Armed school police officers. Blocking exercises. High-tech applications for bullying monitoring and student social media posts.
Like many school systems across the country, the school district in Uwalde, Texas, has introduced a number of recommended safety practices, in part to deter school shootings. But they were of little use on Tuesday when a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Rob Elementary School.
The area’s detailed security plan illustrates that despite the widespread “hardening” of schools over the past two decades, mass shootings continue at a disgusting rate.
“These security measures are not effective,” said Jagdish Hubchandani, a professor of public health at the State University of New Mexico who studied school violence. “And they’re not catching up on the easy access people have to get weapons during a pandemic. All records have been broken in arms sales. “
In Uwalde, an area of 4,000 students, the school’s district police department included six officers, one of whom was involved in the police response. But there are questions about how the city and school police coped with the shooter.
Texas neighborhoods like Uwalde have invested heavily in school police and other security measures in recent years. Texas responded to the mass shooting in 2018 at Santa Fe High School with $ 100 million in funding for school safety. In Uwalde, before the shooting, city special forces visited all district schools in “full tactical uniforms,” according to the police’s Facebook page.
But there is little evidence at the national level that dollars invested in these types of preventive measures have reduced gun violence in schools, according to a 2019 study by Professor Khubchandani.
Instead, he writes, they may offer a “false sense of security.”
Socio-emotional strategies, including anti-bullying initiatives, also do not seem to prevent a senseless tragedy. Uwalde had counselors and social workers at his disposal. Threat assessment teams at each school in the area have looked for warning signs of suicide, according to the area’s safety plan.
Combating bullying was a special focus. The district website showed the winners of a recent bilingual harassment prevention poster contest. “Goodness requires courage!” writes one child.
The area uses software called Social Sentinel, which tracks students’ posts on social media about threats, and an app called STOPit, which allows anonymous harassment reports.
These are also common practices.
Ron Avi Astor, an expert on school violence at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that while social and emotional support has improved the school climate as a whole, these strategies – as well as police presence on campus – are insufficient to prevent suicide, often ideologized young men by accessing weapons and carrying out attacks designed to attract fame.
The focus should be on targeting people at high risk for mental health treatment while preventing them from buying or owning weapons, he said.
“We need to start talking about shooters and shooting in different ways,” he added.
In the hours and days following the Uwalde tragedy, many politicians relied on a familiar answer, adding more police action. Officials in Georgia and Virginia have sent additional staff to schools as a precaution. And Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has proposed more armed police in schools.
In Uwalde, the actions of local law enforcement are under surveillance. The visionary told The Times that officers remained outside the building for some time while the shooter was inside, and that parents had called on police to storm the school as soon as possible. The gunman was given access to a classroom and reportedly barricaded there for up to an hour. According to officials, this classroom is the place where all the deaths occurred.
In an interview, Mo Canada, executive director of the National Association of School Resources Employees, said his organization has trained several Uvalde school staff over four years and that they are usually based in secondary schools, not primary schools. He warned not to jump to conclusions about the actions of employees.
Storming a building too quickly could allow an active shooter to escape, he said. And while capturing or killing an active shooter is Plan A, he said, keeping them in a certain area can be an effective Plan B to reduce carnage.
School police exploded in popularity after the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, when Congress began providing federal dollars to campus employees. Nationally, 19 percent of elementary school students, 45 percent of high school students and 67 percent of high school students attend school with a police officer on campus, according to a 2018 report from the Urban Institute.
But when the Congressional Research Service examined the effectiveness of the school police following the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, it concluded that there was little evidence that staff presence had affected crime rates.
Armed school officers attended some of the most scandalous school massacres and were unable to stop these events. Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School on duty in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 was accused of absconding during a shooting that killed 17 people.
During the Columbine shooting, a school resource officer fired at the shooter, but missed.
School police also cause division, in part because black students are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement, even for routine misconduct.
But Mr Canady said school staff had prevented many cases of violence that did not attract widespread attention. He pointed to a database of the National Police Institute, which shows 120 cases of prevented school violence between 2018 and 2020.
Almost every school in the United States conducts blockade training, and this was true in Uwalde. While some survivors of last year’s Oxford High School shooting in Michigan admit that training helped them escape the building quickly, there is little evidence that exercise prevents violence – and many worries from parents, teachers and mental health experts that cause fear and anxiety for children.
There are some simple, inexpensive measures that are protective, according to those who have studied school shootings. One of them is to keep the classroom doors locked, which was a requirement of the Uwalde district.
But it was unclear whether this practice was observed at Robb Elementary on the day of the shooting, when people reportedly entered and left the building for an awards ceremony.
According to the district, the school had a “perimeter fence” designed to restrict access to campus. The safety plan also describes the use of the Raptor visitor management system, which scans visitor identification numbers and checks them against sex offender registries and lists of non-custodial parents.
At a news conference in Uwalde on Wednesday, Texas Vice Governor Dan Patrick praised the district’s security measures, but suggested that an area of improvement could be limiting schools to just one entrance. And after the shooting, New York, the country’s largest school district, said it would consider locking school doors once students arrive for the day. Los Angeles has said it will reduce entry points to schools.
But Professor Khubchandani doubts whether any of these measures will stop a devoted killer with access to weapons.
“It’s like a cure for heart attacks as long as you keep eating poorly instead of eating healthily,” he said. “You prevent it from happening or you don’t.”
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