billion national investment in counseling and other services included in Congress’ Safer Communities Act.
The challenge is actually funneling that money down to the communities that need it, said U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, a San Antonio Republican who represents Uvalde.
“We are constantly trying to navigate the bureaucratic process,” Gonzales said. “We’re using, really, Uvalde as the template or the gold standard in order to do that. We’ve been in constant contact with various different departments to determine when these funds are available, what grants need to be filled out, what do they look like, when do they open up — the meat and potatoes of it, beyond just the broad stroke.”
Communities in Schools, a national nonprofit that provides support services to help children stay and succeed in the classroom, also recently signed a contract with the Uvalde school district, Gonzales added.
Some of the more immediate fixes, including extra security measures in Uvalde schools, have already been enacted or will be soon. There is not yet a statewide plan to bolster school security.
“School safety is very important,” Gonzales said. “I think we need to continue to have the conversation, all of the above. Everything should be on the table.”
Funds criteria
After the shooting, wellwishers across the country donated millions of dollars to support families who lost someone, those who were injured and children who were inside Robb at the time of the shooting. But the bulk of the donations — more than $16 million — has not yet reached the intended recipients.
The National Compassion Fund is managing that pool, made up of six smaller collections, since Texas has no state-run donation management program. This is the fourth fund the organization has overseen in Texas, operating a similar program after mass shootings in Fort Hood, Santa Fe and El Paso.
A local steering committee is helping the organization decide the criteria for disbursing funds and the dollar value attached to that determination.
The organization won’t begin handing out the donations until Nov. 14 at the earliest, said Jeffrey Dion, the executive director of the National Compassion Fund. As frustrating as it may be, getting the money out almost always takes four to five months, he said.
In that time, officials determine for how long they would like to accept donations and how to distribute the money fairly. Then there’s another delay as the group accepts and vets applications.
“Every fund that I’ve been involved in — when they have made emergency payments, money has been given to people who shouldn’t have gotten it,” he said. “If you’ve got $16 (million) or $18 million, we have a really solemn obligation to make sure we do this right, with a process that’s fair and transparent.”
About 500 people are eligible for the fund, Dion said. Family members who lost someone will receive the biggest checks, followed by those who were injured.
Applications for the money were scheduled to open last Thursday, but the organization had to push that date back a few days to address programming concerns. The application will now open on Tuesday, Sept. 13, and eligible community members can request an advance payment — between $5,000 and $25,000, depending on their relation to the shooting — when they submit the form.
The application will close on Oct. 13, and the steering committee is set to meet on Nov. 7 to approve a final distribution plan. Funds will start flowing in the weeks after, with some added complications for any money that is given to children, Dion said.
‘Just pass a law’
The political response will take far longer. Even when lawmakers reconvene in January, it could take months before they agree on meaningful legislation.
Meanwhile, Democrats have been urging the Texas GOP to embrace some gun safety legislation. Raising the age to purchase an assault-style weapon is on the top of the list, but they’ve also suggested universal background checks and socalled “red flag” laws that would allow a court to temporarily remove a firearm from an individual deemed a danger to themselves or others.
“We’re public servants,” said state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a San Antonio Democrat who represents Uvalde. “We’re elected to do things and to fix things and to do great things because we have the resources to do it. And yet, we have a governor and a Republican Party in Texas that refuses to do the minimum.”
Gutierrez has been heavily criticizing the state leaders’ actions since the shooting, also leading the calls for transparency and accountability for officers who were at the school but waited for more than an hour to confront the gunman, who remained in the classroom full of dead and wounded children. State officials blamed Arredondo, the on-scene commander, though there were several hundred officers at the school well before a Border Patrol tactical team confronted the shooter and killed him.
About 70 percent of Texans support raising the age to buy an assault-style weapon like the one used by the shooter, including 54 percent of Republicans, according to a June poll by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.
On the campaign trail last week, Abbott said raising the age to buy an assault weapon was off the table, as the proposal “has already been ruled to be unconstitutional.” Legal experts disagree, pointing to several conflicting rulings across the country and noting that U.S. Supreme Court has yet to decide on the issue.
State Rep. Tracy King, a Democrat who lives in Uvalde, said he thinks there’s room for compromise in the Legislature, and lawmakers should consider policies including making juvenile records available during background checks. He believes the state can and should raise the age to purchase an assault-style weapon, and he disagrees with Abbott’s assessment that such a move would be unconstitutional.
“I believe the Legislature should go ahead and just pass the law, and I think that there is support for it,” King said. “The Supreme Court is going to do what the Supreme Court does, but the Texas Legislature needs to pass a law and try and protect the school children in the state of Texas.
The calls for stricter gun measures have traveled to Washington, D.C., too — but such a measure would never pass the U.S. Senate, which is split 50-50, unless Democrats would be willing to toss the filibuster. There is no such appetite in D.C. at the moment.
Said Republican U.S. Rep. Gonzales: “Assault bans — that’s just getting to the end of the problem, and a lot of people focus on the end of the problem. I’m not saying that’s wrong. I’ve used my time and energy to focus on the beginning of the problem.”