PROVIDENCE — It was supposed to be a joyful event. But a Christmas tree and menorah lighting scheduled for late Sunday afternoon at Lippitt Memorial Park was turned into a vigil for the victims of Saturday’s shooting at Brown University.

Despite the mid-20-degree weather and falling snow in Providence, over 200 people gathered to light candles to honor the two students who were killed and nine others who were wounded inside the Barus and Holley engineering building.

Councilor Sue AnderBois began the holiday event at the park near the Pawtucket line last year.

“Instead, we are gathered here to share light with one another in one of Providence’s darkest times,” AnderBois told the crowd. “We’re here together to be together and to support.”

AnderBois was joined by several of Rhode Island’s elected officials including Gov. Dan McKee, who earlier in the afternoon ordered flags at all state buildings and facilities to be lowered to half-staff as a sign of respect for the victims of the shooting.

McKee did not speak during the vigil, nor did most elected officials in attendance. Remarks during the 10-minute ceremony were given by AnderBois, Mayor Brett Smiley and Sarah Mack, senior rabbi of Temple Beth-El near Wayland Square in Providence.

Smiley, who converted to Judaism last year, invoked the first night of Hanukkah in his remarks, noting that the initial lighting of the menorah represents a small spark that grows into a bright light by the end of the eight-night festival. He said he hoped the vigil would be “the first little flicker for our community to start to heal and get better together.”

“It’s going to be a long road, but what I know about this community is that we will be here for one another,” Smiley said.

Mack similarly spoke of the need for Rhode Islanders to come together as a way to provide light in these dark times.

“We can use our light to kindle other lights — to care for one another,” she said. “That is how we get through this dark moment.”

After Mack concluded her speech, the crowd spontaneously began to sing “Amazing Grace.” Officials had no further press briefings scheduled for Sunday night on the status of their investigation.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Rhode Island Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janine L. Weisman for questions: info@rhodeislandcurrent.com.

The 61-year-old retiree and former cop — who had a penchant for posting provocative progressive memes that made him stand out in his deeply conservative community southwest of Nashville — was to shoot up a local school. 

The evidence, which the county’s elected sheriff used to hold Bushart in a cell on a $2 million bond until last week, is a meme accusing President Donald Trump of dismissing the lives lost in a 2024 school shooting in Perry, Iowa, while pushing punishment for critics of slain right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk.

The charges were dropped and Bushart was released from the Perry County Jail in Linden, Tennessee, only after Sheriff Nick Weems acknowledged in a TV interview that Weems initially claimed that Bushart’s post set off “mass hysteria” that he was plotting a shooting at the local Perry County High School. 

The high-profile arrest appears to be part of a broader crackdown by Republican lawmakers — including the Trump administration —��on Americans whose social media posts about Kirk’s killing��they found to be offensive. Among them are in violation of the First Amendment for online posts about Kirk’s Sept. 10 death. Bushart’s case is an extreme example, civil rights advocates said, and may be the only one where someone has wound up in handcuffs. He

“This guy should never have been arrested in the first place, but the second that there was real scrutiny of the meme that he posted — and it was very apparent that he was not in any way suggesting that he intended to commit a school shooting or anything like that — he should have been released immediately,” said Brian Hauss, an American Civil Liberties Union senior staff attorney who focuses on free speech issues and called Bushart’s arrest “an absolute travesty.”&�Բ�����;

Bushart’s arrest calls attention to applying strict penalties for school shooting threats and mandating police officer involvement in campus threat assessments intended to ferret out students with violent plans before they act. The bipartisan laws, passed in the wake of the 2023 mass school shooting at a Christian elementary school in Nashville, have led to a wave of student arrests and have similarly become the subject of . 

The state’s new and “incredibly broad” laws can be used as a “convenient tool,” Hauss said, for law enforcement officials with “political grudges to settle.”&�Բ�����;

Weems, himself an avid Facebook user who warned after Kirk’s death that “evil could be standing right beside you in the grocery store,” didn’t respond to interview requests. Neither did Bushart nor the local school district. 

While Bushart’s school days are long behind him, his case is a prime example of why police shouldn’t be “part of the broader role of educators” in scrutinizing students’ behaviors to distinguish an “off-the-cuff remark of a frustrated student” from a threat of violence, said Dan Losen, a senior director at the National Center for Youth Law who has spent more than two decades researching school discipline policies and the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.  

“Once the police are involved, they’re entrenched,” Losen said, adding that officers can make arrests even without the support of educators on threat assessment teams. While law enforcement should be called in threatening circumstances, he said there’s a greater risk for “law enforcement to abuse their authority” if they’re regularly asked to evaluate student conduct through a policing mindset. 

“They can, at any point, decide that a student is a threat,” Losen said. “They can go after people that they don’t like — they can go after their kids.”

Losen said he initially saw value in school-based threat assessments as “a clear process” to evaluate students’ conduct and react appropriately. In recent years, however, he’s come to believe the research supporting the model lacks rigor and that it’s led to a surge in unjust suspensions and arrests —

‘I don’t care, I want him arrested’

In states across the country, police officers have become routinely involved in evaluating students’ behaviors and motives as members of formal campus-based behavioral threat assessment teams. School-based threat assessments have become mainstream, particularly in the aftermath of the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Schools nationally have assembled teams of teachers, mental health officials, police and other campus adults to identify students who pose safety threats and intervene with counseling and other services — and sometimes arrests — before anyone commits violence. 

Such teams are used in 85% of schools across the U.S., by the nonprofit Learning Policy Institute. Forty-five states have policies that establish the teams in public schools, the report states, and 20 have laws requiring them. 

District leaders have also turned to technology for school safety, using artificial intelligence-powered surveillance tools to scan social media websites in search of posts that could spell danger. 

Threat assessments have prompted concerns from civil rights groups that the method could misidentify struggling students as future gunmen and unnecessarily push them into the juvenile justice system. School shootings are statistically rare yet student behaviors that are often factors in threat assessments — like alcohol use and a history of mental health issues — are exceedingly common.

In 2023, Tennessee lawmakers passed rules requiring every school to have threat assessment teams that included police officers. That same year, lawmakers established mandatory yearlong expulsions for students who make violent threats against schools. In 2024, lawmakers increased the penalty for threats against schools from a misdemeanor to a felony. Georgia and New Mexico have since . 

The changes have led to , according to reporting by The Tennessean. Last year, 518 students statewide were arrested under the new law, 71 of them between the ages of 7 and 11. Some of the arrests were preceded, the outlet reported, by ill-advised jokes and statements erroneously perceived as threats. 

In one case, a high school student was arrested for allegedly making a “Hitler salute” and, despite a lack of evidence, the principal said “I don’t care, I want him arrested.” The teen was reportedly taken into custody, strip-searched and placed in solitary confinement at the local juvenile jail. 

When speech becomes a ‘true threat’

The rate of school shootings has surged in recent years, yet early interventions have received credit for saving lives in several instances. 

In September, the nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise — which was formed in the wake of the 2012 mass school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 20 first graders and six school staffers dead — boasted of .

