As questions persist over what could have been done to prevent the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 children and two teachers were killed on Tuesday, it has emerged that the school district responsible for the institution had more than doubled its security budget in recent years to prevent just such an atrocity happening.
According to its own budget records, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District had upped its investment from $200,000 (£158,666) in 2017 to $435,000 (£345,100) in the present academic year to comply with state legislation introduced in 2019 in the wake of another school massacre in Santa Fe in which eight students and two teachers were murdered.
The district also had a detailed security plan outlined on its website, which pledged that arrangements had been enhanced at local schools through the deployment of its own police force and threat assessment teams, the introduction of a new reporting system and software to monitor red flag social media posts, the installation of new fences and a requirement that teachers lock their classroom doors during lesson time.
Furthermore, the Texas state government had awarded Uvalde a $69,000 (£54,733) grant to be spent on additional measures like metal detectors, security barriers, surveillance systems and “campus-wide active shooter alarm systems,” according to state records.
None of which proved sufficient to stop the shooter, a high school dropout named Salvador Ramos, 18, from crashing a pickup truck nearby, making his way onto school grounds with a rifle unchallenged, entering via an unlocked rear door and barricading himself inside a fourth-grade classroom filled with nine and 10-year-old students.
Ramos, who had no prior criminal record or history of mental illness, fired off multiple rounds during the hour he was locked inside, killing 21 people in the process, all but two of whom were children, and injuring 17 others before a US Border Patrol tactical team broke in and shot him dead.
Local law enforcement has faced sharp criticism over their perceived reluctance to intervene in the siege earlier, with a video posted on Facebook showing distraught parents breaking through yellow police tape and demanding officers enter the building and another on YouTube showing a father having to be restrained and a woman crying: “Why let the children die? There’s shooting in there.”
The school district has so far not answered media inquiries about how its security plan was implemented with the police investigation still ongoing but one of Robb Elementary’s students, Elena Cerrillo, eight, told Reuters the door through which the shooter had entered was usually locked but had been left open on Tuesday morning to allow parents attending a school awards ceremony to come and go.
Kathy Martinez-Prather, director of the Texas School Safety Center, a programme at Texas State University that helps districts develop safety protocols, told NBC: “We can do everything we can to mitigate and prevent school shootings but we are never going to stop these events from happening 100 per cent of the time, because evil exists.
“That said, it is important that we have plans in place, and training and drilling on that plan so that if an event happens at our schools we are ready and prepared to mitigate as much loss of life as possible, or to mitigate it 100 per cent.”
Curtis Lavarello, executive director of the School Safety Advocacy Council, said that the measures listed in Uvalde’s plan appeared to meet national best practice standards but added: “All these systems are only as good as the school that’s using them.”
He continued: “Elementary schools are just as vulnerable as any other school. They should be on the same level and in keeping with school safety practices for the rest of the district.”
The state’s lieutenant governor Dan Patrick has meanwhile insisted that the Uvalde district “has been doing a really good job in trying to protect their students”.
Mr Patrick said the 2019 law, introduced in the wake of the Santa Fe killings, allocated $100m (£79m) for districts to improve security but admitted more needed to be done, suggesting making only one entrance available to visitors to smaller schools.
“No matter what you do, there’s going to be someone to find another area that’s vulnerable,” he said.
This week’s atrocity has reignited the gun control debate in the US, following just 10 days after another teen shooter killed 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, although optimism about seeing real change to fiercely-contested American firearms laws is low given the extent of the influence exerted by the National Rifle Association and other members of the country’s powerful weapons lobby.
US president Joe Biden is scheduled to visit Uvalde on Sunday to grieve with the community and pledge action.
Additional reporting by agencies
