High-energy classrooms are safer than they’ve ever been before, and it’s a problem that I can’t promise. My kids are safe
She said she could not promise that we were going to be safe. “Now I tell my kids, ‘We’re safe.’ I promise.’ I felt like I couldn’t make those promises. And so this year it was, ‘We’re safer than we’ve ever been.’ It is kind of how I put it, because we have the Department of Public Safety on campus all year long. I don’t say, “I promise we’re safe.”
What happens after the drill is over? After calming down the kids who did not take it well and calming herself too? “You continue with your day of teaching,” Ogburn said.
“A lot of them have a problem with that, sometimes it’s a Trigger for them,” he said. “Even though they knew it was coming, because every one of our drills this year was actually announced and prepared for before we had it, like a week before.”
There are safety drills for those who survived the shooting, which is a reenactment of what actually happened.
And the exhausting stress didn’t begin or end in her classroom. Even in the community. News reports of mass shootings around the country continued all year, and a hyper vigilance now follows Ogburn wherever she goes.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/24/1177492668/uvalde-texas-anniversary-shooting-robb-elementary-teacher
What did we learn from a bullying incident? A teacher’s perspective on the incident-to-door-dressing incident in Uvalde, Texas
She said she bought a device that made it impossible for them to open the door. “I bought a curtain to pull down so you can’t see in my door if something was happening. We’ve just thought of more safety this year than how cute my room is going to look.”
There was a lot of yelling and controversy in town. It kind of makes you feel like we’re not strong. “This is tearing our community apart.” “Instead of us doing something positive and coming together, it was literally tearing us apart.”
When I take my daughters to the mall in San Antonio, it always goes through my head; where would we go if something were to happen? Where can we hide? Where could we run to? Where can we shield ourselves from something like this?”
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/24/1177492668/uvalde-texas-anniversary-shooting-robb-elementary-teacher
The story of Uvalde, Texas, the night of the November 11 shooting at Robb Elementary School: A symbol of grief and loss of a loved one
“I’ve had to roll myself out of bed five minutes before I’m supposed to be at work,” she admitted. “Because just that motivation, that desire that I used to have to go to work and teach, it hasn’t been there this year like it had in the past.”
She said she still loves her job, and was excited to see the children again. Do you think it’s the “suck it up” part? She was an adult, so the cope mechanisms worked overtime all year.
The shooting at Robb Elementary has torn at almost every thread that held Uvalde together before the shooting. It also revealed a hole in the town’s social safety net. The shooter, a troubled teenager, hadn’t received the mental health counseling that might’ve kept him from carrying out the massacre. Counseling services were hardly offered in the town.
“If I didn’t go back, why would any of the children that were in my class want to go back to school?” she said. “I had to do what I had to do for my family and so I suck it up.”
She said that she has been diagnosed with a lot of things. I can’t imagine how a child of my age could go through this, how they dealt with it and moved forward. Not moving on, but moving forward from this.”
Even as more mass shootings grabbed headlines throughout the year, Uvalde remained a symbol of grief – a community trying to make sense of the violence, remembering the beloved children and teachers while embracing the traumatized survivors.
The story was so horrible that it frightened a nation that has become numb to mass shootings. The public was horrified by details of distraught parents trying to enter the building, while the police waited for more than an hour outside of the classroom before confronting the shooter.
A Year After a Child: What Do We Need to Do to Keep the Children’s Eyes Away in Uvalde, Texas?
She mentioned that she had a shelf near the door, like she did at Robb last year. I knew I would push that against the door, and then stack chairs. A lot of that stuff went through my head all year long – what can we do just to maybe give us a little more time?”
If there was a repetition of what happened a year ago, she would keep track of the items she could use to barricade the classroom door.
It has been a year since 19 children and two teachers were killed in their classrooms at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
Details about precisely what happened, which victims might have survived if police had acted faster, and why the law enforcement response failed so miserably are the subject of ongoing local, state and federal investigations. Many surviving families are pinning their hopes for closure on their findings. Others aren’t sure. In the meantime, most of the community is suspended in it’s grief, trying to keep a narrative of what happened on that tragic day.
Since their sister Eva was killed in her classroom last year, her sisters have changed their lives.
“I need the peace in my life,” she said. “I’m hoping that’s what it’ll entail at the end of whatever I’m looking for. I’m going to keep trying. I am not sure if I will succeed.
