With a little more than two weeks left before the beginning of the school year, Tina Quintanilla-Taylor drove her 9-year-old daughter, Mehle, past the new school where she was supposed to start fourth grade.

The school is just a mile or so away from the one she attended last year, Robb Elementary School, now permanently closed after a gunman’s shooting rampage left 19 students and two teachers dead. The new school looked clean and welcoming, but Mehle and her mother said they felt uneasy. There were no police officers visible, Mehle said. The newly installed fencing, she said, looked “skinny” and easy to climb.

“I don’t feel safe,” she told her mother. Quintanilla-Taylor has decided to enroll her daughter in online classes approved by the state, as have many other parents in Uvalde, where the trauma of the May 24 shooting still lingers after a summer of mourning.

Some parents said they are also considering private schools, including one operated by Sacred Heart Catholic Church, which began the new school year on August 15 with double its enrollment from last year for students in pre-kindergarten to sixth grade. “They are not ready for the new school year,” Quintanilla-Taylor said.

“Nobody feels safe going back to school.” Parents have been confronting school board members at meetings to demand answers about the flawed police response to the shooting and new security measures to keep students safe at school. A legislative committee that investigated the attack found serious deficiencies in the school’s readiness for a mass shooting, including internal and external doors that were left unlocked, contrary to school protocols, and a five-foot exterior fence that the gunman was able to easily climb over. The committee also found “systemic failures and egregiously poor decision making” on the part of the police officers.

New York Times News Service