I posted that Beto O’Rourke would have a discussion about Educatuon in Lubbock, Texas, tomorrow evening. This is true.
But the meeting will be in-person, NOT ON ZOOM.
If the meeting is recorded, I will post it here.
Archives for category: Texas
It is good to report some positive news from Texas, instead of news of guns, death, and hatred, the specialties of Governor Abbott and Lt. Gov. Patrick.
Billionaire Charles Butt, owner of the H-E-B grocery chain, has pledged $10 million to build a new elementary school in Uvalde to replace the Robb Elemebtary School, site of a massacre.
The Uvalde school district on Tuesday announced that it had secured signature support from donors to build a new school to replace Robb Elementary, site of a mass shooting in May that killed 19 children and two teachers.
The Butt family and H-E-B grocery stores have pledged a combined $10 million in funding, officials announced. In addition, Huckabee, a Fort Worth-based architectural firm, and Joeris General Contractors, which will assist in the design and construction of the school, will waive the fees for their architectural work and contracting services.
“Public schools are the foundation of a community,” says Huckabee CEO Chris Huckabee in a statement. “Our team is honored to partner with Joeris construction, the Butt family, H-E-B, and so many others to design a new facility that will honor Uvalde and serve its future generations.”
Charles Butt is a good friend of the five million children in Texas public schools, as well as Pastors for Texas Children.
A woman driving in the HOV lane in Dallas was given a ticket because she didn’t have a passenger. She told the police officer that she was 34 weeks pregnant, and her unborn child was a second person. He ticketed her.
A pregnant Texas woman who was ticketed for driving in the HOV lane suggested that Roe v. Wade being overturned by the Supreme Court means that her fetus counted as a passenger, and that she should not have been cited.
Brandy Bottone was recently driving down Central Expressway in Dallas when she was stopped by a sheriff’s deputy at an HOV checkpoint to see whether there were at least two occupants per vehicle as mandated. When the sheriff looked around her car last month, she recounted to The Washington Post that he asked, “Is it just you or is someone else riding with you?”
“I said, ‘Oh, there’s two of us,’” Bottone said. “And he said, ‘Where?’”
Bottone, who was 34 weeks pregnant at the time, pointed to her stomach. Even though she said her “baby girl is right here,” Bottone said one of the deputies she encountered on June 29 told her it had to be “two bodies outside of the body.” While the state’s penal code recognizes a fetus as a person, the Texas Transportation Code does not.
“One officer kind of brushed me off when I mentioned this is a living child, according to everything that’s going on with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. ‘So I don’t know why you’re not seeing that,’ I said,” she explained to the Dallas Morning News, the first to report the story.
Bottone was issued a $215 ticket for driving alone in the two-or-more occupant lane — a citation she told local media she’d be challenging in court this month.
“I will be fighting it,” Bottone, 32, of Plano, Tex., said to The Post.
I wrote about the purchase of the Texas State Board of Education by the chairman of the board of Hillsdale in a previous post.
The state board rejected an application for a Hillsdale charter school, and the rejection was supported by three Republicans on the board.
In retaliation, the chairman of the Hillsdale College board contributed $250,000 to a PAC to punish the errant Republicans. The PAC replaced two of them with privatizers, and the third was redistricted out of his seat.
Now, it’s smooth sailing for the theocratic, 1776-themed Hillsdale charters, which cater to white students.
The Hillsdale website lists its current charter schools.
What it does not mention is that the Hillsdale Classical Academies have collected millions of dollars in federal funding from the federal Charter Schools Program.
Here is a sampling of Hillsdale-Barney charter schools that have applied for and received federal funding:
Ascent Classical Academy of Northern Colorado $671,000
Treasure Valley Classical Academy Idaho $1.25 million
Ivywood Classical Academy Michigan 1 million and managed by a for-profit
Seven Oaks Classical School, Indiana $899,962
St. Johns Classical Academy, Florida $513,000
Pineapple Cove Classical Academy at West Melbourne Florida $612,363.00
Golden View Classical Academy Colorado $215,000
Atlanta Classical Academy $650,000
Estancia Valley Classical, New Mexico, $647,349
Doesn’t it make you furious to know that our tax dollars are supporting this Trump -Christian charter chain?
