Uvalde residents grilled school board members at a town hall on Monday night about their plans to fix safety issues that were exposed by the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in May — with a number of attendees left frustrated by the responses they received.
The town is preparing to open its new academic year next week, with a number of students, teachers, and staff returning to classes for the first time since the mass shooting that claimed 21 lives some three months ago.
The shooting at Robb Elementary School was notable not just for the bloodshed, but also for the inadequacy of law enforcement’s response to it as the more than 350 law enforcement officers who responded to the school took more than an hour to confront the shooter.
In response to that law enforcement failure and a report from a Texas House committee’s investigation of the response that found “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” by local, state, and federal law enforcement organisations and officers, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District has drawn up a new security plan for the coming academic year.
The plan calls for 33 Texas Department of Public Safety officers to monitor campuses across the district. But at the town hall on Monday night, school district trustees were unable to answer questions from attendees about whether any of those 33 officiers would be officers who also responded to the shooting in May.
Some 91 officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety were among the officers who responded to Robb Elementary School. According to the Texas Tribune, Superintendant Hal Harrell said he would discuss the issue with Department of Public Safety officials later this week.
Diana Oveldo-Karau, a Uvalde resident who attended the meeting, said that siimply having law enforcement members on site does not equal safety for school students and personnel.
“And I continue to just not understand how the school board and administration can believe that just because you have those DPS members on site ... expect us to believe that our children will be safe,” Oveldo-Karau said. “Those are the people who failed us.”
Uvalde residents have pushed the school district and other state agencies to take accountability for the law enforcement failure at the elementary school, with varying degrees of success. The school board last week fired former schools police Chief Pete Arredondo, who failed to take control of the response to the shooting, but some residents have argued that Mr Arredondo should not be the only official to face consequences for the response.
Mr Harrell told attendees on Monday night that the district is also preparing to implement a range of other measures to enhance security, including upgrading door locks, adding fencing, putting in new cameras to monitor activity in school buildings, and auditing the WiFi system responsible in part for the district’s emergency management alert system.
The return to school also comes in the wake of Congress passing the most significant piece of gun reform legislation in decades in the aftermath of the shooting, though that new law does not ban any weapons.
