$22M in Uvalde aid stirs ill feelings
Some recipients say dispersal of donations doesn’t prioritize those who need the money
The families of the students and teachers killed or wounded in the May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, along with hundreds of others who were on campus at the time of the massacre, have received a combined $22.3 million in donations.
But some are upset with their share — partly because of confusion over what the Uvalde Together We Rise Fund was intended to do.
The fund doled out the money to 448 people, including the families of 19 children and two teachers killed in the mass shooting, the second-worst of its kind in U.S. history.
The fund’s steering committee worked with the National
Compassion Fund, an Alexandria, Va.-based organization that has distributed millions of dollars collected from donors for similar efforts in the wake of mass shootings around the country, including the Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech massacres.
It’s not clear how much each Uvalde family received. Mayor Don McLaughlin Jr. said he’d heard that some families may have gotten as much as $900,000. Others said the upper range was probably around $700,000.
Some received far less.
One recipient — a mother of six getting by on Medicaid, food stamps and a small income — said her 10-year-old son, who was in a classroom near where the 21 victims were killed, was badly traumatized. He lost two friends in the massacre and heard the victims’ cries during the shooting.
“To this day, he sleeps in bed with us,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified.
He takes three medications and is in therapy with a psychiatrist in San Antonio, which represents a long drive in the family’s old, breakdown-prone car and a lot of gas money every week.
The family was awarded $16,000 from the fund, but placed it in trust until the boy turns 21 out of fear of losing public assistance.
His mother said she feels for those who lost loved ones in the massacre. But she asked why more isn’t being done for the traumatized survivors of the school shooting. She said they haven’t been given enough mon
“We came together with incredible acts of generosity and compassion.” Attorney Mickey Gerdes, who chaired the steering committee for the Uvalde Together We Rise Fund
ey or assistance.
Yet, there is some money available to help survivors and their families. Gov. Greg Abbott committed $5 million in state funds for a relief effort within days of the massacre. The grant is paying for the Uvalde Together Resiliency Center, which provides free counseling services for residents.
The program doesn’t include direct cash benefits.
The lack of such assistance may be one of the reasons the focus on Uvalde Together We Rise Fund disbursements is so sharp — in a rural community of 15,000 residents where the poverty rate is 21 percent.
The families of the dead and wounded received more than Robb Elementary students, teachers and staff who escaped the bloodshed but still are dealing with the emotional fallout.
“Why did they get more than the ones that are here traumatized, going through therapy and whatever, and they get very little?” the 10-yearold’s mother said. “Then they get to spend that money and do whatever they want, and we can’t even do anything or take our kids, take him or anyone on a vacation to cheer him up and kind of get him out of Uvalde because it’s not medical, it’s not food, it’s not his needs.”
But the truth — a hard one for families struggling with the expense of treating trauma — is that the fund’s primary objective wasn’t to cover the cost of survivors’ long recovery.
Prioritizing victims
“This is not compensation. This is not based on economic loss,” said Jeffrey Dion, executive director of the National Compassion Fund. “This is a gift from people whose hearts were broken and wanted to help, and the steering committee sought to be good stewards of those funds and prioritize people based on how seriously they were impacted.”
The Uvalde Together We Rise Fund distributed money to students, teachers and support staff, such as janitors and cafeteria workers — anyone who was on Robb Elementary grounds when the gunman began his rampage at 11:27 a.m. Police officers and emergency medical technicians who flooded the campus after the shooting started weren’t eligible for the grants.
Fund organizers separated the victims into the five categories, with the dead making up Category A, which was the donors’ highest priority.
“People whose family members were killed — death is the injury from which there is no recovery, and the final protocols said that people in Category A would receive the highest level of payment,” Dion said.
The 17 students and teachers who were wounded but survived the mass shooting were in Category B. They received the second largest grant amounts.
All others on campus that day were sorted into Categories C, D and E, depending on their proximity to the classrooms 111 and 112, where the killings took place, and other factors.
