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What Happened in Uvalde, from the Children’s Accounts

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2022 //
26

The San Antonio Express-News reported what several children said about the carnage in their classroom. The Houston Chronicle said that Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who opposes gun control, wants the state to spend $50 million in bullet-proof shields.

As Salvador Ramos approached Room 112 in Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School, the teacher and her students heard gunshots.

She told the fourth-graders to get down on the floor or under their desks, and she went to the door to make sure it was locked. Then Ramos fired at the door handle. Rounds from his assault-style rifle shattered the door window and struck the teacher, fatally injuring her as she tried to protect her kids.

“It’s time to die,” Ramos declared as he entered the classroom. “You guys are mine.”

Ramos at one point asked if anyone needed help, and when one child stood up, he shot him.

These details of the first minutes of the May 24 rampage are from a 10-year-old boy who was in the classroom and who has described the scene to his mother and to law enforcement officials.

“Creepy music” blared from Ramos’ phone as the 18-year-old high school dropout opened fired on the class, the boy recalled. His mother, Corina Camacho, said shrapnel struck her son in the leg.

Then Ramos walked to the connected classroom next door, Room 111, and opened fire again.

“He was like going back and forth, playing music,” the mother told the San Antonio Express-News.

The terror continued for over an hour. It would be more than 75 minutes after the first 911 calls before members of a Border Patrol tactical unit went into the classrooms and killed Ramos. By then, 19 students and two teachers — Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia — were dead. Seventeen other people were injured. It isn’t clear which teacher was killed when Ramos shot through the door.

On ExpressNews.com: Morning of chaos: A reconstruction of how the Uvalde massacre unfolded

The Express-News’ account of the early minutes of the rampage is based on interviews with law enforcement sources, state lawmakers, Corina Camacho and civil lawyers who represent surviving children and teachers.

Camacho’s son told his story to the FBI recently. He is one of several witnesses who were interviewed by the FBI, the Texas Rangers or the Texas Department of Public Safety.

The information from the lawyers and law enforcement sources helps shed light on the tragedy and the disastrous police response that followed. Key details remain unknown to investigators as they try to reconcile incomplete or contradictory statements from witnesses and law enforcement officers.

The massacre in the rural town of more than 15,000 is the second-worst mass shooting at a school, after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which killed 26. President Joe Biden visited Uvalde last week to comfort the families, and in a televised speech days later, he renewed calls for tighter gun restrictions, including a ban on assault-style rifles.

Frozen with fear

The morning of Tuesday, May 24, began like any day near the end of the school year. Some classes at Robb Elementary had just come in from recess. Others had just let out for lunch. Summer break would begin in two days.

Teacher Emilia Marin had propped open a door with a rock to help a co-worker bring in food for an end-of-the-year party from a car in the school parking lot. Then Marin saw a truck crash outside the school’s perimeter fence, said her lawyer, Don Flanary.

Marin went back inside the school to get her phone and report the crash to 911.

When she came back outside, still on the phone, she saw her co-worker flee and heard people at a funeral home across the street yell, “He’s got a gun!”

Marin saw Ramos jump over a fence. She kicked the rock away, pulled the door shut and ran into the school. She huddled under a counter in a classroom.

She heard gunshots, first outdoors, then inside the school. Her 911 call dropped. She grabbed chairs and boxes to hide behind. Frozen with fear, she tried to be still.

Marin received a text from her daughter asking if she was safe.

“There’s a shooter,” Marin typed back. “He’s shooting. He’s in here.”

Then Ramos approached Room 112.

Camacho and one of her lawyers, Stephanie Sherman, said her son described how Ramos shot his way into the classroom and how police at one point opened the door and retreated after he fired at them. Law enforcement sources disputed the latter part of the boy’s account, saying no officer went into the classroom during the initial response.

The officers “were all in the hallway, and when shots were fired, they all ran back to another hallway or outside,” one source told the Express-News.

Another lawyer for the family, Shawn Brown, said the boy related different details to his grandfather. He told the grandfather that his teacher shielded him with her body as he lay on the floor and that Ramos fired at her, killing her and striking him in the leg.

Brown also said the boy told his grandfather that Ramos, after pacing from one room to the other, asked if anyone needed help — acting in the guise of a police officer.

“When one kid stood up, he shot him with the AK,” Brown said, quoting the grandfather. “That may be the reason he thought an officer had come in.”

Investigators are trying to unravel discrepancies in the accounts provided by the traumatized children. Camacho’s son’s account differs somewhat from what other children have told investigators. The inconsistencies could reflect differing vantage points — whether the children were lying facedown or were facing away from Ramos.

Some saw most of the massacre unfold. As their memories return, the children have revealed progressively more and sometimes contradictory details to investigators and family members.

“The kids’ interviews, they’re bad,” said one law enforcement source, referring to the graphic details. “I can’t even imagine the nightmare … that those kids went through.”

Brown said the differing versions simply reflect trauma.

“It’s because of the shock and because of the stress that they went through,” Brown said. “They’re remembering bits and pieces as they go, and it may not be in sequential order. It was such a traumatic experience that their brains are trying to block it out.”

