AUSTIN, Texas — The most aggressive of Texas’ four teacher groups is pushing hard, with new survey results, to force Texas lawmakers to do something significant to make Texas schools safe.
The first major mass shooting on a school campus occurred at Columbine High School in 1999. It would be almost two decades before a similar massacre would occur on a Texas school campus. In between, and since, Texas teachers have failed to hold lawmakers accountable for keeping schools safe, President Zeph Capo of Texas AFT told reporters in a virtual news conference on Wednesday morning.
“One of the things that we’ve decided is—for too many times in the past—it’s been too comfortable,” Capo said. “We’ve let people forget about the massacres, the horrible things that have happened in our schools. It’s gotten to the point where we’ve seen so far—at the state level and on the national level—that we have had no substantive action to keep these things from continuing to happen.”
Texas put no more than $100 million into a campaign to “harden schools” after the Santa Fe shooting, a fraction of what is needed, Capo said. It should be a priority to make school campuses safe and to mandate a minimum counselor-to-student ratios on Texas school campuses, not add more law enforcement, Capo said.
“Counseling is a dire need,” said Capo, who also supports a special session on additional education spending. “And it ought to be a legislative top priority when the session starts.”
Gov. Greg Abbott has issued agency directives—sometimes, more than one a day—to address what he considers imperative to avoid repeating the Uvalde mass shooting. First, it increased oversight of school safety plans by the Texas School Safety Center. Then it was additional active shooting training for school district police programs across the state and additional participation in reporting through the iWatch application.
Abbott’s directive to the Health and Human Services Commission on Wednesday was to make sure all children in the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District to have adequate mental health sources. All the state’s mental health resources should be available to help children heal, Abbott said.
Teacher groups agree more mental health resources will help, but they also are focused on the issue Abbott has yet to address: gun control. A recent survey of both school personnel and community members—with 5,000 initial respondents–showed that 77% don’t want teachers armed.
“(U.S. Senator) Ted Cruz’s best advice on how to handle these situations was to arm teachers, and we knew from so many conversations in the past that is an absolutely non-starter with our members and, frankly, most educators across the state of Texas,” Capo said. “But rather than taking my word on it, we wanted to make sure that our members had another opportunity to verify and solidify what we already knew.”
When it comes to specific gun measures, school personnel were even more supportive among the respondents on the Texas AFT survey: 99% supportive comprehensive background checks on all gun purchases; 98% want “red flag” warning laws to take guns away from people in a mental health crisis; and 96% raising the minimum age from 18 to 21, which would stop current student or recent high school dropouts from buying weapons.
Teacher turnover is high, Capo said. It will get higher, if lawmakers continue to insist that more security is the answer to the rising number of school shootings.
Every day since 19 students and 2 teachers died on the Robb Elementary School campus in Uvalde on May 24 has brought fresh revelations about the circumstances around the mass shooting.
On Wednesday, it was the testimony of witnesses of the Uvalde mass shooting before a U.S. House oversight committee: the pediatrician who testified about the carnage high-velocity ammunition has on young bodies; the crying father who begged lawmakers to take away the terror of his daughter, who survived the massacre; and heartbroken parents, in remote testimony, who begged lawmakers to do something about gun control before another mother suffered their loss.
“I’m a reporter, a student, a mom, a runner. I’ve read to my children since they were in the womb,” Kimberly Rubio, sitting with her husband, told the committee. “My husband is a law enforcement officer, an Iraq war veteran who loves fishing and our babies.”
Rubio called on the committee to enact stronger gun controls, including raising age limits on gun purchases and passing “red flag” laws for those who don’t need to possess weapons.
“Somewhere out there, there’s a mom listening to our testimony, thinking, ‘I can’t even imagine their pain,’ not knowing that our reality will one day be hers unless we act now.”