A high school student reported to the Say Something Anonymous Reporting System “detailed threats on social media,” to shoot up a local school complete with images of ammunition, a mapped-out attack plan and access to a gun, according to the nonprofit, which notified a local school district response team. The student who made the alleged threats was ultimately detained by the police. 

Sandy Hook Promise claims the incident is the 19th planned school shooting they’ve prevented since 2018. School shootings are , a majority of whom leak their violent plans to people around them in advance, offering officials a window to act. 

Mo Canady, the executive director of the nonprofit National Association of School Resource Officers, said the police play a critical role in assessing school threats and preventing campus violence. Canady acknowledged that social media, in particular, “is not an easy environment to navigate” when trying to decipher whether someone’s speech constitutes a threat.

But the focus needs to be placed on keeping campuses safe, he said, rather than “being hyperfocused on, ‘Oh my gosh, am I violating someone’s First Amendment rights?” 

“People have a right to say what they want to say, but there are also consequences at times to what they say,” Canady said. “From a behavioral threat assessment standpoint, I don’t think there’s ever an intent there to try to squish anyone’s First Amendment rights. That’s not what this is about.”

In its new report on school-based threat assessments, the Learning Policy Institute concluded that the approach appears effective in preventing violence at schools where it’s implemented with high fidelity and where educators receive instruction from expert trainers. In the absence of adequate staff and training, educators often turn to suspensions, expulsions and arrests to handle students who are viewed as problematic. 

Poorly designed assessments have led to concerns they “may target and potentially traumatize the most vulnerable students, including through the exclusion and criminalization of historically marginalized students.”&�Բ�����;

It also called for additional research into threat assessments, noting that much of the existing evidence supporting them comes from a team of University of Virginia researchers who developed a model used in schools nationwide. In one 2021 study, resulted in low student disciplinary rates and didn’t exhibit racial disparities in outcomes. 

Psychologist Dewey Cornell, the principal author of the university’s Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines, declined an interview request, but argued that First Amendment implications were rare.

“Free speech objections to threat assessment don’t come up very often in school threat settings,” Cornell wrote The 74 in an email. “There is case law on how threats are excluded from free speech protections.”&�Բ�����;

The Supreme Court has set a high bar for what constitutes a “true threat,” and the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank, said Bushart’s Facebook post fell . In a 1969 Supreme Court opinion, the group noted, the nation’s top court “made it crystal clear that only true threats are exempt from the freedom of speech — not hyperbole and political bombast.”

 In 2023, the Supreme Court further strengthened First Amendment protections, finding someone can only make a “true threat” if they knowingly disregard a “substantial risk” that their speech would cause harm. 

In Bushart’s case, it doesn’t matter whether the sheriff’s actions were the result of a misunderstanding about the intent behind the Facebook post or an effort to censor speech he found objectionable, the ACLU’s Hauss said. The monthlong confinement violated the Tennessee citizen’s constitutional rights. 

Hauss said he understands “the very serious security concerns when it comes to school shootings.” But campus safety matters, he said, “should not be left up to people who can’t distinguish political speech from threats of violence.”

Babies and children in the United States are nearly twice as likely to die before reaching adulthood compared with their peers in other wealthy countries, according to .

The health of U.S. children has deteriorated since the early 2000s across a range of measures, researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of California, Los Angeles found. They published their findings last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study compared infant and child deaths in the U.S. with the figures from 18 other high-income nations between 2007 to 2023.

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U.S. infants, children and teens were about 1.8 times more likely to die before reaching adulthood compared with young people in peer countries, researchers discovered.

For babies, the two causes of death with the biggest gaps between the U.S. and the other countries were prematurity — — and.

For children and teens, the biggest gaps were in firearm-related incidents and car crashes.

Since 2020, gun violence for U.S. children and teens. Firearm death rates among U.S. kids have

Many of the deaths from prematurity, firearms and sudden unexplained infant death, three physicians argued in an op-ed published after the new report.

Those three causes of death are among Black youth than their white counterparts.

The authors estimated the mortality gap between the U.S. and other countries claimed the lives of nearly 316,000 children and teens between 2007 and 2023.

The study also found that rates of chronic conditions including obesity, early puberty, trouble sleeping, limitations in activity, depressive symptoms and loneliness all increased in children during the study period.

Overall, Americans have than residents of other wealthy�� countries, even though the U.S. spends nearly twice as much on health care, relative to its gross domestic product.

To improve infant and child health, the authors of the op-ed proposed antipoverty measures such as child tax credits; social media restrictions; broader health insurance coverage; more investment in primary care; and more restrictive firearm laws.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

As students across the country return to school, a mass school shooting in Minneapolis has again reignited debates about����in the U.S.,�� — and youth embrace of��

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz this week announced plans to convene a  in the wake of the Annunciation Catholic School shooting that took place while students attended an annual Mass to kick off the new academic year. Two children were killed and 21 people, 18 of them students, were injured.

Vice President JD��Vance and his wife went to the church Wednesday,����and visited one of the hospitalized young survivors. The injured girl’s father,��Harry Kaiser, questioned Vance on whether he would “earnestly support the study of what is wrong with our culture, that we are the country that has the worst mass shooter problem?”��

As has happened in shooting after shooting, attention quickly turned to the assailant’s online presence as people sought to understand what could motivate such a heinous act. On social media,  — from anti-Christian hate to the radicalization of transgender people — reached millions of eyeballs.

The 23-year-old perpetrator died by suicide after the rampage. Like other shooters, the Minneapolis attacker  indicating mental health struggles, suicidal ideation and, perhaps most importantly, a . 

The attacker “appeared to hate all of us,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said during a briefing. “More than anything, .”

In the news

A ‘catastrophic’ hack:��Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit Wednesday against education technology giant PowerSchool, which fell victim to a massive cyberattack last year that compromised the sensitive data of some 60 million students and 10 million educators globally. The state alleges the breach, which affected some 880,000 Texas��teachers and students, occurred because PowerSchool “failed to implement even the most basic security features.” |��

• The move is the latest in a slew of lawsuits from parents, students and school districts adversely affected by the massive hack. |��The 74
• Matthew Lane, a 19-year-old from Massachusetts, is scheduled to be sentenced in federal court next week after pleading guilty to the extortion scheme over the summer. |��

As Texas and other Republican-controlled states seek to erode the separation of church and state by endorsing Protestant Christianity over other faiths, Paxton has urged students to use a new law allowing prayer time in public schools to practice the Lord’s Prayer “as taught by Jesus Christ.” | 

Victims speak out: Haley Robson, who was 16 when she was first sexually abused by financier Jeffrey Epstein, recounted on Wednesday how she was forced to recruit young victims from her high school. | 

Florida’s surgeon general announced plans to end state vaccine mandates for children attending public schools, while officials in California, Oregon and Washington joined forces to preserve access to the life-saving shots. | 

The Los Angeles school district has settled a lawsuit filed by parents who allege the pandemic-era remote learning policies of the country’s second-largest K-12 public education system discriminated against students of color, English learners and those with disabilities. | 