The official account of what happened inside the school has not been fully disclosed because of a criminal investigation by the Texas Rangers, assisted by the FBI, that is being overseen by Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee…

First on the scene

According to law enforcement sources, Uvalde police and Uvalde CISD officers were among the first to arrive. Because it was school district property, responding officers deferred to Arredondo.

State Sen. Roland Gutierrez of San Antonio, whose district includes Uvalde, said last week that Arredondo was not aware of 911 calls from students inside the classroom, who were begging to be rescued.

Arredondo’s six-officer department does not have its own radio communications system. The 911 calls were routed to the Uvalde Police Department, Gutierrez said. Why Arredondo would not have known about the desperate calls from the students is unclear, given that numerous officers equipped with radios were at the scene.

One source said interviews with officers indicated that Arredondo did not have a police radio with him. Another law enforcement source said security video from the school confirms Arredondo did not have a radio.

“He made some phone calls to Uvalde PD” to get information and may have missed the 911 calls from the students, a source said.

On ExpressNews.com: Uvalde schools police chief didn’t receive 911 calls

Also, the fortified, concrete walls of the school interfered with reception of the radios carried by other officers, law enforcement sources said.

At one point, 19 officers were in a hallway outside the classrooms where Ramos had cornered his terrified victims.

“There’s not as much radio traffic as you would think there would be,” one law enforcement source said. “Those inside may not have heard the kids’ 911 calls.”

Because some officers were off-duty or rushed in, they didn’t have body cameras or did not set them to record, further complicating matters for investigators.

Arredondo appears to have been inside the building with some school police officers and Uvalde police officers. Investigators have collected reports from some first responders indicating that Arredondo tried early on to negotiate with the gunman by cellphone, but Ramos did not answer.

As officers planned strategy in the hallway, Arredondo believed the victims were all dead and Ramos had barricaded himself, investigators said. He held officers back to wait for reinforcements and specialized equipment, and the officers on the scene stood down, according to sources.

DPS Director Steve McCraw has said there was “no excuse” for that decision and that the 19 officers should have stormed in and killed Ramos early on to end the bloodshed and give aid to the wounded.

On ExpressNews.com: As Uvalde students waited for rescue, police assumed there was no reason to rush in

Outside, other officers cordoned off the school and barred agitated parents from going inside.

While the school was under attack, Mireles, one of the fourth-grade teachers who was killed, called her husband, Ruben Ruiz. He is a school district police officer, and he rushed to the scene, Uvalde County Judge Bill Mitchell said. Like the students’ parents, he was prohibited from entering the building.

Mireles and Ruiz talked by phone as the fatally wounded teacher took her last breaths.

“She’s in the classroom and he’s outside. It’s terrifying,” Mitchell told reporters after being briefed by Uvalde County sheriff’s deputies who were at the scene.

Radio traffic shows that officers from several federal law enforcement agencies responded, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Marshals Service.

Ultimately, members of a Border Patrol tactical unit shot Ramos, who apparently was locked inside one of the classrooms.

Brown, the lawyer for the family of the 10-year-old boy, said the child described how he and a couple of other students got up when they were rescued.

“He said he saw the other kids on the floor,” Brown said, choking back emotion. “He told the grandfather, ‘I got up. My friends didn’t.’”

‘Really bad’ for police

Why the outer door Ramos used to get into the school didn’t lock when the teacher pulled it shut is unknown. One law enforcement source said officials plan to remove that door and the classroom doors for inspection.

A team from the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University went to the school this past week to conduct an assessment of what happened.

The U.S. Justice Department is carrying out a separate review of the police response, at the request of Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin Jr.

“The report is not going to be good,” one source said. “This is really bad for law enforcement.”

guillermo.contreras@express-news.net | Twitter: @gmaninfedland

Categories Guns, Guns in Schools, Safety, Students, Texas

Uvalde: The Officer in Charge Did Not Have a Police Radio

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2022 //
44

As more details emerge, the disaster at Uvalde grows ever more horrifying. The New York Times reported that more than 140 officers of the law converged on Robb Elementary School. They began to arrive only minutes after the killer started shooting children and teachers. Two officers tried to enter the classroom but were struck by gunfire. The school district’s chief of police—who commanded a force of six—decided not to storm the classroom, although the first rule in an active shooter situation is to confront the shooter immediately and disable him. Since Columbine, police training for school shootings emphasizes the importance of rushing the killer and stopping the shooting.

The chief decided that the shooter was barricaded in the classroom and that no one was in danger. He did not have a police radio. He called on a cell phone to ask for reinforcements. Children in the classroom with the killer repeatedly called 911 to plead for help. The police waited outside the door for more than an hour. When a tactical force from the Border Patrol stormed the classroom, the officer in charge told them to stay out. They disobeyed orders and killed the shooter.

The story begins:

UVALDE, Texas — Two minutes after a gunman burst through an unlocked door at Robb Elementary School and began shooting inside a pair of connected classrooms, Pete Arredondo arrived outside, one of the first police officers to reach the scene.

The gunman could still be heard firing repeatedly, and Chief Arredondo, as leader of the small school district police force in Uvalde, took charge.

But there were problems from the start.