This article in The Houston Chronicle is infuriating. The subtitle might well be, “If the state board turns you down, buy it.”
As I read it, I felt my blood was coming to a boil. This is a portrayal of tank corruption, corruption of education and corruption of the democratic process. The elected state board of education in Texas denied the charter application of four out of five charters. The charters struck back by dumping vast sums of money into the election for state board and electing hand-picked candidates to give them the approvals they wanted. As I have shown in previous posts, charter schools in Texas are generally low-performing and compare unfavorably to public schools,
The article begins:
The State Board of Education last month denied, for the third time, efforts to launch Heritage Classical Academy in Northwest Houston, a school designed as a conservative response to anti-racism, LGBT-inclusive sex education and other progressive themes in public schools.
But despite Heritage’s recent failure, its future — and that of other charter schools like it in Texas — looks bright.
The state’s fight over charter schools has bubbled slowly for decades since they were first authorized in the 1990s, with the state board standing as the main political roadblock to their expansion.
Now, as Republican lawmakers fight to restrict how teachers discuss social issues in the classroom and generally shift the education system more toward the right, their alliance with charter schools is stronger than ever.
A MOVEMENT: Trump-era rancor spills into Texas school board politics
So much so that three GOP members of the state board, who have sided with Democrats in voting against Heritage Classical Academy, won’t be therenext time — two were beaten in a primary after the family of Heritage’s board chairman donated $250,000 to a PAC supporting their opponents. The third was redistricted out of his seat by the Texas Senate.
Heritage, and other classical academies to come, can count on a more sympathetic board starting in January.
Matt Robinson, the Republican who lost his seat in redistricting — he says he had decided before then not to run for re-election anyway — called his ouster a testament to the power charter school advocates wield.
“There’s a whole pattern here of them really strongly exerting the influence that they have with our elected officials,” he said.
LIBRARY BACKLASH: Texas GOP’s book hunt mostly targets LGBT issues, not critical race theory
The pitch for classical education
Heritage is part of the Barney Charter School initiative, a national charter school movement to introduce a more conservative ideology in schools. The initiative was founded by Hillsdale College in Michigan.
The college doesn’t fund or govern schools directly, but provides curriculum and consulting. Dozens of schools have been started so far across the nation, including one in Gardendale, Texas. The schools serve nearly 15,000 students and 8,000 more on wait-lists.
Its “1776 Curriculum” for charter schools teaches that “America is an exceptionally good country” and includes comprehensive lessons about American history through a conservative lens, including descriptions of the New Deal as bad public policy and of affirmative action as “counter to the lofty ideals of the Founders.”
The wife of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginni Thomas — who reportedly lobbied to overturn the 2020 presidential election — is a former vice president at the college and ran its Washington programs.
Hillsdale is a nonsectarian Christian university with a mostly white student body that touts its role in the abolition movement of the 1800s, when Black activist Frederick Douglass spoke at the campus.
‘CRITICAL RACE THEORY’ IN SCHOOLS: Abbott signs law forbidding lessons on systemic racism
Across the country, only one Hillsdale-backed charter school serves a majority of economically disadvantaged students, and only two serve a majority of students of color, according to staff at the State Board of Education.
Heritage Classical Academy was voted down for the first time in 2020 by the board, several members said, because of the inclusion of “Brer Rabbit” books in its early grade curricula. The 19th century children’s story has been assailed by critics for promoting racist stereotypes and mimicking dialect used by African-American slaves.
The arguments for and against Heritage over the last few years have added up to more than the sum of their parts. When the board discussed it last month, conversations turned to how racism and slavery are taught, “inappropriate content in public schools,” alleged anti-Islamic Facebook posts made by a Heritage board member, the work experience of the proposed school leadership and more.
Aggressive lobbying from the Heritage board and its supporters also appears to have backfired, becoming a factor in the board’s decision this year to reject the charter.
After the board denied approval for the second time in 2021, Heritage Board Chair Stuart Saunders and his family donated more than $250,000 to a political action committee called Texans for Educational Freedom. That PAC then donate more than $500,000 to local school board races and other candidates who have promoted conservative themes in the schools.
