The principal of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, has pushed back against criticism over her handling of school security after she was suspended from her role earlier this week.
Principal Mandy Gutierrez was placed on administrative leave with pay on Monday, one week after the Texas House committee investigating the 24 May massacre released its bombshell report pointing to multiple failures by several authorities.
The probe, which was based on interviews with dozens of witnesses including the principal, found that Ms Gutierrez knew that the door to classroom 111 where the shooting took place didn’t lock properly – but failed to have it repaired prior to the attack.
Gunman Salvador Ramos entered the classroom through an unlocked door and murdered 19 innocent students and two teachers inside.
In a memo sent to the Texas House committee on Wednesday, and shared with The Independent, Ms Gutierrez defended her actions and denied that she was ever complacent with security at Robb Elementary School.
“It is unfair and inaccurate to conclude that I ever because [sic] complacent on any security issue of Robb Elementary,” she wrote.
Ms Guttierez – who was appointed as principal at the start of the 2021/2022 school year – said that she hopes to return to her role so that she can support the community “that I love and want to protect”.
“I live with the horror of these events for the rest of my life,” she wrote.
“I want to keep my job not only so that I can provide for my family, but so that I can continue to be on the front lines helping children who survived, the families of all affected, and the entire Uvalde community that I love and want to continue to protect.”
The principal addressed the various criticisms leveled at her in the Texas House committee report, including the lock on the classroom door, the wifi limitations and failure to sound an alert through the intercom, and the alleged “culture of complacency” at the school because of a string of “bailouts” in the area.
The 77-page lawmaker report gave a scathing rebuke of school safety protocol, with doors left unlocked and emergency alerts not taken seriously.
“Robb Elementary had recurring problems with maintaining its doors and locks. In particular, the locking mechanism to Room 111 was widely known to be faulty, yet it was not repaired,” the report reads.
“The Robb Elementary principal, her assistant responsible for entering maintenance work orders, the teacher in Room 111, other teachers in the fourth grade building, and even many fourth grade students widely knew of the problem with the lock to Room 111.
“Nevertheless, no one placed a work order to repair the lock— not the principal, her secretary, the teacher to Room 111, or anyone else.”
Ms Guttierez responded to the findings about the classroom door insisting that it does lock and denying the surviving teacher’s claim that he complained to her for the last three years about it – when she only became principal in the last school year.
Her predecessor also has “no record or recollection” of such complaints, she said.
She wrote that the need to “forcefully shut” the door to make it lock is part of working in “an aged building” and that the teacher was aware of this and managed to lock and unlock it throughout every school day.
She also said that the teacher who survived the attack was “severely wounded” and that “his memory of the events have not added clarity” to what happened on 24 May.
Ms Guttierez went on to respond to the report’s findings that school staff didn’t take the intruder alert seriously because there had been 47 lockdown events since February – 90 per cent of them involving nearby immigration-related police chases dubbed “bailouts” and not being related to school violence.
Ms Gutierrez wrote that she “wholeheartedly den[ies]” that these bailout alerts led to any complacency on her part, writing that “we were trained to treat every alert from any law enforcement agency as a situation with the high potential to escalate into a dangerous episode for students, teachers, and administrators”.
The alert system itself was also criticised in the lawmaker report with the principal failing to communicate the lockdown over the school intercom system.
Instead, alerts were sent through a smartphone app which the report said some teachers likely didn’t receive due to both known issues with the wifi and them not having their phones on them at the time.
In her letter to lawmakers, Ms Guttierez insisted that she followed security protocols when Ramos entered the school building.
She had been trained not to sound an alert over the intercom because this could create a “panic situation among students and an alert to the one or more gunman that was present to do maximum harm”, she wrote.
Meanwhile, she disputed that wifi issues prevented the lockdown alert being sent out and said that teachers are required to have their phones on them at all times so would have received the alert.
Ms Guttierez was newly appointed as principal of Robb Elementary School at the start of the 2021/2022 school year.
However, she has worked at the school for more than two decades. Ms Guttierez started out as a fourth grade teacher in 2008 before becoming assistant principal in 2018.
On Monday – two months on from the massacre – she became the the second UCISD employee placed on leave.
The first was School Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who has shouldered much of the blame for the bungled response to the mass shooting. As the on-site commander, the police chief failed to send law enforcement officers into the classroom to confront the gunman.
Instead, a staggering 77 minutes passed from the time when the gunman entered Robb Elementary School and began killing innocent victims to the moment when an elite Border Parol unit finally breached the classroom and shot the perpetrator dead.
TheTexas House committee report stated that it was “plausible” that the lengthy delay cost the lives of some of the victims bleeding out inside the room.
One teacher died of her injuries in an ambulance while three children died after reaching hospital.
Last week, the acting chief of the Uvalde Police Department Lt Mariano Pargas was also suspended pending the outcome of an investigation into his actions, after the committee report found that the department disregarded its own active shooting training that day.
The Uvalde City Council has now said it will investigate every single city police officer who responded to the massacre as victims’ families, survivors and community members demand answers.