Chief Arredondo did not have a police radio with him, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation, which may have impeded his immediate ability to communicate with police dispatchers. As two supervisors from the local police department were grazed by bullets fired by the gunman, he made a decision to fall back, the official said.

Using a cellphone, the chief called a police landline with a message that set the stage for what would prove to be a disastrous delay in interrupting the attack: The gunman has an AR-15, he told them, but he is contained; we need more firepower and we need the building surrounded.

Rather than confront an actively shooting gunman immediately, as officers have been trained to do since the killings at Columbine High School in 1999, the ever-growing force of increasingly armed officers arriving at Robb Elementary held back for more than an hour….

A tactical team led by Border Patrol officers ultimately ignored orders not to breach the classroom, interviews revealed, after a 10-year-old girl inside the classroom warned 911 dispatchers that one of the two teachers in the room was in urgent need of medical attention.

The story is horrifying. It is a story of missed opportunities, unnecessary deaths, fear, miscommunication, ignorance, and perhaps cowardice. The children risked their lives to call 911. Their messages were not relayed to the officer in charge at the scene. 140 police officers on hand, waiting for orders. No orders came other than to evacuate the children who were not in the classroom with the killer. The children in the classroom with the killer were on their own for over an hour while armed police waited for a key and an order.

Categories Accountability, Guns, Guns in Schools, Safety, Texas

Uvalde: “I’m Not Surprised,” Writes Uvalde Native

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2022 //
12

Neil Meyer, a native of Uvalde who now lives in Bethesda, Maryland, says he was not surprised by the massacre there. He explained why in the Washington Post.

I was born in Uvalde, Tex., lived there recently and love its complex history and people. Like most, I’ve been struggling under the weight of grief to understand the violence that left 19 children, two teachers and a young killer dead last week. But I’m not surprised.


First, you would be challenged to find a more heavily armed place in the United States than Uvalde. It’s a town where the love of guns overwhelms any notion of common-sense regulations, and the minority White ruling class places its right-wing Republican ideology above the safety of its most vulnerable citizens — its impoverished and its children, most of whom are Hispanic.

Second, at news of the shooting, I was struck to hear the words “Robb Elementary” because I knew of its centrality to the struggle in Uvalde over the past half-century to desegregate its schools. Robb sits in the city’s southwest quadrant. So I knew the victims of the shooting would largely be Hispanic. They have been locked into that school for decades.
In Uvalde, simply put, everything north of Highway 90 is primarily White Republican, and everything south is mostly Hispanic Democrat. The city has about 15,000 residents; more than 80 percent identify as Hispanic or Latino.


Most of Uvalde’s political leadership and the heads of the largest employers are White. At the center of town on the courthouse grounds, you’ll find a monument to Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president — installed when the Ku Klux Klan dominated Uvalde politics. (Some of us tried to get the monument removed after the murder of George Floyd, but that’s a story for another day.)

Categories Guns, Poverty, Racism, Texas

Texas: State Leaders Said That 2022 Was the Year of “Protecting the Children”

By dianeravitch
May 31, 2022 //
61

Christopher Hooks wrote in The Texas Monthly about the boundless hypocrisy and moral vacuousness of Texas’ elected leaders.

In the run-up to the 2022 primaries and election, they made a big show of “protecting the children.”

They obsessed about the danger of transgender children, even insisting on criminalizing parents’ efforts to get medical help for their children. They obsessed about teachers allegedly “grooming” children for lives of deviant sexual behavior. They obsessed about “obscene” books that might normalize sexual behavior they—these men of high righteousness— deplored. They obsessed about “critical race theory” and demanded the banning of books that taught children about racism, whether past or present, or anything about human sexuality.

Yes, the children of Texas would be protected from any teaching about race or sexuality.

But they would not be physically protected. They would not be protected from an 18-year-old with two AR15s.

When the bad man with a powerful weapon came into their classroom, the children were left to fend for themselves while 19 police officers stood in the hallway. The bad man killed their teachers. He killed children. Little girls called 911 and begged for help. One said 8 or 9 children were still alive. But the police remained in the hallway.

The parents in the schoolyard pleaded with the police to save their children, but the police had their instructions: keep the parents away.

Almost an hour passed before the police broke into the classroom and shot the murderer.

The Governor called a press conference , where he commended the police for their courage and bravery. He commended the men who waited in the hallway for almost an hour, while the children were dying, one after another.

Hooks writes:

Texas, a friend used to say, is hard on women and little things. That would come to mind over the years when reporting seemed to bear it out. In 2015, I watched a foster mother testify in court, via telephone from her daughter’s hospital bedside, that state cuts to the Medicaid acute therapy program were having disastrous consequences for her child’s incurable, debilitating genetic disorder. In 2021, an eleven-year-old boy in Conroe suffocated from carbon monoxide poisoning after seeing snow for the first time, as his family tried to keep their home warm after the collapse of a horribly mismanaged electrical grid. And then there were the perennial horror stories from the state’s spike-pit child welfare system—a three-year-old found dead, bleeding from the ears, after his day care repeatedly warned state agents about signs of abuse by his foster parents; a teenage girl who killed herself the moment she could despite orders that she was never to be left alone; and countless others who survive through the heavy prescription of psychotropic meds before being kicked out to the streets at the age of eighteen.