The Walt Disney Company has agreed to pay $10 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit over alleged children’s privacy violations after the entertainment behemoth improperly uploaded kid-focused videos to YouTube and enabled targeted advertising. | 

• Meanwhile, the FTC announced a settlement with a Chinese robot toy manufacturer accused of illegally collecting U.S. children’s location data. |��

Stainless steel water bottles made by Stanley and Yeti are all the rage. But this New York district says they’re a no-go on campus — claiming they pose safety risks. | 

Trump vs. trans kids: As the administration seeks to clamp down on districts that don’t inform parents when their children identify as transgender at school, the Education Department revived an obscure 12-year-old privacy case to access district emails. | The 74

• Two Northern Virginia school districts have sued the Trump administration challenging the federal government’s assertion that policies allowing transgender students to use restrooms and locker facilities violate anti-discrimination laws. |��
  • The legal dispute has been fodder in the state’s gubernatorial race, in which Republican candidate Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears has placed anti-trans bathroom policies among her top campaign issues. |��The 74

• In South Carolina, state officials filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court after an appeals court blocked enforcement of a new law denying trans youth access to facilities that align with their gender identity. |��
• The Trump administration warned officials in 40 states they could lose federal funding unless they scrap lessons from sexual education materials that focus on LGBTQ+ issues. |����

An online group that calls itself Purgatory has claimed responsibility for a string of swatting calls that drew massive law enforcement responses to college campuses at the start of the new academic year. | 

In a middle-of-the-night operation, the Trump administration scooped up 76 unaccompanied minors as they slept at federal shelters, in a deportation bid that was then temporarily blocked by a federal judge. | 

A new Florida law will require educators to get parents’ permission before spanking students as a form of school discipline. | 

• Student activists lobbied for the law after an investigation by The 74 revealed that Florida educators most often used corporal punishment to address minor infractions like “excessive talking,” “insubordination” and “horseplay.” |��The 74��

ICYMI @The74

Confusion as Kids Head Back to School and RFK Jr. Calls the Shots on Vaccines

Kids Shouldn’t Access Social Media Until They’re Old Enough to Drive, Book Says

Emotional Support

Sinead ponders summer’s end while boating over Labor Day weekend.��: Kathy Moore

Following that heartbreaking tragedy, I saw the outline of an approach that has developed further since my time operating on the frontlines of trauma response and recovery. The steps we take to prevent violence and tragedy in schools matter. These steps matter because prevention makes terrible situations less likely to occur; and when they do happen, the prevention protocols in place minimize physical and psychological harm.

We call this planning “precovery,” which can be defined as strategies and actions to prevent and to limit harm to the school community. It has in the aftermath of disasters and mass violence that students and adults suffer from emotional distress, cognitive impairment, and a range of behavioral changes. In students, the reactions include school absence, emotional withdrawal, depression, and traumatic stress. In some cases, abusive, hostile, and aggressive behaviors develop after students are victim or witness to violence or the threat of violence.

This is no small problem. In 2020, the National Center for Education Statistics found that 77% of all schools in the U.S. grappled with at least one act of violence on the school campus. In addition, the rate of school shootings has risen over the past 20 years. Natural disasters like wildfires have increased in numbers and intensity, destroying homes, hospitals, churches, and schools as well as other vital institutions representing places of safety. As one of those institutions that function ‘in loco parentis’, schools must make precovery a watchword. 

Michelle Kefford, principal of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida, gave this sage advice after commemorating the seventh year after the massacre of students and staff in her high school: “Don’t wait until tragedy takes place. Take precovery seriously. Start now!” 

Recognizing this, the policy and procedures bulletin for the LAUSD Crisis Intervention in Schools has been regularly revised and updated since originally written in 1984. Annual training of the crisis teams is based on the updated policy bulletin.����

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Any precovery work must have the following essential elements: a clear action plan shared with staff, a process to put policies and procedures in place to prevent harm, a review process to improve established procedures using lessons learned from schools that have suffered from mass violence or destructive natural disasters, and training for educators to prepare them to participate in the recovery process and maximize the return of all students to the classroom. 

A prominent survey in my field once asked educators about their school safety plans. At the administrative level, everything appeared to be in order: School leaders reported that the plans were in place, they were updated, and they were understood. The plan was located in a binder in the front office.

However, as researchers posed the same questions to faculty and other staff, massive gaps in communication became clear. Although staff members knew that there was a plan, somewhere out there, they did not know what it contained or what their role was should a shooting or disaster occur. Many indicated that in a widespread disaster they would be torn between their responsibility to the students in their classrooms and their responsibility to ensure the safety of their own children and families. 

Building and maintaining a strong foundation for precovery requires:

•  Establishing trusting relationships with all school stakeholders – students, educators, parents, and the community.
• Establishing open channels of calm and helpful communication.
•  Building and maintaining crisis response and recovery infrastructure with meaningful policies, roles and responsibility that are spelled out in advance, giving educators the opportunity to plan for both classroom and family safety.
• Expanding capacity to train staff in their individual roles as well as in a variety of prevention and intervention scenarios.
  

For students, open communication and meaningful connections are invitations to seek help when they’re in distress, reducing the feelings of isolation that can lead to harmful behaviors. Simultaneously, these relationships enhance an entire school community’s capacity for early intervention, as teachers and peers are more likely to recognize warning signs of trauma and to reach out to troubled students with help and support.

At a time when roughly are reporting at least one violent incident each school year and natural disasters are intensifying, we need more proactive safety measures in place. Precovery strategies offer schools the means to reduce or nullify potential threats and extreme anxiety, social and emotional pain before they escalate. 

Being able to navigate both personal and community crises with the support of a school system that protects all members of the learning community and plans ahead builds resilience in the face of future adversity. Over the past 40 years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has been exemplary in these efforts.

The most recent example of precovery can be seen in the many steps that the Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD) took in advance of the devastating Eaton Wildfire that destroyed homes, businesses, and schools. In the past three years, district leaders created and maintained effective school and district-level crisis teams. They implemented training for staff in that expanded knowledge about trauma recovery.

They provided training to staff in an evidence-based intervention designed to reduce the distress of students who have experienced a traumatic event and restore their ability to return to school in a safe and supportive environment. All of these actions created a comprehensive precovery action agenda that prepared the district and its educators to welcome 9,000 students who had experienced evacuations and, for some, the loss of their homes and schools.

We may not know how long recovery from this widespread disaster will take, but we do know that putting precovery into action not only prevents trauma from becoming worse, it also helps to heal it.