The group donated in four State Board of Education races, including well over $100,000 total in the bids to unseat board members Sue Melton Malone and Jay Johnson, Republicans who opposed Heritage.
In their charter application filed with Texas Education Agency, Heritage reported 17 meetings with public officials ahead of the board’s decision last month, including a July 2021 meeting with TEA Commissioner Mike Morath and state Rep. Steve Toth, who penned the Legislature’s anti-critical race theory law. Signed a year ago by Gov. Greg Abbott, the law limits how public school teachers address systemic racism and the lingering impacts of slavery.
When it convenes in next year after this fall’s elections, the state board will be a more conservative body, with six new members.
“Clearly, (Saunders) was trying to use all his money to remake the SBOE, to buy it,” said Robinson, the board member from Friendswood who is losing his seat in redistricting. “When you really upset wealthy peoplethey don’t take that lightly.”
During an SBOE meeting, Robinson confronted Saunders — who is the chairman of SouthTrust Bank — saying that while Saunders’ donations were legal, they were unethical.
Saunders retorted: “Me and my family have a long history of supporting education initiatives. Part of our involvement includes a history of supporting public policy and education initiatives, and I did give some of my money to a PAC that is involved in education. Their website speaks of wanting to depoliticize the classroom, working to create strong local school boards and to root-out and eliminate sexually explicit materials that have found their way into our schools. And I support those initiatives.”
He said his son was assigned two “inappropriate” books in class, and though he confronted the school’s principal about them, only one of the books was removed from the curriculum.
Texas Ethics Commission records show that the PAC Saunders spoke of donated to SBOE races both before and after he and his family contributed money.
18,000 Texas students in classical schools
Over the last decade, the State Board of Education has generally been a chokepoint to charter school expansion. The board is given final veto power over charter applicants after they are approved by the TEA commissioner. Since 2017, TEA approved 35 schools, but the SBOE only allowed 23 to proceed.
Those who oppose charter schools typically do so because they say it weakens the structure of public education. Charter schools face less accountability than public schools, and when students flee struggling public schools for charters, the school districts lose out on the attendance-based funding they would have received from the state if the child was still a student.
“The idea of 95 percent of kids losing funding and programming and opportunities so that 5 percent can attend a private-light-school and parents aren’t paying a private school bill is just asinine to me,” said state board member Georgina Pérez, a Democrat who votes against all charter applicants.
The Republican-controlled Legislature has been pushing in the opposite direction. The last major change Republicans in Austin made to charter school law was removing the state board’s ability to approve expansions of existing charter schools, in 2013 paving the way for hundreds of new campuses. Charter enrollment has nearly doubled since, to 377,375 students (the state’s K-12 schools serve about 5 million children).
The total number of charter campuses has risen from 588 to 872.
“I always compare charter schools and how they expand to Gremlins if they eat after midnight. Tomorrow morning you’re going to wake up and you don’t know how many of them you’re going to have,” Pérez said.
There’s also an appetite particularly for “Classical” schools such as Heritage, of which there are already a number in Texas, including Aristoi Classical in Katy, the Great Hearts Texas schools, Founders Classical and Houston Classical. Their combined enrollment for the 2016-2017 school year was less than 7,500, and has more than doubled to 18,000, state data shows.
Charter school supporters and several members of the SBOE, they said they expect that another bill will be filed next year with renewed efforts to remove the state board’s authority to approve the schools, leaving the matter up to Education Commissioner Mike Morath, an appointee of Gov. Greg Abbott.
Some members of the state board added that Abbott lobbied their colleagues directly, asking them to approve Heritage’s application and other charter schools over the years.
“Historically it was, (the SBOE wasn’t) approving expansions fast enough, or enough, to keep pace with demand,” said Starlee Coleman, CEO of the Texas Charter Schools Association. “I would not be surprised one bit if a move were made to roll back the board’s authority, even farther.”
Charter school proponents point to a charter school wait-list in the state of more than 58,000 kids. They say families want more options and that public schools aren’t working for everyone. They point to data that show the large majority of charter students are children of color, and that their test scores are better than the public school averages.