Each revelation of new misery brings a new wave of revulsion, but—I hate to say this—as you learn more about how the social safety net works in Texas, the revulsion starts to fade, and it becomes a dull undercurrent to an awareness of the world instead of something sharp that pokes through. As it fades, so comes the realization that it has faded in the same way for those in power—and that nothing gets fixed because leaders have been immunized from caring to an even greater degree. The grid remains unsteady; children in foster care still get abused. Legislators make a show of passing partial, temporary fixes and resist looking at problems head-on. The Texas Legislature, with all its self-regard and jocularity and pride in itself as an institution, turns out to be suffused with a very dull and banal kind of evil.

On Tuesday, though, something poked through. For me, it wasn’t the knowledge that there had been another school shooting. Who could be surprised by that? Every detail was familiar. A once-bullied eighteen-year-old, two AR-15s, 22 dead, and 19 injured. The thing that shocked was the pictures of the dead when they lived. They were so little! Do you remember what it was like to have a body that small? A round fired by an AR-15 at close range enters the human body at three times the speed as those fired by a handgun, disintegrating and liquefying bones and organs around it. “It’s like a grenade goes off in there,” one trauma surgeon told Wired. Parents had to submit DNA samples so their kids could be accurately identified.

This spectacular violence, it sometimes feels, has not left much of us. At his initial press conference, Governor Greg Abbott wore his traditional white disaster-response shirt and offered details of the massacre as if reading a weather report. At a press conference the next day, where the governor sat alongside Texas senator Ted Cruz and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Abbott told Texans that the disaster “could have been worse,” and the primary flash of anger shown by elected officials came when Beto O’Rourke, who appeared in the crowd, tried to talk over them.

Appearing on Newsmax TV the day of the shooting, state attorney general Ken Paxton suggested that more armed guards at schools would help, “because it’s not going to be the last time.” Can you believe that, as a response from one of the most powerful elected officials in the state to a massacre of fourth graders? “It’s not going to be the last time.” There used to be at least a perfunctory mourning period, some hugs given in front of cameras, before those in power turned to one another other and shrugged. But in truth, leaders are only handling this the way they think about the foster care system they oversee, and every other death trap run by the state. The revulsion dulls, the novelty fades, and it becomes normal.

The shooting took place on the day of the Texas primary runoff. The composition of the Legislature and the rest of state government for the next two and a half years was set that night, barring extraordinary circumstances, by the conclusion of the Republican primary, which in Texas is more influential than the general election. Paxton, who had shrugged off the Uvalde shooting on Newsmax while wearing a campaign T-shirt, won renomination and almost certainly a third term in office.

It is a grotesque and cruel irony that the Republican primary this year, and several years of political activity before it, have been dominated by an all-consuming and comically misdirected argument about the “protection” of children and by a war on public schools. There was essentially no policy contested in the GOP primary that could affect the practical and economic circumstances of all Texans. (There rarely is.) There was, however, ceaseless argument about the well-being of children, their morals, their internal lives.

The most acute panic was over transgender children. In February, Paxton’s office issued a formal opinion holding that the prescription of puberty blockers to transgender children represented “child abuse.” Shortly after, Abbott tasked the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, an overworked and underfunded agency he had overseen for close to eight years, with investigating the families of transgender children for child abuse.

The more widespread crisis concerned books. The panic was conjured by parents and elected officials in equal measure. The first target was books with “divisive” material about race. Then, elected officials began to panicabout “pornography” in schools, a category that mostly included literature featuring queer characters and sexuality. Lawmakers proposed lists of books to be banned. In November, Abbott ordered the Texas Education Agency to investigate cases of “obscene material” in public schools and prosecute those responsible “to the fullest extent of the law,” because, as he wrote, it had to be a top priority to “protect” Texas students.

Public school teachers and children’s librarians—two professions that offer a strongly beneficial service to society for little pay—became villains for parents and candidates alike. They were called “groomers” and pedophiles on social media. In a press release, Abbott called for criminal charges to be brought if librarians were found to have put “pornography” in front of children. In Granbury, southwest of Fort Worth, half a year later, one woman lodged a criminal complaint against the librarians of Hood County ISD, prompting a police investigation. At a subsequent school board meeting, she condemned the fact that a committee brought together to review troublesome books had “too many” librarians instead of “people with good moral standards.”

The deterioration spread. A record number of public school teachers, already weary from the pandemic and now faced with a sort of siege, started quitting en masse—and forfeiting their licenses, indicating they probably wouldn’t come back. “I’m tired of getting punched. It shouldn’t be like this,” ninth grade math teacher Gloria Ogboaloh told Texas Monthly. As more teachers left, the quality of life for remaining educators got worse. Then, just four months after ordering that libraries be investigated, Abbott ordered the TEA to create a task force to investigate why so many teachers were quitting.