The world is a messy place. Most of us figure this out by the time we hit adulthood: However compelling our convictions, however good our intentions, humans are constantly tripping into one another. What looks like virtuous, upstanding behavior through our eyes — always looks different to others. Worse yet, sometimes the Good Thing to Do in a moment can be all but impossible to discern. Do you tell the truth now, even if that causes your friend pain? Do you tell them later, even if your delay hurts many more people? Do you turn to violence to stop the violence of others — and if so, how much?��

Pretty much every moral tradition is clear that harm to children is among the gravest misdeeds. This isn’t complicated. Children merit unique protective cushions because of their enormous potential. How they develop now will shape their — and our — future. Further, children cannot deserve harm. They’re morally blameless — . As messy as the world is, it’s obvious that adults shouldn’t hurt children. Further, systems that are somehow violating this — bombing them, shooting them, starving them, injuring them — are also fundamentally wrong. There are no legitimate excuses. End of discussion. 

Hold that close to your heart as you reflect on the Trump administration’s recent decision to open K–12 campuses to armed enforcement actions. For 14 years, the U.S. federal government had recommended that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents should steer clear of “” like schools, but also churches, hospitals and other community centers. Immediately after taking power, , opening schools across the country to immigration raids. 

To understand the behind this change, it’s worth understanding why officials ever avoided conducting enforcement at these locations. It’s not that federal leaders were reluctant to carry out U.S. laws, rather, it’s that they wanted to separate the potentially dangerous, complex work of immigration enforcement activity from disrupting children’s daily lives. 

As , “We can accomplish our law enforcement mission without denying individuals access to needed medical care, children access to their schools, the displaced access to food and shelter, people of faith access to their places of worship, and more. Adherence to this principle is a bedrock of our stature as public servants.”

Again: Protecting kids is a paramount moral concern. And in 2025, it’s clear that U.S. adults have collectively failed in that task. Today’s K–12 students have weathered the academic and social strains of a deadly global pandemic. They attend school in an era when campus shootings are regularly in the news and natural disasters amplified by climate change have decimated their communities and shuttered their classrooms in places like , and . They’ve watched violent assaults on representative government being not just normalized as part of U.S. politics — but excused and even celebrated by the leaders of one of our major political parties. Is it any wonder that children’s mental health ?

The kids are not all right. This is a terrible moment to introduce more uncertainty and instability into their lives. At least one major district is pushing back. Denver Public Schools this week to keep ICE agents out of schools, with the school board president noting, “Scared children can’t learn.”

Obviously, the Trump administration’s new ICE-in-Your- Classrooms policy could be stressful for children of immigrants, who are uniquely sensitive to the possible consequences of these raids. Research has that increased immigration enforcement activity around children of immigrants . In the weeks since Trump’s order, , regardless of the specific state of their family’s documentation, . 

And yet, this new policy affects all children. , “This administration is breaking with the idea that schools should be an accepting and reassuring space for young people.” Children don’t have to have an immigrant parent to struggle with this moment. It’s hard to imagine how armed law enforcement activity on campus could help them feel safer or help them learn more, especially as the most recent round of math and reading scores have confirmed that the country’s students are falling further off pace, academically speaking. 

Of course, that’s perhaps the point. The new administration’s K–12 education plans are thin (at best) when it comes to proposals for improving how schools support children’s academic achievement. , Trump and his deputies are and . 

This won’t make communities safer or improve kids’ academic performance. Research , shows that are major to their . It also has found that culturally and linguistically diverse kids are some of U.S. schools’ best students, whose presence appears to academic achievement . 

If this debate still seems complicated: remember that the world’s messy. U.S. immigration laws, , should be enforced. Meanwhile, our kids — currently overcoming generationally awful obstacles — deserve to feel safe and secure enough to focus on learning. 

But anyone who reflects on those two public priorities and concludes that children’s well-being is of secondary importance is betraying the depravity of their moral compass. They are showing that they do not, however much they protest, understand what it means to put students first. 

Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a Founding Partner at the Children’s Equity Project, and a father to three public school students. These views are his alone and do not reflect his employers or any organizations with which he may be affiliated. 

The shooter, who was identified as Solomon Henderson, 17, shot two students in the cafeteria at 11:09 a.m. before killing himself, according to police. Josselin Corea Escalante, 16, was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead. The other, a male, suffered a grazing wound.

Metro Nashville Public Schools Director Adrienne Battle released a statement Wednesday evening saying:��“This is a heartbreaking day for the entire Antioch High School community and all of us in Nashville Public Schools. My heart goes out to the families of our students as they face unimaginable loss. I want to thank the school staff who quickly and heroically followed emergency protocols, potentially preventing further harm, as well as the Metro Nashville Police Department and Nashville Fire Department for their swift and urgent response.

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“While we have been focused on addressing the immediate situation, we are committed to understanding how and why this happened and what more we can do to prevent such tragedies in the future. It’s important to remember that our schools have historically been safe places for learning, friendship, and growth. We cannot allow this tragedy to overshadow the positive experiences of our 80,000 students.”

Antioch High School will be closed for the rest of the week to give students time to grieve, Battle said, and grief counseling will be provided there and at other schools, which will remain open.

“We are committed to supporting Antioch High School’s students, staff, and families in the days and weeks ahead. I am grateful for the support of our Nashville community as we navigate this difficult time together,” she said.

The shooting comes almost two years after three 9-year-old students and three staff members were shot to death at in Nashville before police intervened and killed the shooter.

It also comes just three months after a killed a 24-year-old man, and injured six adults and three teenagers.

Wednesday’s shooting drew renewed grief from lawmakers, along with some pleas for “common sense gun safety solutions.”

“As a mother and a representative of this community, I grieve with the families, students, and staff who are enduring this unimaginable tragedy,” said Sen. Charlane Oliver, a Nashville Democrat who represents the Antioch area in the state legislature, in a statement. “My heart goes out to the victims who were shot, their loved ones, and everyone impacted by this horrific act of violence. No child should ever feel unsafe in their school, and no family should face the anguish of such a senseless loss.”

Other elected officials took to social media following the shooting.

Gov. Bill Lee said “he was praying for the victims, their families and the school community.”

State Sen. Jeff Yarbro, a Nashville Democrat, called for the legislature to “start doing the work needed to keep kids safe.”

“High school kids really ought to be able to go to the cafeteria without fear of being shot,” Yarbro said.

Nashville State Rep. John Ray Clemmons, the state House Democratic Caucus chair, echoed Yarbro’s sentiments.

“We will continue to fight for common sense gun safety solutions that protect our children and communities from gun violence,” Clemmons wrote.

Antioch High School serves about 2,200 students speaking 41 languages, and offers STEM programs and an international baccalaureate curriculum. School buses have taken students to be reunified with parents at Ascension St. Thomas Hospital, 3754 Murfreesboro Rd.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

(Cassandra Stephenson and Adam Friedman contributed to this story.)

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com.

When a broad group of parents, educators and activists met in late October at a government office building in Arlington, Virginia, they gathered around a shared goal: Make America’s schools safer. 

There, three parents whose children were killed in mass school shootings sought to bolster student mental health and crisis intervention services. Some advocates favored increased school policing and physical security while others sought to limit how those hardening measures can harm children’s civil rights. Each was there as a check on recommendations being made by the federal government.

But membership on the 26-person committee, which was created through the — passed in the wake of mass shootings at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket — was short-lived. On Monday, the first day of President Donald Trump’s second term, all members were terminated. For members of the Federal School Safety Clearinghouse External Advisory Board, the October gathering was the group’s first time meeting — and also its last. 

