One day after an 18-year-old shot and killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in the predominately Latino town of Uvalde, Texas, and just days before the start of summer break, shockwaves rippled across the Bay Area’s school communities — illuminating concern over heightened security, mental health needs of students and teachers, and national gun laws.
“This is the final week of school in OUSD, one filled with graduations, fun activities, and lots of joy, laughter, and love. But now, during this joyous season, we learn of another horrific mass shooting, this one at a Texas elementary school,” Kyra Johnson-Trammell, superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District, wrote in a letter to the school community on Tuesday.
Teachers on the front lines grappled with how to form conversations with anxious students while considering what they’ll do if a shooting happens on their watch. Worried parents considered whether to send their kids to school. Students were dolefully reminded of the importance of active-shooter drills.
Roberto Santiago, a Berkeley father of three, wasn’t planning on keeping his kids home from school Wednesday, except for the one who was sick.
But when an email from his oldest child’s school, Oakland School for the Arts, landed in his inbox at 9 a.m., telling him that a student there was, out of “an abundance of caution” being kept off campus after they had shared a photo on social media of shooting a gun, Santiago changed his mind and went to pick up his 13-year-old from the school.
Santiago said it’s possible this student’s social media posting was harmless, but so fresh off the tragedy in Texas he simply didn’t want to take a chance.
“If something did happen, I’d feel awful thinking, ‘I had been warned,’ ” Santiago said Wednesday afternoon.
At the East Side Union High School District in San Jose, Jenny Ludwig, who teaches mostly online independent studies on the Oak Grove High School campus, said that when she received a message on Wednesday morning from the National Association of Psychology directing her to “emphasize that schools are very safe” to her students, she refused.
“I don’t think telling students they’re safe makes them feel safe,” Ludwig said. “I can’t promise them that they’re safe.”
Ludwig said many of her students choose to attend school online because they fear COVID or because of neighborhood and school safety issues, including a recent bomb threat at one of the schools.
“Today, one of my kids was saying that he wants to get a gun as soon as he can … so he can protect himself,” Ludwig said. “And the girls were like, ‘Nobody should have a gun.”
Parents also struggled with the best way to communicate with their children about what happened.
Jenni Kumimoto said she talked about the shooting with her 6-year-old son Ben, a kindergartener at Los Alamitos Elementary School. She said she considered keeping him home Wednesday but then decided against it.
“I tried to reinforce that if there’s an emergency at school, just listen to your grownups, and if they tell you to go hide or evacuate, you need to do what they say,” said Kumimoto, a kindergarten teacher at Graystone Elementary in San Jose. “As a teacher, it’s been a hard day for me today — I’ve been holding back tears.”
Kumimoto, who began teaching the same year as the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, said the violence has made her fearful.
“It’s been this constant anxiety coming to school. I hear a knock on the door and my heart skips a beat, and I think, ‘Who’s there?’ ” she said.
When she picked up Ben on Wednesday, the kindergartener said he had been “nervous” about going to school because he thought “maybe somebody would come to my school.”
Eight-year-old Josiah, son of Hercules resident Destiny Kornegay, said he, too, felt scared going to school at Ohlone Elementary in Hercules because “it could happen at my school any day.” He said he and his mom talked about what to do in an emergency.
“I would go and run away and call my mom,” he said.
Kornegay, who also has a 15-year-old son at Hercules High School and a 10-year-old at Ohlone Elementary, said her family learned about the shooting Tuesday night while watching the news and that her sons asked questions about what had happened.
“I think any school is vulnerable, and until it happens, that’s when the school or the district starts to pay attention or put in measures so it doesn’t happen again,” she said. “I’m sitting here at my kid’s school right now waiting for them, and anyone can just walk on the campus and do harm, and there’s no one there to stop them.”
Michael Stanton, a Latino assistant professor of public health for California State University East Bay, said families and teachers should ensure they’re listening to children and tracking their kids’ behavior and moods. He encourages teachers to meet with students in small group settings and parents to talk to their kids about the incident before they ask.
“The advice I have for teachers are two main things: Get the accurate facts of the case, and get perspective on how likely it is to happen,” Stanton said.
In the wake of the shooting, Bay Area school officials and law enforcement ramped up security at some school campuses. The Contra Costa County Sheriff announced all schools under their support would have an officer from the San Ramon Police, Danville Police or the sheriff’s office there on Wednesday.
For the coming days, officials offered words to help families, teachers and staff cope with feelings of fear, anger and loss.
“The next few days are going to be hard. We will learn more about what happened and grapple with how this came to be. We will feel anger that this continues to happen and nothing is done,” Maricela Guerrero, the executive director of California’s Rocketship Schools, wrote in a letter to staff Wednesday. “We are all leaders and are expected to show up for our students, but we are also all human beings — we are not immune from these experiences. If you are struggling, please reach out for help.”
Santiago said he and his wife decided long ago that they wouldn’t shy away from sharing current events and news with their kids. In previous years, it was less frequent. “We’d be saying, ‘This happens, it’s not going to happen to you, and there are bad people who do terrible things, but it’s rare.’ Not that it’s an acceptable level of violence, but we wanted them to know the odds are you’re going to be okay,” he said.
Now those threats are not so rare. He said he debated whether to tell his 11- and 13-year-old kids about the email from the school but ultimately did when they asked why he picked up the oldest from school early.
“I said it like, “Probably nothing is going to happen at your school, but I felt better coming to get you home,” Santiago recounted as he watched his kids play video games. Tomorrow, he said, the seventh grader has a science final exam.
“I can’t keep them home forever,” he said with a sigh.
Angelica Cabral contributed to this story.
Source: www.mercurynews.com