DALLAS — State leaders are parsing the Uvalde shooter’s past, looking for signs that could inform plans aimed at preventing future mass shootings in Texas schools.
Beyond the swirling questions about what happened at Robb Elementary are those about how the massacre will influence state policies related to campus safety. Among them: Will Texas lawmakers push for a school discipline crackdown?
Sen. Charles Perry zeroed in on the issue during a recent marathon legislative hearing. Seven hours in, he looked toward Texas’ top education official.
“I’m going to make a statement that’s gonna get me hate mail,” the Lubbock Republican said. “Not all kids belong in the classroom anymore.”
Texas spent years stepping away from zero-tolerance policies and disciplinary practices that disproportionately kick Black and Hispanic children out of school. Students with disabilities are also punished at higher rates.
Lawmakers learned recently that the Uvalde shooter was often truant. That revelation prodded them into a broader discussion about discipline, with some indicating a desire to revisit how schools handle punishment.
Perry, a member of the education committee, was unavailable for an interview but provided a written statement saying he looks forward to filing legislation next session that “addresses classroom disruptions and disrespect towards teachers and other students.”
“These behaviors are extremely concerning and they cannot be ignored in today’s environment,” he wrote.
Gov. Greg Abbott tasked lawmakers with developing solutions to improve campus security following the Robb Elementary shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers.
Education and civil rights advocates are bracing for attempts to promote zero-tolerance policies, which come with inflexible — and often harsh — punishment for particular offenses. Such discipline doesn’t take into consideration the broader context of the student.
Politicians locally and across the country have responded to previous mass shootings by turning to strategies that the advocates say strengthen the school-to-prison pipeline, which is often described as when the education system pushes children into the criminal justice system rather than into support services that help them.
“They reason that cracking down on students early will help to prevent violence later. This is wrong,” Morgan Craven, of the Intercultural Development Research Association, wrote in a policy brief after Uvalde.
She cautioned that such disciplinary practices result in missed learning time, lower graduation rates and feelings of mistrust and detachment from school. They avoid dealing with the underlying issues contributing to why a student acts out, she wrote.
Texas shifted away from various strict discipline policies in recent years in response to widespread concerns that the state was criminalizing vulnerable students.
Since 2013, legislators have curbed the practice of ticketing students for low-level misdemeanors in schools, decriminalized truancy and banned out-of-school suspensions for students younger than third grade in all but the most serious cases.
“We didn’t undo the truancy criminalization or school ticketing because it was a nice thing to do,” said Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, a backer of these reforms. “It was because hundreds of thousands of unnecessary tickets were being written mostly to students of color.”
Texas school officials still can send students to alternative schools or expel them for a variety of offenses. Some incidents will trigger automatic removal, such as a student bringing a gun or other deadly weapon to campus.
At the Uvalde hearings, an exchange between Perry and Education Commissioner Mike Morath may serve as a preview of the debates to come.
“Our truancy law reform we did a few sessions back, along with a lot of other things, have allowed students to become disciplinary problems that, in the past, under the ‘broken windows theory’ … would have been disciplined,” Perry said.
“Broken windows” refers to a controversial theory of policing that asserts cracking down on small problems could prevent larger criminal issues. Research has suggested it contributes to racially discriminatory outcomes.
Perry described the theory as: “No offense should go unchecked because they just ramp up from there.”
The senator asked Morath if the education system doesn’t approach discipline with that mindset anymore.
“It’s not that we don’t do it anymore, but some of the tools that were used previously are no longer available,” Morath told Perry at the committee hearing.
Perry suggested it might be time to “go back and get those tools.”
A June 2020 federal report found no empirical research in the last decade that directly examined the link between school discipline and school shootings. The Government Accountability Office’s report noted that it is difficult to isolate the effect of any one variable in a school shooting.
“After any tragedy like this, everyone virtually is saying, ‘What shall we do? How do we stop this?’ ” said Russ Skiba, professor emeritus at Indiana University and former director of the school’s Equity Project. Skiba has studied zero tolerance and school violence for over 25 years.
Some politicians, he said, “take that and use it to try and reapply their favorite ideological approaches, which have not been shown to have any evidence basis, which have not been shown to contribute in any way to school safety or reduction in student disruption.”
Another shooting
Shootings affect the way school leaders, pundits and families think about discipline.
After Columbine, Skiba said, educators took different approaches. Some felt they had to crack down hard, he recalled, while others took it as a motivator, saying, “We can’t punish our way out of this. What can we do to lead to better climates for kids?”
The push-and-pull continues more than two decades later.
After the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High shooting in 2018, then-President Donald Trump and other conservatives lambasted Obama-era guidance that had sought to curb the disproportionate suspensions and expulsions that students of color face.
The Trump administration dumped the policy.
A gunman killed 10 people at Santa Fe High School, near Houston, that same year.
Abbott responded by assembling a 40-point list of recommendations to improve school safety, which included expanding the list of offenses that allow administrators to kick students off of campuses. The report noted that superintendents and educators discussed potential zero-tolerance policies for serious threats.
“They indicated that they feel hamstrung by the current laws of the state and are forced to keep students in classrooms who represent a threat to themselves, teachers, or other students,” the report read.
Lawmakers ultimately added the harassment of school employees to the list of offenses that could trigger removal.
Advocates raised concerns after both Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Santa Fe about the direction the school safety debate was heading.
Texas Appleseed published a 2018 report that found in the months after Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Texas saw a dramatic spike in students referred to juvenile probation departments.
Schools reported a 156% increase in referrals for “terroristic threat” and a 600% jump for exhibition of firearms, which doesn’t require actual weapon possession. The report noted that two-thirds of those referrals were for threatening to use a weapon, as opposed to possessing one.
The biggest rise in referrals involved children 10 to 13 years old. Black students were more than twice as likely as others to be referred to juvenile probation for such charges.
The Texas Appleseed report referenced a 15-year-old student removed from school and arrested for allegedly making a bomb threat in class. When the student’s teacher asked him to remove his backpack that morning, he responded, “It’s not like it’s going to blow up,” according to The Texas Tribune.
The teen — who has ADHD and anxiety — missed two weeks of school and spent a couple of days in juvenile detention. The criminal charges were dropped, the news outlet reported.
“A zero tolerance approach that fails to distinguish between transient and substantive threats, arresting every student who makes a threat, makes poor use of expensive law enforcement and juvenile and criminal justice system resources and unnecessarily criminalizes students,” the report states.
When the issue of disproportionality came up at the Senate hearing, Perry pushed back.
“We just need to deal with these kids. I don’t care what race or otherwise they are, if they’re disruptive kids, regardless of their ethnic history, they need to be dealt with,” he said. “And that goes for affluent kids all the way down to the poverty kids and all up and down the middle.”
Advocates say they understand the need to act after the Uvalde tragedy and that families want measures ensuring kids remain safe in school.
“I am worried that we’re seeing a swing back to this kind of tough approach that Texas tried,” Texas Appleseed’s Deborah Fowler said. “It failed.”
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(The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Todd A. Williams Family Foundation and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.)
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