Hooks goes on to describe politicians who are liars, braggarts, cruel, indifferent to the safety of children, callous. How long can they continue to fool people with their charade and their fake concern? They don’t care about thechildren

Categories Bias, Bigotry, Censorship, Education Industry, Failure, Guns, Hypocrisy, Lies, Texas

Texas: Why Rural Communities Oppose School Choice

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2022 //
4

Vouchers are a big issue in Texas. Governor Greg Abbott recently announced he would promote them. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick—the Rush Limbaugh of Texas—is a voucher fanatic. Senator Ted Cruz said that school choice is the most important issue of our time.

But vouchers have died every time they are introduced in the legislature. Legislators from rural communities stand firm against vouchers. Jay Leeson explained why in the Dallas Morning News.

He wrote:

Vouchers are unpopular in places where public schools are the lifeblood of community.

With Gov. Greg Abbott’s announcement that he’ll pursue “school choice” in the upcoming Legislature, there’s political math to be done.

The governor’s proposal is pencil whipping his previously reliable rural voting base, presuming that rural communities will stick with him as he looks past the November match-up against Beto O’Rourke, and moves to the next problem of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a probable 2024 presidential foe. But in rushing to check off another box on the national GOP purity exam, questionable work has been submitted.

Out where rural public schools constellate expansive Lone Star landscape, out where the real Texas economic miracle of food, fuel, and fiber is produced, there’s pencil scratching being done.

Rural folks know school choice will come at their expense. Almost like the same-old bait (moral convictions) and switch (economic interests) over and over. It’s been that way for more than 30 years, since the GOP came to power promising term limits and local control — and how has that gone?

We’ve voted for plenty of slippery-as-slop-jar scenarios, like numerous federal officials who vote against subsidies for the state’s $25 billion annual agriculture industry. In 2018, cotton had fallen out of a federal funding program to help producers break even, and it was Abbott who single-handedly stalled restoration from Austin. We’ve closed 26 hospitals since 2010. Now just 163 hospitals provide care for 85% of the state’s geography, many with limited services. We’ve incrementally upped local property taxes to fill state budget holes over three decades. And Abbott’s routing of state infrastructure, including pivotal rural telecommunications by his commissioned appointees, could make Santa Anna blush.

But the missing variable in the slippery school choice proposal is the importance of public schools to respective rural communities — and the pillars of community within those schools. I know because I attended them.

Gid Adkisson, a gargantuan man, long in kindness as he was physique, was a retired school superintendent in Abernathy (population 2,904, about 25 miles north of Lubbock) with a bad lifelong cotton farming habit. He’d head out from his homestead to the high school for Gid Night Lights to voluntarily tutor us in algebra on Mondays and Thursdays, so we could play under the Friday Night Lights.

Children, even deviant teenagers like I was, know goodness when they see it. When I first think of Gid, I don’t picture him physically; I think of his heart. The physical trait I most remember is the big dent on his forehead that shone in the lights of Ms. Hardin’s classroom.

Bettie Hardin was a petite, put-together woman — pristine white perm, horn-rimmed glasses, mock turtleneck. She played the Methodist piano every Sunday morning with the same precision she expected from our math during the week.

Sports were our world. And Ms. Hardin could end that world with the swipe of a red pen.

But Gid came to the rescue, helping us understand it all. The first time I figured out ratio and proportion equations, Gid was right there, two huge knuckles on the desk behind me, affirming and encouraging me as my mind translated through pencil what Hardin and he had worked so hard to cultivate. When the problem was solved, the huge knuckles rose above the suspenders past the dent and to the lights, “Good, golly. You got it.”

I don’t today use an acquired high school skill — from on or off the field — more frequently than that equation.

Sitting in Wayne Riley’s 6th Grade Sunday School with half a dozen others was the first time I ever first-hand witnessed a grown man weep; we’d know him later as Coach Riley, our varsity basketball coach.

When my grandmother passed, I was destroyed and my band teacher Harold Bufe took a knee and consoled me about the loss of my world and his longtime friend.

When Gid died, many of us learned what we didn’t know all along: he’d been rescuing people for a long time. He led the 317th Regiment, 80th Infantry Division up Utah Beach where dented-head man earned, but later refused, a Purple Heart. Too many missing human variables under his command for him to accept such an award.

Public education gave us a tutor who defeated Hitler, coaches who earned our respect, and band teachers who helped us outside the notes. And Ms. Hardin who played Amazing Grace as the soundtrack.

My story isn’t uncommon, which is the point.

We’ll vote against ourselves on a myriad of issues, but not our schools.

Add to it all, rural folks know a little grammar as well.

“Choice” is a political synonym for “consolidation” and “consolidation” is another way of saying “closing” our communities — and our organists, Purple Hearts, and Sunday school teachers.

The political math for Abbott and statewide Republicans is they desperately need rural Texas votes to overcome deficits in the likes of Dallas, Tarrant, Travis, and Harris Counties. Their campaign commercials running longer loops every four years are evidence.

And while Oltons, Borgers, Ballingers, Floydadas, Abernathys, and the 85% of Texas geography won’t become Beto O’Rourke Country anytime soon, if ever, these places might just not vote.

Pull the lever, do your duty, get the sticker, but leave the gubernatorial box left open.

The collective rural Republican state representative silence on the governor’s initiative is already telling. Silence from electeds who backed Abbott’s $118 million for pre-K public education funding in 2015, only to have Abbott abdicate in subsequent far-right primary challenges.