“The statute is really clear about legislative intent is that there will be a robust and vibrant charter sector in Texas,” Coleman said. “if the state board can’t agree with that, then I don’t think state legislators feel very compelled to let them continue to be part of the process.”
edward.mckinley@chron.com
Dana Milbank is my favorite columnist at the Washington Post. In this column, he responds to the Texas GOP platform, which proposes that the state secede from the US and become a sovereign nation. Milbank says. “Good riddance!” As a native Texan, I’m ashamed for my state, ashamed that it’s been taken over by theocrats and dumbbells.
The Lone Star State does not have the best track record as a sovereign power. The Republic of Texas survived only 10 years from independence to annexation by the United States in 1845. Texas seceded during the Civil War — and, with the rest of the Confederacy, was crushed.
But, as the saying goes: If at first you don’t secede, try, try again. The Texas GOP now wants the state to vote on declaring independence.
And the United States should let Texas go! Better yet, let’s offer Texas a severance package that includes Oklahoma to sweeten secession — the Sooner the better.
Over the weekend, while many Americans were celebrating the 167th anniversary of Juneteenth (when Union Gen. Gordon Granger, in Galveston, Tex., delivered the order abolishing slavery) the Texas Republican Party voted on a platform declaring that federal laws it dislikes “should be ignored, opposed, refused, and nullified.”
The proposed platform (it’s expected to be approved when votes are tallied) adds: “Texas retains the right to secede from the United States, and the Texas Legislature should be called upon to pass a referendum consistent thereto.” It wants the secession referendum “in the 2023 general election for the people of Texas to determine whether or not the State of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation.”
Yee-haw!
Of course, protections would have to be negotiated for parts of Texas that wish to remain on Team Normal. Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio and parts of South Texas would remain in the United States, and they will need guaranteed safe passage to New Orleans or Santa Fe, along with regular airlifts of sustainable produce, accurate textbooks and contraceptives.
But consider the benefits to the rest of the country: Two fewer Republican senators, two dozen fewer Republican members of the House, annual savings of $83 billion in defense funds that Texas gets. And the best reason? The Texas GOP has so little regard for the Constitution that it is calling for a “Convention of the States” to effectively rewrite it — and so little regard for the United States that it wishes to leave.
In democracy’s place, the Republican Party, which enjoys one-party rule in Texas, is effectively proposing a church state. If you liked Crusader states and Muslim caliphates, you’ll love the Confederate Theocracy of Texas.
The Texas GOP platform gives us a good idea what such a paradise for Christian nationalists would look like. Texas would officially declare that “homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice.” It would redefine marriage as a “covenant only between one biological man and one biological woman,” and it would “nullify” any court rulings to the contrary. (The gay Log Cabin Republicans were banned from setting up a booth at the convention.) It would fill schools with “prayer, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments” but ban “the teaching of sex education.” It would abolish all abortions and require students to “learn about the Humanity of the Preborn Child.”
The Texas Theocracy, which maintains that President Biden “was not legitimately elected,” would keep only traces of democracy. It wants the Voting Rights Act of 1965 “repealed,” and it would rewrite the state constitution to empower minority rule by small, rural (and White) counties. It would rescind voters’ right to elect senators and the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.
The Texas Theocracy would probably be broke; it wants to abolish the federal income tax, “Axe the Property Tax” and do away with the estate tax and various business taxes. Yet it is planning a hawkish foreign policy! The platform argues that Texas is currently “under an active invasion” and should take “any and all appropriate measures the sovereign state defines as necessary to defend” itself. It imagines attacks by a “One World Government, or The Great Reset” — an internet-born conspiracy belief — and proposes “withdrawal from the current United Nations.” The Theocracy would put the “wild” back in the West, abolishing the minimum wage, environmental and banking regulations, and “red-flag” laws or waiting periods to prevent dangerous people from buying guns.
Above all, the Confederate Theocracy of Texas would be defined by thought police. It would penalize “woke corporations” and businesses that disagree with the theocracy over abortion, race, trans rights and the “inalienable right to refuse vaccination.”