A letter signed by Acting Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman and obtained by The 74 said the decision was part of a wider effort to ensure the agency’s “activities prioritize our national security.”&�Բ�����;

“Future committee activities will be focused on advancing our critical mission to protect the homeland and support DHS’s strategic priorities,” Huffman wrote in the letter. “To outgoing advisory board members, you are welcome to reapply, thank you for your service.”

In an email to The 74, a senior official with the Department of Homeland Security said the agency “will no longer tolerate any advisory committee which push[es] agendas that attempt to undermine its national security mission, the President’s agenda or Constitutional rights of Americans.” The official did not elaborate on how the committees may be undermining the new administration’s mission. But Trump and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, the president’s pick for homeland security secretary, have made clear their priorities for DHS are and to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which steers the school safety clearinghouse. 

In fact, DHS this week to eliminate what it deemed as “the misuse of resources,” including those focused on emergency preparedness and cybersecurity. The move comes as schools and nationwide face .

But school safety committee members who spoke with The 74 said the group included experts from diverse perspectives — all focused on ensuring the effectiveness of a federal school safety initiative created during Trump’s first term. While the advisory board was created by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a sweeping $1.4 billion law that includes stricter gun control measures and violence prevention programs, its purpose was to provide expertise and best practices to the Federal School Safety Clearinghouse. The clearinghouse is an interagency effort the to improve national school safety efforts. It includes the creation of SchoolSafety.gov, a “one-stop shop” of resources for school leaders looking to foster safer campuses. 

New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, accused the Trump administration of violating the law, stating during a Jan. 26 news conference that the president “should not bow down to the NRA.”

In a press release the following day, Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, similarly criticized the move.

“President Trump doesn’t care about keeping our kids safe from gun violence,” Murphy said. “President Trump should reinstate these members immediately and stop playing politics with our children’s safety.”

Among those who advocated for the committee’s creation — and were ultimately dismissed from it last week — are airline pilot Tony Montalto, whose 14-year-old daughter Gina was killed in 2018 during the mass school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Montalto is now president of the nonprofit which was created by the parents of the Florida shooting to advance bipartisan campus security efforts. 

In an interview with The 74 on Wednesday, Montalto said he is “disappointed that the members have been dismissed,” and hopes to serve again on the board, which is congressionally mandated. 

“Too often the government gets involved in ‘government speak’, and we wanted to bring this external advisory board to life so that real people from outside of government could come together and have input into the process of keeping students and teachers safe at school,” Montalto said. He said the board members, which were appointed during the Biden administration, represented a “broad cross-section” of experts and opinions with a shared interest in student and teacher safety. 

School shootings in the U.S. have surged to record highs in the last several years, including an Wednesday that led to the deaths of two students, including the alleged gunman. The video streaming platform Kick acknowledged Wednesday evening the shooter had .

Chad Marlow, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union who served on the advisory board until this week, said the varied and wide-ranging viewpoints among members stood out most during their first meeting in October. 

“There was really an effort to get as many perspectives as possible into the room, and I don’t think there was any preconceived notion on where we were going,” Marlow said. “We were not given any instructions, like ‘We would like to see you do X.’” 

During the day-long session, he said, committee members were divided into three groups to discuss improvements to federal school safety grants and to analyze various security interventions like school-based policing. 

Marlow said it’s possible that the Trump administration could appoint new board members who are not in lockstep but fears the shakeup could eliminate experts whose viewpoints don’t align with those of the Trump administration and “handcuff the quality” of the group’s work. 

“I hope it’s not the latter because, at the end of the day, we should be focused on doing the best for keeping our kids safe — or, in the language they’re using, protecting the homeland,” Marlow said. 

Still, Marlow said he plans to reapply for his seat. So, too, does Montalto, who said the Clearinghouse first created by Trump is “actually one of the most efficient programs in the government” with four agencies coming together to provide resources designed to keep students safe. 

Important, too, are the voices of parents who’ve experienced tragedy firsthand. 

“Anybody who has suffered that loss can drive home the point of how important school safety is,” Montalto said. “It’s a nonpartisan issue, we just need to come together as an American family and try to make a difference.”

There are things bigger than politics, state legislators declared on the floor of Michigan’s state House, as legislation to implement school safety requirements and mental health assessment standards passed Tuesday evening with bipartisan support.

It’s been just over three years since by another student who brought a gun to school and opened fire on the school community. Just as the loved ones of Tate Myre, 16; Hana St. Juliana, 14; Justin Shilling, 17; and Madisyn Baldwin, 17, will never forget the pain of the Nov. 30, 2021 killings, neither will lawmakers, Rep. Luke Meerman (R-Coopersville) told members of the state House.

“We must show the people of Michigan, we as lawmakers can come together and produce solutions that address real need in the state,” Meerman, who is a sponsor of the bill package, said. “From where I stand, these bills are long overdue. I’m grateful to vote yes on these bills today.”

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Michigan state Rep. Luke Meerman (R-Coopersville) speaks in support of a school safety package on the House floor on Dec. 10, 2024. | Photo: Anna Liz NicholsMeerman, along with Rep. Nancy DeBoer (R-Holland) on House Bills and which would replace the with a School Safety and Mental Health Commission housed in the Department of State Police.

The would-be-replaced School Safety Commission was created under Gov. Rick Snyder, after the deadly Parkland High School shooting in Florida in 2018 where a 19-year-old opened fire, killing 17 people at the school. The commission has been charged with evaluating safety measures in Michigan schools and making recommendations for improvements.

Codifying a School Safety and Mental Health Commission is being pursued by lawmakers in recognition of . The commission would specifically examine and make recommendations to improve school safety measures and mental health support, with members consisting of experts in law enforcement, education, mental health, school threat assessments and community programming with youth, as well as having a current student or recent high school graduate on the commission.

House Bill and House Bill received 89-19 votes, passing with widespread bipartisan support and with two members not voting.

Amongst the “no” votes was Republican Rep. Josh Schriver who represents Oxford and voted against every bill in the package Tuesday

Under House Bills and , all schools in Michigan would be required to adopt uniform terminology for emergency response starting in the 2026-2027 school year.

Michigan State Police would be mandated under the legislation to create language all schools use, so terms like “lockdown” and “shelter in place” mean the same thing across the board and law enforcement can respond accordingly should there be an emergency.

House Bill received a 94-15 and House Bill received a 93-16 with one lawmaker not voting.

In the face of the threat of school shootings, it’s important to note that , Rep. Kelly Breen (D-Novi) told lawmakers Tuesday. But students don’t always feel safe while they’re trying to learn.

“A few years ago, my daughter asked me one of the worst questions a child could bring a parent, ‘Mama, what do I do if my teacher tells me to run and I can’t find my little brother?’,” Breen told members of the state House. “No parent ever wants to answer that.”

Michigan was once again rattled by another school shooting in 2023, when three students on Michigan State University’s campus were killed by a gunman the evening before Valentine’s Day, Breen lamented.