Mr. O’Rourke may well come for some of our guns, but that’s highly unlikely with a legislative and judicial GOP stronghold.

But Abbott’s open threat is against the lifeblood of our communities: our schools. And he’s making it with a three-branch majority.

That’s Abbott’s math now. And Gid’s currently unavailable to tutor.

Jay Leeson is a freelance writer and artist in Lubbock. He wrote and illustrated this for The Dallas Morning News.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Republicans, Rural Schools, Supporting public schools, Texas

Gov. Abbott Explains Why the Police Did Not Break into the Classroom Where the Shooter Was

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2022 //
133

We now know why the police did not enter the classroom where the murders occurred. We now know that a large contingent of officers waited for nearly an hour before entering the classroom and shooting the killer.

The commander made a mistake. He thought the classroom was empty. He thought the shooter was alone in an empty classroom.

The police waited outside the classroom even as little children called 911 and begged for help.

CBS says:

The decision by the on-site commander to delay breaching the classroom of a Texas elementary school during the mass shooting this week was the “wrong decision,” authorities said Friday. Nearly 20 officers stood in a hallway outside of the classrooms during the attack on Robb Elementary School for more than 45 minutes before agents used a master key to open a door and confront the gunman, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said at a news conference.

The on-site commander — identified by the Associated Press as the school district’s police chief — believed 18-year-old Salvador Ramos was barricaded in a classroom in Uvalde during Tuesday’s attack and that the children were not at risk, McCraw said.

“He was convinced at the time that there was no more threat to the children and that the subject was barricaded and that they had time to organize” to get into the classroom, McCraw said.

“Of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision,” he said.

Friday’s briefing came after authorities spent three days providing often conflicting and incomplete information about the 90 minutes that elapsed between the time the gunman entered the school and when U.S. Border Patrol agents unlocked the classroom door and killed him. The gunman killed 19 students and two teachersduring the attack.

McCraw said there was a barrage of gunfire shortly after the gunman entered the classroom where they killed him but that shots were “sporadic” for much of the 48 minutes while officers waited outside the hallway. He said investigators do not know if or how many children died during those 48 minutes.

Throughout the attack, teachers and children repeatedly called 911 asking for help, including a girl who pleaded: “Please send the police now,” McCraw said.

The reason the police did not charge in to the room to save anyone who was still alive was a combination of bad judgment and stupidity.

Categories Accountability, Guns, Stupid, Texas

Uvalde: Agents in Tactical Gear Were in the Scene, Held Back by Local Police

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2022 //
41

The New York Times reports that a federal team of officers in tactical gear arrived on the scene and were kept out of the school by local police.

When specially equipped federal immigration agents arrived at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday, the local police at the scene would not allow them to go after the gunman who had opened fire on students inside the school, according to two officials briefed on the situation.

The agents from Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, arrived at some point between 12 p.m. and 12:10 p.m., according to the officials — far earlier than previously known. But they did not breach the adjoining classrooms of the school where the gunman had locked himself in until a little before 1 p.m. Members of the federal tactical team killed the gunman.

The officials said that members of the Uvalde Police Department kept the federal agents from going in sooner.

The new details deepened questions about the tactics used to respond to the shooting and the length of time it took officers on the scene to end the carnage…

The federal agents reported that they arrived to a scene of chaos — people pulling children out of windows while the local police, carrying only handguns and a few rifles, were trying to secure a perimeter, according to one official, who like the other spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

The Border Patrol and ICE agents did not understand why they were left to wait, according to the official. Eventually, the specialized Border Patrol team went into the building.

Texas law enforcement officials have said that the gunman was locked in a pair of adjoining classrooms and had already shot a number of students there in the first few minutes; with him pinned down there, they said, the local police initially focused on evacuating students and teachers from elsewhere in the school.

Law enforcement officers had initially tried to enter the classroom but fell back after the gunman fired on them, injuring two officers, state law enforcement officials said.

Most if not all of the 21 victims in the attack, including 19 students and two teachers, died in the area where the gunman, identified as Salvador Ramos, had locked himself in. The gunman was fatally shot by the federal team that entered the rooms more than an hour after the initial 911 call of a man with a gun outside the school, which came around 11:30 a.m.

The federal officers had driven up from the Mexican border, one official said. The official said it was not clear to the federal agents why their team was needed, and why the local SWAT team did not respond.

Also from the same source:

The authorities now say that local officers first entered the school at 11:35, two minutes after the gunman, and that there were 19 officers in the hallway by 12:03 p.m., but that they did not breach the door and kill the gunman until 12:50, even as they continued to hear him firing.

From the Houston Chronicle:

It remains unclear when the scene changed from an active shooter to a potential hostage barricade situation, a transition that could have altered the police response, San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said.

“The response to someone who is actually actively shooting, that response has to be immediate, and it’s through the door,” McManus said. “If it turns into a barricade situation, we are not going to make an entry while nothing is happening. We’re going to go in if something happens — shooting starts, screaming starts.”

That thinking reflects changes law enforcement agencies made after the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado, said Fulshear Police Chief Kenny Seymour, who described that 1999 massacre as “the pendulum swing” that prompted law enforcement’s current response to active-shooter situations.