Government programs would be stripped of “education involving race.” Evolution and climate change “shall be taught as challengeable scientific theories subject to change.” There would be a “complete repeal of the hate crime laws.” The Texas Revolution “shall not be ‘reimagined’” in a way the theocracy finds “disrespectful.” Confederate monuments “shall be protected,” “plaques honoring the Confederate widows” restored, and lessons on “the tyrannical history of socialism” required.
In their platform, the Texas Republicans invoked “God” or the “Creator” 18 times and “sovereignty” or sovereign power 24 times. And the word “democracy”? Only once — in reference to China.
I hope you can read the comments. Readers suggest other states that should secede with Texas.
Forrest Wilder of the Texas Monthly has been trying to sort out the conflicting accounts of what happened at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. He learned that everyone in a position of authority has gone silent. Governor Greg Abbott initiated the government response by praising the courage of law enforcement; when he learned that the shooter was left alone in the classrooms for more than an hour, he said he was “livid” about being misinformed.
One authority after another offered accounts and pointed the finger of blame for the slaughter of children and teachers. The State Senate promised a thorough investigation but Lt. Governor Dan Patrick pointedly left the Uvalde representative off the committee.
Now everyone has clammed up. Answers are not likely to be forthcoming until after the Governor’s race in November. A strategically timed response. Family members want to know what happened to their loved ones. They are not likely to get answers until Greg Abbott is safely re-elected.
Wilder writes:
More than three weeks have passed since the terrible events in Uvalde. What was once a torrent of appalling facts about the police response—many of them misleading or false—has now slowed to a trickle of leaks and lawyer-mediated, self-serving narratives. Governor Greg Abbott has pivoted to talking about the border again. Texas Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw, last seen slipping into a closed-door meeting of a state House investigative committee, has gone quiet. The Uvalde schools chief of police, Pete Arredondo, finally emerged from hiding last week, lawyer at hand, to contradict reports that he had made the call to wait around for more than an hour while the gunman lingered in the classrooms with dead and dying children and teachers; hours later, key parts of his story were contradicted by evidence reported in the New York Times.
For anyone expecting an apology, accountability, or even a clear and concise narrative of what happened at Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022, well, you may be waiting a while longer—perhaps forever. No one has resigned, no one has been fired, and local and state authorities from the Uvalde CISD superintendent up to the governor have stopped providing updates. Local and state agencies are refusing most requests to release information they are supposed to make available under Texas’s open records law, even to the state senator who represents Uvalde. Off-duty police from around the state, as well as mysterious motorcycle clubs whose members reportedly include former police officers, descended on Uvalde to physically block reporters from talking to families and community members, even after those locals had agreed to talk—a blockade so unusual and aggressive that one veteran Texas journalist has called it “bordering on official oppression.” It’s as if those in power concluded that the answer to communicating poorly was to stop communicating altogether, and to obstruct anyone seeking answers.
Perhaps all will be revealed soon. Perhaps ongoing investigations by the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Department of Justice will bring clarity. Perhaps the Texas House committee, which is taking testimony in private, will emerge with a full report. Perhaps someone will take responsibility. But right now, it seems that authorities are biding their time, waiting for public attention to move on to the next outrage, and hoping to insulate themselves from accountability. “People in Uvalde are angry,” said state senator Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat who represents the small city. “They want answers. They’re distrusting of law enforcement. The credibility of law enforcement is at stake,” he said. “They’re good people, but they just want honesty, man.”
The inflection point—the shift from a public reckoning to a studied silence—came on May 27, just three days after the nineteen kids and two teachers were killed. That morning McCraw gave a press conference in which he announced to a stunned world that police had committed a grave “mistake.” They had not, as Abbott and McCraw had stated in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, engaged the gunman at the earliest possible moment. Instead, the DPS director said, law enforcement had waited more than an hour before breaching the classroom and killing the shooter.
At the outset of the press conference, McCraw said his only goal that day was to “report facts” and not to “criticize what was done or the actions taken.” But faced with a barrage of pointed questions from the media, McCraw did point a finger—at Arredondo. Without using his name, McCraw said Arredondo, as incident commander that day, was responsible for the dilatory response. It was his decision—a “wrong decision, period”—to treat the gunman as a “barricaded subject” rather than an “active shooter.” It was Arredondo alone who had held back all the gathered law enforcement—Uvalde city police, the county sheriff’s deputies, Border Patrol officers, and DPS state police.