After the tragedy at MSU, lawmakers passed several gun violence reforms including and implementing .

And as survivors of school shootings in Michigan and the families of the students the state has lost demand justice and change, Breen said lawmakers have the opportunity to stand alongside them.

Breen’s bill in the package, House Bill , requires all schools to create a behavior threat assessment and management team by October 1, 2026. The team would have to define prohibited or concerning behaviors that are indicative that a member of the school community might hurt themselves or others. The team would also be expected to perform monitoring for such behaviors, creating reporting mechanisms for members of the school community to identify concerning behavior and facilitate the school’s responses to intervene.

The team is required to have a school administrator, a mental health professional and a school resource officer or another member of law enforcement.

While the other bills in the package cleared the politically divided state House with the vast majority of votes, House Bill cleared with a 57-51 vote, with one lawmaker not voting.

Rep. Gina Johnsen (R-Odessa) unsuccessfully proposed an amendment that would have allowed non public schools to opt out of creating behavior threat assessment and management teams and would have specified that members of the clergy could be eligible to fulfill the role of the mental health professional on such teams if non public schools wanted to participate.

The bills will now head over to the state Senate in the final days of the legislative session.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan J. Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com.

By Marissa Yelenick

Active shooter drills in Maryland schools will be different next school year under a new set of state guidelines meant to limit the impact those drills have on the mental health of students.

The  are designed to prohibit trauma-inducing elements like imitation of gunfire or explosions. They also require school systems to notify parents in advance when students will be practicing what to do in the event of an active shooter in their buildings.

The new guidelines were released by the Maryland Center for School Safety this fall, ordered by a new  requiring the center to draft new parameters and create a new process for collecting and analyzing data on their effectiveness. The center will also look into the psychological impact the shooter drills have on staff, parents and students.

Parts of the guidelines — including bans on gunfire and the requirement to notify parents — have already gone into effect because they are explicit in state law. The full set of guidelines will be put into effect at the beginning of the academic year in 2025.

“The mental health crisis that we see in our young people is undeniable,” said Del. Jared Solomon (D-Montgomery), who sponsored the measure in the House earlier this year. “As we normalize having to deal with school shootings, we are creating more anxiety and more issues among young people.”

While schools have long practiced safety drills, active shooter drills are relatively new, following the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School, according to the guidelines.

While school systems have made an effort to keep students safe by implementing active shooter drills, concerns have been raised  about the impact these drills have on student’s mental health. This led to the April passage of the Maryland bill, as well as  signed by President Joe Biden to increase federal guidance on the subject.

Maryland’s new guidelines, released in October, call for unified terminology between districts to discourage miscommunication between the school system and the relevant public. They intend to increase communication between staff and students to create an open dialogue where everyone feels comfortable raising concerns, as well as creating a diverse planning team who will work on planning the drills and doing a post-analysis of how it went and any shortcomings it faced.

The guidelines emphasize that active shooter drills are not a one-size-fits-all matter, and should be adjusted to fit the age group.

“These are going to be part of a young person’s life for the foreseeable future, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t do them in a way that is both trauma-informed and age appropriate,” Solomon said. “It’s really important that the way school systems do these types of events reflects a care and age appropriateness of the grades that are being impacted.”

The guidelines also recommend that a mechanism be established to pause or stop the drill when necessary, for schools to notify parents before and after all drills to increase trust and communication, and to allow students and staff who feel uncomfortable to opt-out of the drills.

The lead sponsors of the bill, Solomon and Sen. Cheryl Kagan (D-Montgomery), felt that the impact guns have on today’s children needs to be mitigated as much as possible, and worked to balance a focus on their safety while prioritizing their mental health.

“The law that Del. Solomon and I sponsored and passed tried to walk the fine line of thoughtful preparation that isn’t traumatic,” Kagan said. “And we also had to consider parents and community members who are understandably alarmed and concerned when they see the impact of these drills … Our concern was that [the drills] were not being strategic in how they were handled, and were actually causing trauma for those involved.”

One active shooter drill that occurred in Solomon’s district served as a driving force for his involvement.

“Families were literally getting texts from their kids saying, ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again,’ and it was a drill. They didn’t know,” said Solomon. “There was no requirement prior to this for a school or a school system to notify families before or after.”

Additional motivation for the bill included shared experiences from other parents Solomon spoke to, he said. Many shared their frustrations at the lack of foresight they had into when the drills would be taking place and what would happen during them, which prevented parents from having appropriate conversations with their children to prepare them.

Starting in January, schools will distribute a new survey made by the National Center for School Mental Health to gather feedback from staff, parents and students on how effective the drills are, and the mental impact they have on all involved.

“The goal is not to create fear but to instill confidence and preparedness,” said the guidelines from the Maryland Center for School Safety. “By working together as a community, schools can foster safe and supportive learning environments.”

This was originally published on .

In 12 days, it will be three years since the deadly Oxford High School shooting robbed Michigan of the lives of four students. Parents of the victims of the shooting gathered Monday in Oxford for a news conference to call on the state to open an independent investigation into the events that led to the shooting.

The gunman, who was a student at the school when he opened fired on students and educators on Nov. 30, 2021, was at the end of 2023 for the deaths of four students. The shooter’s parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, were also held legally responsible for the shooting in a landmark criminal prosecution for their role in making it possible for their 15-year-old son to commit a mass shooting. The parents were sentenced earlier this year to 10 to 15 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter.

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But as other families prepare for Thanksgiving and start early Christmas shopping, parents of the shooting victims are imploring the state to investigate other entities — namely the school’s leadership — into what their role was in not preventing the tragedy.

“We are not going anywhere. We will do whatever it takes to drive change, because it’s not a matter of if a school shooting happens again, but when,” said Steve St. Juliana, father of Hana St. Julianna, a student who was killed in the Oxford shooting at age 14.

It’s not enough that the shooter and his parents have been held criminally responsible. The parents of the victims said much more needs to be done to understand what happened at Oxford and how other families can be spared the pain of another school shooting in the future.

had the school responded appropriately to the shooter as a potential threat as he gave several warning signs, asserted one investigation by Guidepost Solutions which concluded in 2023. Nearly half of the individuals investigators requested to talk to did not speak with investigators. Lawyers for Oxford Community Schools, as well as the teachers union discouraged school employees from cooperating in the investigation, the report said.

To implement real change, not simply gun safety legislation as the Michigan Legislature has enacted, the state must find out exactly what happened that permitted a 15-year-old student to open fire on his classmates and teachers at school where the community should be safe, said Buck Myre, father of Tate Myre who was killed in the shooting at age 16.

“This has always been about change — period — nothing else. It’s time for our state government to investigate this. Stop hiding; stop making excuses. A Michigan public school was the scene of the shooting. Kids’ lives were lost. Kids were shot. A teacher was shot. Every kid in school that day has a shooting badge, a shooting badge that they will heavily carry on their chest for the rest of their lives,” Myre said. “Don’t we want to learn from this?”