“We can’t wait,” he said. “These shootings don’t allow us to call those specialized units in. We have the training, the tools, to make a difference in these shootings.”

From the Texas Tribune:

Law enforcement response: It took police an hour to stop a gunman once he entered a South Texas elementary school and killed 19 children and two teachers, according to recent details from state law enforcement officials. 

Officials with the Texas Department of Public Safety walked back their original claims that the shooter encountered a police officer employed by the school district before entering Robb Elementary School in Uvalde through a back door. In a press conference Thursday, Victor Escalon, an official with Texas DPS, did not explain why it took officers between 40 minutes and an hour to kill the gunman once he entered the school. Here are two key timestamps we do know: 

  • Uvalde police received the first call about the gunman around 11:20 a.m., when his grandmother called 911 from her home, about two minutes from Robb Elementary, after he shot her in the face. The gunman then fled in her pickup truck, crashing it in a ditch near the school and prompting a 911 call from a neighbor.
  • At 1:06 p.m. the Uvalde Police Department posted on its Facebook page that the shooter was in police custody.

The law enforcement response has sparked growing concern, and state law enforcement officials have given vague and conflicting answers on what exactly happened after the gunman arrived at the school.

Categories Guns, Safety, Texas

Washington Post Editorial: Why Did Police Not Enter the School While the Killer Was Shooting?

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2022 //
19

Many people have been trying to understand what the local, state, and federal police did after they arrived at the Robb Elementary School while an active shooter was killing children and teachers. And they wonder about conflicting accounts from officials.

The editorial board of the Washington Post says that Governor Abbott of Texas must create an independent commission. Frankly, Governor Abbott is so pro-gun that it’s hard to imagine that any commission appointed by him would produce anything but a whitewash of his vicious policies, which made it legal for an 18-year-old to buy military assault weapons and to carry them openly. His actions and policies should be part of an independent investigation, and that is not likely to happen if he chooses the commission members.

What’s needed in Uvalde, Texas, is a credible investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI.

The editorial board writes:

When police in Littleton, Colo., responded to reports of gunfire at Columbine High School in 1999, they did what they had been trained to do: set up a perimeter, summon specially trained SWAT and hostage teams, wait for demands and allow no one, including first responders, into the building. Hours passed before the building was secured, authorities realized the shooters had killed themselves, and the wounded received medical attention. Thirteen people — 12 students and a teacher — had been slaughtered.


Columbine resulted in fundamental changes in how law enforcement responds to mass shootings. The Columbine Review Commission formed by then-Gov. Bill Owens recommended in 2001 that “law enforcement policy and training should emphasize that the highest priority of law enforcement officers, after arriving at the scene of a crisis, is to stop any ongoing assault.” Active-shooter programs in which officers were trained to immediately target the gunman or gunmen became standard police protocol.

So why did it take 40 minutes to an hour before law enforcement authorities in Uvalde, Tex., stormed an elementary school classroom to stop a gunman who had gone on a shooting rampage? It is just one of the questions that parents whose children were killed, wounded or traumatized are asking — and it is one that authorities would do well to answer with clarity and urgency.

Since Tuesday’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, in which 19 children and two teachers were murdered, conflicting and confusing narratives have emerged. After initial accounts that the gunman had been confronted by a school resource officer and suggestions that there was an exchange of gunfire, a Texas law enforcement officer said on Thursday that the gunman entered the school “unobstructed” through a door that was apparently unlocked. Victor Escalon, a regional director at the Texas Department of Public Safety, said that Salvador Rolando Ramos, the alleged gunman who was killed when a Border Patrol tactical team burst into the room where he had been barricaded, did not initially encounter any law enforcement officers. Why the discrepancy?

Equally troubling is a harrowing video posted to a parent’s Facebook account that shows frantic family members on Tuesday begging police to take action. “Why let the children die? There’s shooting in there,” one woman pleaded. “They’re little kids, they don’t know how to defend themselves. … Six-year-old kids in there, they don’t know how to defend themselves from a shooter!” a man cried. Parents talked about rushing the building themselves, as they said police were just standing around. One parent was tackled to the ground. A national school safety expert told Post reporters that any delay in going inside will be hard to explain.


Make no mistake: The person responsible for the murder of these little children and brave teachers is the deranged 18-year-old who fired an AR-style rifle. But it is important to know whether errors were made that might have cost some lives. What lessons can be learned that might save lives in the future if — as sadly seems inevitable — there are more mass shootings? There needs to be a full public accounting. Just as the governor in Colorado once ordered a rigorous review of the events surrounding Columbine, so should Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Categories Accountability, Guns, Safety, Texas

Uvalde: Husband of Murdered Teacher Dies of a Heart Attack; Lt. Gov. Patrick Blames Massacre on Video Games, Not Guns

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2022 //
92

This is heartbreaking news. According to the Houston Chronicle, Joe Garcia, the husband of Irma Garcia, died of a heart attack. She was one of the two teachers murdered at Robb Elementary School. The Garcias were parents of four children.

The husband of one of the two teachers killed in the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School has passed away “due to grief,” according to a nephew of the woman.