A Year After Uvaldes School Massacre Healing Resires Nelusive: Sandra and Maggie, whose sister Eva was killed in 2005, are still searching for closure
Maggie has turned her house into a sort of shrine to her sister’s memory, with pictures in every room, next to her bed, and in the closets. She stores bins full of stuffed animals and dried flowers from Eva’s funeral and from the memorials that popped up across Uvalde after the tragedy. The sisters wear clothes and jewelry with Eva’s name on them. Each of their SUVs has a special license plate for the day she was killed.
This has been an important part of their healing process. Sometimes it makes them feel better and sometimes it makes them feel like they’re with their sister. The sisters are grasping for a better understanding of what happened in the classroom that day, as they feel swallowed by grief. One of Eva’s students has helped the siblings learn about their sister’s fight to survive. She tried to save a bleeding arm with a plastic bag. She continued to say that she didn’t want to die. But they still have a long way to go.
So they keep searching for ways to piece it all together. On Monday, they visited their sister’s classroom, thinking it might give them a sense of closure. The school district gave them an hour inside. Sandra sat on the floor with her rosary and prayed. The visit raised more questions than it answered.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/24/1177729989/a-year-after-uvaldes-school-massacre-healing-remains-elusive
A Year After Uvaldes School Massacre Healing Remains elusive: Aranda Drives to San Antonio, Not Just in the Nearby Area
Aranda wasn’t directly affected by the tragedy. He’s not even from Uvalde. He lives in San Antonio. He went to Uvalde every weekend after the shooting to leave flowers and reflect, but the massacre made him depressed so he drove 90 minutes from his home.
“Yeah, it’s been a year, but it’s still hard to process it. Did this really happen here? he said. When you come, it gets really cold. To be here and see all these crosses, it hits you like, it’s real, it’s real.”
Still, it’s hard to accept, he said, which is why he visits the town so often. Because he often finds himself drifting away from acceptance. Even if no one else knows who he is, he hopes his presence in town will get the families of the victims to see a flower he has left.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/24/1177729989/a-year-after-uvaldes-school-massacre-healing-remains-elusive
A Year After Uvaldes School Massacre Healing Resires Impossible: A Case Study in Texas, where Shooting Happened
One of the children killed in the massacre was a 10-year-old daughter of Jerry and Veronica Mata. Veronica is not sure if her daughter died instantly or if she would have survived if the police had acted quickly.
She said that “all those ‘what-if’ questions” have prevented her from beginning the healing process. I have to know what happened before I can do that.
The Matas want to heal at some point. They are raising money to create an endowed scholarship in her name. They’ve become among the most active and vocal of Uvalde’s surviving parents to lobby for gun reform. They even took several months of therapy. It was a difficult decision for Jerry.
He said that the therapy helped. But about five months in his therapist delivered the news. She was leaving Uvalde after getting a new job. That was the end for Jerry. He said he won’t start therapy again. He and his wife will continue to fight for the memory of their loved one.
Marian Sokol runs the Children’s Bereavement Center of South Texas, which arrived in Uvalde within hours of the shooting, and eventually opened a permanent counseling center in the town.
People were skeptical of therapy at first. But over the months, more families have signed up — including families of the victims.
There is a lot of pain in the past and what has happened. There is still a lot of anxiety about the future. “Am I safe? Is my child safe? Who will I rely on? And so it’s taken a full year for us to feel comfortable that families will come.”
“And for some, they continue to say, ‘it’s too early. I can barely talk about this. “And we have to respect their process, and that’s OK.”
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/24/1177729989/a-year-after-uvaldes-school-massacre-healing-remains-elusive
Uvalde and the Loss of the Infant – A Legacy of the Singularity-Induced Civil Rights Violation (Revised)
Much of Ronald Garza’s job as a Uvalde county commissioner is to listen to his constituents. A lot of them have expressed to Uvalde that they would like him to turn the page on the tragedy and move on.
“There are some naysayers out there who say, ‘What do the parents want now? Garza asked what they want now. And I remind them, ‘Hey wait a minute.’ You did not lose a child. You didn’t lose a grandchild. You didn’t have to go identify a body maybe with a face blown off, so just back off.’”
Garza said it’s understandable that some in town would want to put it all behind them. They don’t want Uvalde to be forever defined by the tragedy. If the surviving families do not get the answers, accountability and reforms they need, that process cannot begin.