Later that day, Abbott held his own press conference. The governor, not known for his emotional range, seemed eager to convey outrage. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, he had praised law enforcement for their “amazing courage” and averred that without their actions, “it could have been worse”—the “it” referring to the 21 deaths. Abbott wanted everyone to know that he had been wronged. “I was misled. I am livid about what happened,” he said. What happened, he explained, was that in the aftermath of the shooting “law enforcement officials and non–law enforcement officials” had debriefed him on the shooting. Abbott had taken notes by hand, writing everything down “in detail” and “in sequential order.” The information he then provided the public was a “recitation” of those facts.
Who had given him such bad information? What consequences would they face? If the governor was so angry, surely heads would roll. But Abbott offered no names, no accountability. In an unusually quick turnaround after an open records request, the governor’s office released his notes this week to a Houston television station. But the nine pages of scrawl confirmed only that Abbott had been misled, not who had done the misleading.
At the May 27 press conference, Abbott signaled that he was moving on. He admonished law enforcement leaders to “get to the bottom of every fact with absolute certainty” as part of their investigations. Ever since, Abbott, McCraw, and other officials have stopped answering questions or publicly sharing information, pointing to the ongoing investigations. It’s an all-purpose excuse. Republicans in the Legislature are using the investigations as a reason to avoid calling for a special session on gun violence prevention. They’re also conveniently postponing, perhaps forever, a discussion about gun safety; as one state senator put it, “bad facts make bad law.”
The story goes one. Subscribe to The Texas Monthly and finish reading.
The Houston Chronicle reports that the scores of police who responded to the Uvalde massacre did not try to open the doors of the classrooms where the shooter was killing children and teachers until more than an hour had passed. (The story was originally published in the San Antonio Express News.) The story is based on surveillance video.
When you read the story, you will see why Governor Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick are trying to block any public release of official investigations until after the state elections in November. More than 100 “good guys with guns”were unable to stop one bad guy with a gun. The more we learn, the more questions are raised about the training, competence, and courage of those who were supposed to protect the students and teachers.
Surveillance footage shows that police never tried to open a door to two classrooms at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in the 77 minutes between the time a gunman entered the rooms and massacred 21 people and officers finally breached the door and killed him, according to a law enforcement source close to the investigation.
Investigators believe the 18-year-old gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers at the school on May 24 could not have locked the door to the connected classrooms from the inside, according to the source.
Interactive timeline: Minute-by-minute reconstruction of Uvalde school shooting
All classroom doors at Robb Elementary are designed to lock automatically when they close and can only be locked or unlocked from the outside with a key, the source said. Police might have assumed the door was locked. Yet the surveillance footage suggests gunman Salvador Ramos, 18, was able to open the door to classroom 111 and enter with assault-style rifle — perhaps because the door malfunctioned, the source said.
Another door led to classroom 112.
Ramos entered Robb Elementary at 11:33 a.m. that day through an exterior door that a teacher had pulled shut but that didn’t lock automatically as it was supposed to, indicating another malfunction in door locks at the school.
Police finally breached the door to classroom 111 and killed Ramos at 12:50 p.m. Whether the door was unlocked the entire time remains under investigation.
Regardless, officers had access the entire time to a “halligan” — a crowbar-like tool that could have opened the door to the classrooms even if it was locked, the source said.
Two minutes after Ramos entered the building, three Uvalde police officers chased him inside. Footage shows that Ramos fired rounds inside classrooms 111 and 112, briefly exited into the hallway and then re-entered through the door, the source said.
Ramos then shot at the officers through the closed door, grazing two of them with shrapnel. The officers retreated to wait for backup and heavy tactical equipment rather than force their way into the classrooms.
Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief and the on-scene incident commander, has said he spent more than an hour in the hallway of the school. He told the Texas Tribune that he called for tactical gear, a sniper and keys to get inside. He said he held officers back from the door to the classrooms for 40 minutes to avoid gunfire.