Joe Garcia of Uvalde reportedly suffered the heart attack, John Martinez tweeted at noon on Thursday. He was the husband of fourth-grade teacher Irma Garcia. They were married for 24 years.

In addition:

Update 12:22 p.m. The Georgia-based manufacturer of the assault rifle model used in Tuesday’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary has pulled out of the NRA convention in Houston this weekend, according to a report from the Daily Beast.

Daniel Defense — who designed the DDM4 V7 rifle — was originally slated to host a booth at the George R. Brown Convention Center but now the booth they were assigned to will be occupied by the NRA itself.

The Houston Chronicle previously reported that the Uvalde gunman, Salvador Ramos, purchased two weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in the days immediately after his 18th birthday, which was on May 16. One weapon was the Daniel Defense rifle; the other was a Smith & Wesson MP 15, which retails for about $1,300.

Update 11:39 a.m. Larry Gatlin and Don McLean have both pulled out of their respective performances at the NRA’s annual convention held in Houston, according to The Chronicle’s Joey Guerra.

Gatlin released a statement on the heels of Thursday morning’s news that McLean would not be participating in Saturday’s Grand Ole Night Of Freedom Concert at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

“I pray that the NRA will rethink some of its outdated and ill-thought-out positions regarding firearms in America,” he said, adding he could not “in good conscience” perform and that he is in support of background checks.

The performance lineup still includes Lee Greenwood, Restless Heart’s Larry Stewart, T. Graham Brown, “NRA Life member” Jacob Bryant and Danielle Peck.

Update 11:15 a.m. As negotiations on possible gun reform got underway in the U.S. Senate on Thursday, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer blasted Gov. Greg Abbott as an “absolute fraud,” according to a report from The Chronicle’s Washington correspondent Benjamin Wermund.

Schumer accused Abbott of offering nothing but “empty platitudes about healing and hope” during a press conference in Uvalde on Wednesday.

“This is the same Gov. Abbott who tomorrow — tomorrow — will go speak at the NRA convention in Houston,” Schumer said. “Gov. Abbott, will you ask your MAGA buddies and your NRA pals to put aside their agendas and think of someone other than themselves like you asked the families to do?”

Update 10:20 a.m. Although Uvalde CISD had an extensive security plan in place for moments of crisis, the district’s planning failed to stop 19 children from being shot and killed at Robb Elementary School, according to an article from NBC News.

The district had doubled its security budget in recent years, according to documents, after legislation was passed in the aftermath of the 2018 Santa Fe High School in which eight students and two teachers were killed.

Update 9:15 a.m. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick appeared on Fox & Friends this morning and spoke on “hardening’ schools” and mental health in the wake of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School.

“We are a country in the ditch,” Patrick said. “We have violent music, violent rhetoric, everything is anti-everyone. Where are we as a nation? We have people in this nation who want to pull us away from God.”

Patrick also took issue with identifying some people with mental health issues as “loners,” saying some are not really alone but connect via the Internet with others who would praise their violent acts.

“They are on the Internet all day long where they play their violent video games where they kill hundreds of people a day.”

Update 7:17 a.m. Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel opened his show without an audience Wednesday evening, speaking to the camera uninterrupted for about 10 minutes in an impassioned segment on Uvalde and gun reform.

Kimmel initially got choked up when mentioning the “little boys and girls whose lives have been ended.” He then took aim at Republican lawmakers, Fox News, Sen. Ted Cruz and others over the current state of U.S. gun laws.

“If your solution to children being massacred is armed guards, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on,” he said. “There was an armed guard in Buffalo. There was an armed guard in Parkland. There was an armed guard in Uvalde.”

Update 6:15 a.m. As the tragedy unfolded at Robb Elementary School, a crowd of frustrated onlookers were urging police to charge in and stop the violence, the Associated Press reported.

“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” said Javier Cazares, whose fourth grade daughter, Jaclyn, was killed in the attack.

Categories Guns, Hypocrisy, Propaganda, Texas

Uvalde: Parents Pleaded with Police to Enter the Building and Save Their Children

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2022 //
76

A video was posted on Facebook showing Uvalde parents pleading with police officers in the school grounds to enter the school and stop the shooting. Some wanted to charge into the building on their own. They yelled, they cursed, pleaded, to no avail. The response from the officer they encountered was to push them back. The video is posted on this article in The Washington Post. It will undoubtedly be all over the other news sites soon. (I’m not on FB.)

The police seemed to have no plan. They sat in their patrol cars, waiting for instructions.

As more and more law officers arrived—local, state, and federal—their confusion about what to do and who was in charge must have grown intense.

There was one evil guy with an AR15 and (as the saying goes among gun advocates) more than 100 good guys who had weapons, maybe even their own AR15s. Without action, their presence was not enough to save the 21 souls in the classroom the evil one entered. No one even tried to save them. The decision was made by someone to isolate the classroom instead of entering it.

This is not a time to take pride or offer congratulations on a fast response. This is a time for grief and shame. Grief for those who died at the hands of a heartless killer. Shame for the officials who failed to develop action plans to save those in danger.

Who should be held accountable?

Governor Greg Abbott.

Categories Accountability, Failure, Guns, Texas
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