There is an epidemic of school shootings that are killing children, St. Juliana said. And if the state doesn’t want more carnage, state agencies need to work together, stop pointing fingers, and get to work on a revelatory investigation.

“We should not have to be sitting up here repeatedly saying, ‘Do a damn investigation.’ I’ll paraphrase the governor of Michigan ‘fix the damn system,’” St. Juliana said, referring to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s signature call to “fix the damn roads.”

“Forget about the roads. Keep our kids safe,” St. Juliana said.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel responded to the parents’ requests for a state investigation, pointing out that her office has offered several times to perform an investigation and the Oxford School Board, Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office and Oakland County Sheriff’s Office have rejected her requests.

The parents of Tate Myre, Hana St. Juliana, Justin Shilling and Madisyn Baldwin are not simply calling for further prosecutions, but for the state to examine the systems that could prevent a future shooting. Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said in an emailed statement after the press conference Monday that a comprehensive, state-led investigation has the potential to provide that.

“We are not aware of any mechanism for our office to refer a matter to the Attorney General’s office when it has not been presented to our office,” McDonald said. “And what the families are asking for is much broader. We are not aware of any action needed by my office to activate the Attorney General’s authority, but we will do everything possible to enable such an investigation. And my office will fully cooperate with any such investigation.”

Nessel said the protocol for her office to perform an investigation is to respect local authority, not use her jurisdiction to supersede local or county level criminal investigations. She added that the Attorney General Department will only join or take on leadership of a criminal investigation or prosecution after local authorities have referred the case to her office.

Both McDonald and Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard have her personal phone number, Nessel said, but neither have requested the attorney general’s involvement, although she is still willing to investigate

“We share in the families’ fatigue over the constant finger-pointing and scapegoating in these investigations and wish our offers to participate at any level had been accepted years ago for my office to conduct an investigation,” Nessel said. “At this point, nearly three years after the tragedy [it] will definitely be more difficult than if it had been allowed to begin when our earliest or repeated offers were initially made.”

McDonald sent a letter and legal opinion on Oct. 9 to St. Juliana in response to his and other families asking for criminal charges against Oxford District members. In the documents, which were provided to the Michigan Advance by St. Juliana, McDonald says Nessel has the authority to perform an investigation without an invitation.

“The Attorney General’s Office holds a wide range of powers, which include the investigatory powers that were held at common law. In addition to the investigatory powers, the Attorney General’s office is equipped with its own Criminal Investigations Division — meaning it not only has the authority, but also the resources to investigate potential violations of Michigan law,” McDonald wrote to St. Juliana.

Parents on Monday talked about the Attorney General’s Office’s ability to subpoena some of the individuals within Oxford Schools who did not talk with Guidepost Solutions’ investigation. Nessel addressed what she called confusion over what her office is allowed to do. She said her subpoena power can only be triggered when there is to believe criminal acts were committed.

In McDonald’s letter to St. Juliana, she says although parents have requested charges be filed against individuals at Oxford Schools, she has “not seen evidence that would allow me to bring charges against any of those individuals.”

“… neither my office nor Guidepost can conduct a criminal investigation,” McDonald said in the letter to St. Juliana. “I can only make decisions based on the information provided to me by law enforcement, and Guidepost must rely on the cooperation of individuals who have information to share that information.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan J. Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on and .

Winning a House seat representing Delaware, 34-year-old McBride became the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, just four years after the Democrat was elected as the nation’s first transgender state senator. Groundbreaking in any year and especially one in which conservatives regularly attacked the transgender community, McBride’s victory also marked a major win for a multimillion-dollar campaign — launched by school shooting survivor David Hogg — to elect young lawmakers to state and national office. 

“From the youngest-ever Senator to the first Trans member of Congress, Delaware knows what young leaders can accomplish when given a chance, just look at Joe Biden,” Hogg posted on X, commenting on how the 81-year-old president was first in 1972 just days before his 30th birthday. 

After Hogg survived the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 of his classmates and educators, he became a formidable up-and-comer in Democratic politics, turning his attention to helping elect Gen Z and millennial Democrats. His latest effort is , a political action committee formed in 2023 that raised nearly $8.5 million as of September to elevate the campaigns of McBride and a dozen other young candidates. 

“Leaders We Deserve is proud to say that Sarah will be our first endorsee elected to Congress,” Hogg wrote. 

Beyond McBride’s high-profile win, candidates endorsed by Hogg’s PAC saw mixed results — with more defeats than victories. Of a dozen candidates offered campaign cash and boots-on-the-ground voter outreach by Leaders We Deserve, five won their races and seven lost.

They include the successful campaign of a seventh-grade math teacher in Atlanta, the defeat of a former Miss Texas who campaigned for a state House seat on a gun control platform, and the setback encountered by a 28-year-old mother who launched her Tennessee House of Representatives campaign after the state denied her access to an abortion. 

Leaders We Deserve has pumped millions of dollars — and resources from Democratic power players — into the campaigns of young candidates who support progressive causes like gun control, reproductive rights and protecting public school funding. The PAC didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Other Leaders We Deserve-endorsed candidates who beat their GOP opponents include Dante Pittman, to the North Carolina General Assembly helped Democrats break a Republican supermajority. In Hogg’s home state of Florida, U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost — who at 27 became the first member of Gen Z to serve in Congress — bid with nearly of the vote.

In Georgia, middle school math teacher Bryce Berry who switched from Democrat to Republican last year after breaking from party ranks to support private school vouchers. In Ohio, Democrat Christine Cockley easily Republican rival Hussein Jabiri. 

The seven candidates who did not prevail include Kristian Carranza, whose campaign for in the Texas House of Representatives in Leaders We Deserve support before losing in a tight race to Republican rival and incumbent state Rep. John Lujan. In another competitive race in Texas, Republican Rep. Angie Chen Button won her to the Texas Legislature, defeating Democrat Averie Bishop. 

In Pennsylvania, former teacher and longtime Republican state Rep. Joe Emrick , defeating Leaders We Deserve-endorsed Democrat Anna Thomas, whose campaign centered on bolstering school funding. Republican Mike Sparks, who has served in the Tennessee House of Representatives since 2010, Democrat Luis Mata.

In another Tennessee House race, Republican Jeff Burkhart in a closely watched contest against Democrat Allie Phillips, who said she was forced to go out of state to terminate a nonviable pregnancy because of Tennessee’s strict abortion laws. After defeating the Leaders We Deserve-endorsed Phillips, Burkhart said his campaign was about “fighting California, New York and everyone else.”&�Բ�����;

Nate Douglas, a 23-year-old University of Florida graduate, failed in his bid to oust Republican Florida Rep. Susan Plasencia. The Douglas campaign on get-out-the-vote efforts among college students. 

In Georgia, Republican state Sen. Shawn Still was , defeating Democrat Ashwin Ramaswami by 7 percentage points. Ramaswami, 25, was still in law school when he decided to campaign against Still, who in 2023 who were indicted alongside President-elect Donald Trump on allegations of conspiring to overturn Trump’s 2020 presidential election defeat in the state. 