“Those got different amounts based on, sort of within that category, how close people were to the trauma, to the shooting, and what they were experiencing,” Dion said. “And that was what the steering committee was looking at in those categories. So basically the closer you were, the more you got. The further away you were, the less you got.”
Several parents who lost children in the mass shooting talked with the Express-News about the Uvalde fund, though they declined to say how much they received.
Javier Cazares, whose daughter, Jacklyn, 9, died in the rampage, said, “I don’t feel comfortable talking about that, honestly.
“I’d like to say we want to do something to honor Jacklyn’s name, but we’re not sure what yet or what type of a foundation or something like that,” he added.
Veronica Mata, whose daughter Tess, 10, was killed in the shooting, said she and her husband, Jerry, are setting most of the money aside.
“We haven’t touched hardly any of the money,” Mata said. “I still use my paycheck to pay my bills because that is what we are accustomed to — that is what we’ve always done.”
Uvalde attorney Mickey Gerdes, who chaired the steering committee charged with developing guidelines for the cash awards, said the community “experienced significant loss and trauma on May 24th, but — together with people from around the country and around the globe — we came together with incredible acts of generosity and compassion.”
The Uvalde fund received donations from individuals and seven organizations, including TXN Bank, which gave $157,000, and Victims First, an advocacy group for mass shooting victims that contributed $7.6 million.
Giving grew over time
Gerdes has heard the criticisms around Uvalde, including complaints that the fund didn’t award the money sooner. But he pointed out that, because it took from June through November to plan and execute the cash awards, the fund grew from as much as $10 million in the first couple of months to more than $22 million as new donations poured in from around the country.
He also said the National Compassion Fund had a tried-and-true approach to grant-making that it had developed in supporting victims of other mass shootings.
“We had to trust that they were going to lead us in a process that would maximize the amount of money to be distributed and not drag out the process any longer than necessary, but also capture as much in donations as possible,” Gerdes said.
Uvalde was the 23rd mass shooting the National Compassion Fund had raised money for. Dion said the $22.3 million raised for Uvalde victims was the organization’s third-largest disbursement to date, trailing only the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Fla., at $34 million, and a mass shooting the following year in Las Vegas, for which the fund raised $32 million.
The Uvalde Together We Rise Fund was by far the largest raised for a school shooting, eclipsing the $10.5 million collected after the 2018 massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.; $2.4 million raised after the Oxford High School shooting in Oxford Township, Mich., in 2021; and $1.3 million raised after the 2018 shooting at Santa Fe High School near Houston.
The National Compassion Fund, which has given cash awards to the families of 4,221 victims, was created in 2014 after Spc. Ivan Lopez gunned down three soldiers at Fort Hood. It was the second mass shooting at the Killeen-area post. In 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, killed 13 people on base.
Dion said the fund did not raise money for victims of the Nov. 5, 2017, Sutherland Springs church massacre that claimed 26 lives because no one from the community asked for its help.
None of the work of deciding how to distribute the funds was easy, Gerdes said, and no one took their roles lightly.
“Myself and the rest of the committee members understood from the beginning that it was a tremendous responsibility and that we had to figure out a way to do what was fair, based on what the public input was and the circumstances of the shooting, and then be able to come up with a way to do it from a practical standpoint,” he said.
The steering committee fielded written statements as well as comments from town-hall participants on July 19 and Aug. 11 to develop the protocols and distribution plan for the cash awards.
‘Some comfort’
In all, 13,000 individuals and organizations gave a total of $22,300,673.80 to the fund.
“These donations could never make the survivors whole,” Gerdes said. But the steering committee hoped the money could “provide the recipients with some comfort knowing that there are many people who wanted to give something to help them in whatever way possible.”
One Uvalde community activist, however, said money and the squabbling over it had cast a shadow over something more important.
“They kept saying there’s no amount of money that can compensate for the loss of a child, yet it’s become a critical part of the conversation,” said Diana Olvedo-Karau, 63.
“It’s become about something that it should never have become about,” she continued. “I don’t even know how to articulate that. It overshadows the loss of lives, the grieving for those lives. It’s like the money overshadows all that.”