3 years after Parkland, another call for gun laws
Biden wants stronger regulations, assault weapons ban
Tallahassee, Fla. — Sorrow reverberated across the country Sunday as Americans, including President Joe Biden, joined a Florida community in remembering the 17 lives lost three years ago in the Parkland school shooting massacre.
“In seconds, the lives of dozens of families, and the life of an American community, were changed forever,” Biden said in a statement released Sunday.
The president used the occasion to call on Congress to strengthen gun laws, including requiring background checks on all gun sales and banning assault weapons.
There was no time to wait, the president said. “We owe it to all those we’ve lost and to all those left behind to grieve to make a change. The time to act is now.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered flags be lowered to half staff from sunrise to sunset across the state to honor those who perished when a former student of Marjory Stoneman Douglas opened fire on campus with an AR-15 rifle on Valentines Day in 2018.
When the gunfire ended, 14 students and three staff members were dead, and 17 others were wounded. The suspect, Nikolas Cruz, is still awaiting trial.
In his proclamation for a day of remembrance, DeSantis asked fellow Floridians to pause for a moment of silence at 3 p.m. Sunday.
“The Parkland community is resilient in the wake of tragedy, reminding us just how strong and united Floridians can be in the face of such devastating loss,” the governor said in his proclamation.
The Republican governor also noted some of the school safety measures enacted since the tragedy three years ago, including money to install panic alert systems at schools across the state and to strengthen programs meant to prevent violence before they occur.
The panic alert measure was dubbed “Alyssa’s Law,” in honor of 14-year-old Alyssa Alhadeff, one of the students killed three years ago.
Parkland parents have been divided over how lawmakers should respond.
Ryan Petty, whose daughter Alaina was 14 when she was killed in the shooting, addressed the president in a tweet Sunday.
“Mr. President, thank you for remembering the loved ones taken from us 3 years ago,” he wrote. “Alaina loved this country and the freedoms it guarantees. Common sense tells us that honoring her life does not require infringement on the rights of law-abiding citizens.”
As it hones its agenda, the new Biden administration would be wise to focus on racial and economic educational inequality. Although the United States is the wealthiest nation in the world, many low-income students, who are disproportionately people of color, do not have access to high-quality educational resources and opportunities. The neglect of students on the basis of race and income is long-standing and only addressing it will maximize latent talent, thereby benefiting all Americans.
Ninety percent of American students attend public schools, and the crux of educational inequality is in how those schools are funded — primarily by property taxes. Lower-income neighborhoods where there are high levels of renters or lower home values simply have less money to work with than areas that have higher incomes and higher-priced homes (which therefore generate higher property taxes). So, in a country that has a long history of housing and income inequality, the majority of students live in neighborhoods where over 50 percent of the population looks like them. A study by EdBuild estimated a funding gap of $23 billion between predominantly white schools and those dominated by children of color.
This isn’t surprising. Over the past four centuries, barriers have consistently and deliberately been erected to limit African Americans’ access to high-quality education — or even any education at all.
During the 246 years of enslavement, it was illegal to teach enslaved people to read. After the Civil War, there was a brief flurry of school-building in the South through the Freedmen’s Bureau with the aim of quickly educating almost 4 million formerly enslaved people. Many schools were created in churches because obtaining funding to build separate structures was difficult. The schools taught all ages, many times with children during the day and adults at night. The demand for teachers was so high that many were recruited from the North to meet the need. However, the progress of Black people was sometimes met with backlash from enraged vigilante white people, who burned Black schools and attacked teachers.
More than 90 percent of the formerly enslaved were illiterate, and education was seen as a source of power and independence, and as a tool for having control over their own lives.
My great-grandmother Ida B. Wells, who was 3 years old when the Civil War ended, was fortunate to attend Shaw University (Rust College), which was established in 1866 in her hometown of Holly Springs, Miss. As a child, Wells read the newspaper to her father and his friends who were eager to vote and take advantage of opportunities as full citizens.
Wells is best known as a pioneering investigative journalist, civil rights activist, suffragist and founder of several organizations, but started her career as a teacher. After losing both parents to yellow fever in 1878, she started teaching at age 16 in a rural Mississippi school to provide for her five younger siblings. She wrote in her autobiography that the racially segregated schools were vastly different. The Black schools were overcrowded, often with more than 70 students in a classroom. Buildings and supplies were inadequate, and the teachers were paid less.
Her frustration with racial differences between schools led her to write an article in 1891 in the Memphis Free Speech. She said in her autobiography that she wrote the article to “protest the few and utterly inadequate buildings for colored children. I also spoke of the poor teachers given us, whose mental and moral character was not of the best.” As a consequence of the article, she lost her job.
Adding to her disappointment was how some Black parents chastised her for speaking up. She recounted that someone said, “Miss Ida, you ought not to have done it; you might have known that they would fire you.”
The challenges of racially separate and unequal schools persisted to the point where a lawsuit went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, resulting in the famous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. The court barred racial segregation in public schools. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote: “In the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
But even that victory has proved largely hollow: In the almost seven decades since Brown, the majority of the nation’s schools have doggedly remained segregated. Contributing to segregation has been white flight into suburban neighborhoods with much larger property tax bases and better-funded schools.
The coronavirus pandemic has brought the racial disparities between schools more plainly into sight, even though it was never a secret. Too many students of color do not have the same access to home computers, high-speed Internet, private spaces to study and more that is needed for remote learning. Additionally, many inner-city school buildings have poor ventilation and other physical constraints that make reopening them harder.
Ida B. Wells raised an alarm over a century ago. As a nation, we are still wrestling with the resistance to providing students of color the same chance at success that is afforded the majority of white students. The Biden-Harris administration has an opportunity to make high-quality education accessible and available to all children in the United States, something with the potential to lift up Americans across the board.