(TEXAS TRIBUNE) – Katrina Rasmussen was an eighth-grader in North Texas when she saw raw, televised footage of children her age running from her Colorado high school as students and teachers bled and were herded into parked ambulances.
Now, 23 years later, she watched the events of the tragic week in Uvalde unfold as a high school teacher in Dallas and says it’s like nothing has changed since the Columbine High School shooting.
“We feel like we’re at the mercy of people who don’t even know what the classroom is like,” she said.
Across the state, Texas teachers are ending one of the toughest years they have ever seen. A global pandemic has closed schools and forced more than 5 million public school students to use laptops and desktops at home.
This was to be the successful path back to normalcy for public schools. But after two big COVID-19 surges, a year of angry school board meetings, parents claiming teachers were setting children up for abuse, and fights over everything from mask mandates for students to which books can read, the teachers were already at a breaking point with just 500 quit even if it meant losing his license.
Rasmussen said watching the news about the shooting at Robb Elementary School that left 19 children and two teachers dead, including the news conference by Gov. Greg Abbott and other state leaders, he feels like he has no control over how to respond to these mass shootings. .
“People who have never taught before make policies that affect every moment of my day,” he said. “Right now, that’s really what affects me the most.”
Lakeisha Patterson, an elementary school teacher in Deer Park, said it has been exhausting to see so many school shootings over the years. When Columbine happened, she said a shock wave was felt across the country and people came together to demand change and action.
Now, she says she is tired of hearing the words “thoughts and prayers” after every tragedy.
“As a teacher, I am not only responsible for the curriculum, but sometimes I have to be a counselor, a parent, a guardian, an entertainer, a supporter, a nurse, a custodian and now I need to be a police officer,” Patterson said.
A day after an 18-year-old gunman opened fire in a classroom in Uvalde, one of Luaren González’s students asked him a heartbreaking question.
“Miss Gonzalez, are we safe?” her third grade son asked.
Gonzalez, who teaches in the Pasadena Independent School District, felt she had to be strong for her students who were the same ages as those she were killed in Uvalde on Tuesday.
“That really got me,” Gonzalez said, trying to hold back tears. “That was something that really hurt my heart.”
Even before the horrific shooting in Uvalde, the mood among Texas teachers has been one of resignation. Literally.
And that’s on top of the teacher shortage the state was experiencing before the pandemic that is now exacerbated by the return to school forcing Gov. Greg Abbott to create a commission to find solutions.
Public education advocates and teachers themselves fear this latest incident could be the breaking point for teachers who were already considering leaving the profession since the pandemic hit. All while Texas already faces a shortage of teachers.
Teachers have walked away in fear of a shooting happening for years and every time one happens, that fear just keeps growing, said Alejandra Lopez, president of the San Antonio Teachers and Support Staff Alliance.
“We are talking about aggravating crises,” López said. “We have a lack of funds and resources, we have had to endure two years of the pandemic and now the reality of the school shooting.”
There have already been more than 200 mass shootings in 2022, according to The Gun Violence Archive, an independent data collection organization. Teachers, whether here in Texas or elsewhere, feel the pain of shootings in their communities, as schools serve much of the time as a community hub.
Lopez said people need to reject the premise that teachers need to be prepared for these incidents and instead find ways to prevent them from happening altogether. That starts with making it more difficult to get weapons.
Ron Acierno, executive director of the Center for Trauma and Resilience at UTHealth Houston, said it’s “crazy” for people to ask how teachers can be better prepared for this situation when people should be calling for less gun violence and more gun reform. .
“Are we really at that point where that’s a valid question?” Acierno said. “It’s like saying, how can we prepare children to be victims of sexual exploitation or sex trafficking?”
Acierno said that for teachers, the fear or trauma can start with the school shooting drills they practice during the school year, especially for those who have already experienced trauma in the past.
“They’re going into these drills, many of them have already experienced trauma in the depths of their lives,” he said. “They are dealing with the trauma of their students and then you put this on top of stress levels that are already very high.”
Nicholas Westers, a clinical psychologist at Children’s Health in Dallas, said it’s normal for students to feel anxiety about the mass shooting, but parents should keep an eye on it if it continues.
With children already facing behavioral issues from being stuck at home during the pandemic, Westers said that during this time, parents and teachers need to reassure students that they will be safe and explain how to do so.
“We all have physical needs for food, shelter, water,” he said. “That’s the most important thing because if you don’t have that, and nothing else really matters, and right on top of that is security.”
Westers encouraged parents to talk with their children about what they’re feeling, what they’ve heard and what worries them most.
Andrew Hairston, a civil rights attorney and education policy advocate for Texas Appleseed, an organization that works to address systemic inequities in state education, said the next steps should be a robust expansion of mental health experts in schools. schools.
“That should be a priority for lawmakers to alleviate the suffering of teachers and youth to invest in those mental health resources,” Hairston.
Rasmussen, who signed his contract for the upcoming school year on the day the shooting occurred, said he has been considering leaving the profession every year for the past two years.
“This year, I was really casting my net, putting out my resume and doing some deep soul-searching about where I want to be next year,” he said. “Not from the point of view that I don’t like teaching anymore, but from the point of view that I don’t know if I can continue living like this.”
This year, many teachers saw a dramatic increase in behavior problems in classrooms, as students who attended virtual school from their kitchens or bedrooms had to reacquaint themselves with sitting in a classroom away from home for more than seven hours.
That spike in student behavior problems is one reason Darrell Nichols, 30, left his job in April at a Brazos Valley charter school near College Station after teaching for seven years.
“I have been bitten; I have been scratched; I’ve been hit in my line of work over the last two years, with this last year in particular,” Nichols said.
But Nichols, who left teaching to pursue sales, said the past week hit him hard, particularly as he remembers all the active shooting drills he did with his own students every few months. His children are so used to them by now that they don’t even question what they are doing.
“It’s bringing back a lot of old feelings because I had to practice what those teachers were teaching,” Nicholls said, referring to teachers Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles who were killed Tuesday at Robb Elementary School. “I had my children hiding from the window, the door. I would lean against the door with my car keys in hand as a makeshift weapon if I needed to use them.”
He said seeing Abbott and other state leaders come to Uvalde and ask for healing prayers for the community also upset him.
“I didn’t walk into the classroom, on the one hand, to be accused of manipulating my students and, on the other hand, to be asked to bring them an AR-15 magazine,” Nichols said. “And no one I know entered the teaching profession because of that.”
Reporter Jason Beeferman contributed to this story.
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