When a custodian brought a large key ring, Arredondo said he tried dozens of the keys but none worked.
But Arredondo was not trying those keys in the door to classrooms 111 and 112, where Ramos was holed up, according to the law enforcement source. Rather, he was trying to locate a master key by using the various keys on doors to other classrooms nearby, the source said.
While Arredondo waited for a tactical team to arrive, children and teachers inside the classrooms called 911 at least seven times with desperate pleas for help. One of the two teachers who died, Eva Mireles, called her husband by cellphone after she was wounded and lay dying.
Drip by drip, we are learning the facts about what happened in the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde when a killer barged in. He could have been stopped. Lives could have been saved. But the incompetence of the police leadership caused an unconscionable delay in stopping the killer. Well-established protocols were ignored (stop the shooter asap, even if you don’t have enough men or equipment, stop the killer). As it happened, the police in Uvalde had more men than they needed and all the equipment they needed to stop the killer. But they didn’t.
The head of the state police called the response an abject failure. The pokice had shields and weapons. They did not need a key. They stood around and waited for 77 minutes.
AUSTIN, Texas — The head of the Texas State Police offered a pointed and emphatic rebuke of the police response to a shooting last month at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, calling it “an abject failure” that ran counter to decades of training.
In his comments before a special State Senate committee in Austin, Steven McCraw, the director of the Department of Public Safety, said that just minutes after a gunman began shooting children inside a pair of connected classrooms on May 24, the police at the scene had enough firepower and protective equipment to storm the classroom.
But, he said, the on-scene commander “decided to put the lives of officers ahead of the lives of children.” Mr. McCraw, speaking forcefully, said the same commander had delayed confronting the gunman because he “waited for a key that was never needed.”
Mr. McCraw said that the doors to the classrooms could be locked only from the outside. “There’s no way to lock the door from the inside. And there’s no way for the subject to lock the door from the inside,” he said, adding that a teacher had made a request for the locks to be fixed, believing they were broken, before the shooting.
“I don’t believe, based on the information that we have right now, that that door was ever secured,” Mr. McCraw said. “The door was unsecured.”
There were so many police officers present that no one knew who was in charge. It turns out that no one was in charge.
This is an instance where the planning was wholly inadequate.
100+ men with guns were unable to stop one bad guy with a gun.
They had the guns, the shields, and overwhelming force. And for 77 minutes, they stood by.
The Texas Tribune, an independent journal, has been first to report on the news about the Uvalde massacre. In this story, there are new revelations based on video footage from inside the school.
Some of our takeaways include:
- The records show a well-equipped group of officers entered the school almost immediately. They pulled back once the shooter began firing inside the classroom. They waited for more than an hour to reengage.
- There is no security footage that shows police officers attempted to open the classroom doors that the shooter hid behind. Law enforcement officials are skeptical, the Tribune has confirmed, that the doors were locked or that anyone physically tried to open them.
- At least some officers on the scene seemed to believe that Arredondo was in charge inside the school, and at times Arredondo seemed to be issuing orders. That contradicts Arredondo’s assertion that he did not believe he was running the law enforcement response…
The officers in the hallway of Robb Elementary wanted to get inside classrooms 111 and 112 — immediately. One officer’s daughter was inside. Another officer had gotten a call from his wife, a teacher, who told him she was bleeding to death.
Two closed doors and a wall stood between them and an 18-year-old with an AR-15 who had opened fire on children and teachers inside the connected classrooms. A Halligan bar — an ax-like forcible-entry tool used by firefighters to get through locked doors — was available. Ballistic shields were arriving on the scene. So was plenty of firepower, including at least two rifles. Some officers were itching to move.
One such officer, a special agent at the Texas Department of Public Safety, had arrived around 20 minutes after the shooting started. He immediately asked: Are there still kids in the classrooms?
“If there is, then they just need to go in,” the agent said.
Another officer answered, “It is unknown at this time.”
The agent shot back, “Y’all don’t know if there’s kids in there?” He added, “If there’s kids in there we need to go in there.”
“Whoever is in charge will determine that,” came the reply.
Diane Ravitch's blog 