After Trump regained control of the White House and Republicans swept into elected office in races across the country, Hogg turned to X to reiterate his argument that new, young voices are more critical than ever. 

“Time for some big changes to the Democratic Party,” he wrote.

“I’m directing the members of my cabinet to return to me within 110 days with resources and information for schools to improve active-shooter drills, minimize this harm, create age-appropriate content and communicate with parents before and after these drills happen,” Biden said during a Thursday afternoon White House event. “We just have to do better and we can do better.”&�Բ�����;

Students nationwide participate in active-shooter drills, between school districts and have received mixed reviews as to their effectiveness from students, parents and educators. In some states, including New York, lawmakers have sought to scale back routine drills amid concerns they’ve exacerbated the youth mental health crisis. A approved this summer bans realistic drills that use props and actors to mimic real-world school shooting scenarios. 

Biden also ordered on Thursday the creation of a new task force to assess the threat of conversion kits that allow semi-automatic guns to be modified into fully automatic weapons, so-called “ghost guns” without serial numbers and weapons created with 3D printers. 

The efforts fit into the president’s agenda to toughen gun laws and prevent mass shootings. The Rose Garden announcement also featured Vice President Kamala Harris, who in a tight presidential race against Republican Donald Trump has positioned herself as a gun owning-Democrat in favor of stricter firearms restrictions. Trump has the endorsement of the National Rifle Association.  

“It is a false choice to suggest you are either in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away,” Harris said. “I am in favor of the Second Amendment and I believe we need to reinstate the assault weapons ban and pass universal background checks, safe storage laws and red flag laws.”&�Բ�����;

Active shooter drills have become routine in schools nationwide although a White House fact sheet notes there is “very limited research on how to design and deploy” them in a way that’s effective without becoming harmful in themselves. Though the executive order doesn’t mandate the drills or specific strategies on how to conduct them, it directs the U.S. Education Department and the Department of Homeland Security to publish a report outlining the existing research on their efficacy, how to design them in ways that are age-appropriate and “how to prevent students and educators from experiencing trauma or psychological stress associated with these drills.”&�Բ�����;

Rob Wilcox, the deputy director of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, told The 74 on Wednesday that the variation in how drills are being conducted presents a need for federal officials to analyze their usefulness and provide guidance around the best path forward. 

Along with “traditional lockdown drills” where students are instructed to shelter in place behind closed doors, he said the Biden administration has been warned about the psychological harms of “unannounced simulations” where “fake guns, fake blood, fake gunshots” and a militarized police response are used to portray real-world assaults. 

“The president and vice president have heard from parents and students across the country about the need to know more about these drills and the need to really understand what our kids are going through,” Wilcox said. “What is the effective way to do it and what are the harmful ways?”

Traumatizing — or empowering? 

Teachers are split on the value of active-shooter drills, according to released this month. Fewer than half of educators said the drills have prepared them for a school shooting. More than two-thirds said they have had no impact on their perceptions of campus safety and just a fifth said they made them feel more safe.

A Pew Research Center survey found that a quarter of teachers experienced lockdowns in the 2022-23 school year because of gun incidents at their campuses. While 39% of teachers gave their schools a fair or poor job of training them to deal with active assailants, a smaller share — 30% — gave their school leadership an excellent or very good rating.

About two-thirds of parents of K-12 students say that children should be required to participate in at least one active-shooter drill per year and 83% were confident their kids’ schools were well equipped to keep them safe, released last fall. While 80% of respondents said the drill should be “evidence-based and age-appropriate,” just 36% said they should feature the sounds of guns or gunshots. 

that active-shooter drills , but other researchers have sought to combat that narrative. A in the peer-reviewed Journal of School Violence found children exposed to gun violence feel safer after undergoing lockdown drills. 

Research into the psychological impact of active-shooter drills and lockdown drills has generally treated all procedures as one in the same, said Jaclyn Schildkraut, the lead author of the Journal of School Violence report and executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at New York’s Rockefeller Institute of Government. Given that schools have deployed a range of drills — and because some efforts may be more effective than others — she said it’s “very important that we do have very clear guidance about what schools are being asked to do.”

Drills that seek to mimic active shootings have, in particular, become a point of controversy. In one in 2019, teachers reported injuries after they were shot with pellet guns during a mock shooting simulation at their elementary school. While some drills have taught kids to shelter in place during a shooting, others have instructed kids to use school supplies as makeshift weapons and fight back against an armed assailant. In some communities, schools have and as a solution to help kids defend themselves. 

But the drills, including those criticized for traumatizing kids, have been credited with saving lives during campus shootings, which remain statistically rare but have reached record highs in the last several years. During a shooting at Michigan’s Oxford High School in 2021, a 16-year-old student was reportedly shot as he charged at the assailant — an act that cost the star running back his life but the county sheriff said likely saved his classmates. 

“We don’t light schools on fire to practice a fire drill, yet we know that some schools are simulating active-shooter situations to practice for an active shooter,” Schildkraut said. 

The effects of conducting realistic shooting scenarios, she said, should not be conflicted with the impacts of less-invasive emergency preparation like lockdowns. 

Keeping guns locked

Thursday’s executive order coincided with the release of a new Education Department tool designed to encourage families to keep their guns at home behind lock and key. 

The outlines state safe-storage and child-access prevention laws, which have been adopted in 31 states and penalize gun owners who fail to lock their weapons or who provide access to them to an unsupervised child. Though no such laws exist at the federal level, the Education Department website says the state-based efforts are an “important step towards keeping our youth, schools, and communities safe.”

The website also features examples of community and school district measures to promote firearm storage, including by the Cincinnati, Ohio, school district and a campaign at Colorado’s Cherry Creek School District, which distributed several hundred gun locks to families for free last year.

“When school administrators communicate with parents about safe storage of firearms in their homes, it motivates parents to act,” Biden said Thursday. 

About three-quarters of school shooters get their guns from a parent or another close relative, according to . In about half of cases, the guns had been readily accessible.

Prosecutors have increasingly turned to the actions — and inactions — of the parents of school shooters, who are . 

Earlier this month, a 54-year-old father from Georgia was arrested on murder charges after his 14-year-old son was accused of carrying out a shooting at Apalachee High School that left two of his classmates and two math teachers dead. The boy was given an AR-15-style rifle as a holiday gift last year.

In April, Michigan parents Jennifer and James Crumbley were each given decade-long prison sentences in first-of-their-kind convictions after their son, who was 15 years old at the time, killed four students in the 2021 Oxford High School shooting. The parents gave their son the 9-millimeter handgun used in the assault as a Christmas gift and stored it in an unlocked drawer in their bedroom despite warning signs the teenager planned to act violently. 

“After current events, especially in Georgia, it’s beyond clear that safe storage in the home is essential,” Wilcox, the White House gun prevention office deputy director, told The 74. “Fourteen-year-olds should not have access to assault weapons.”&�Բ�����;

Former Uvalde schools police Chief Pete Arredondo asked a state district court on Friday to quash ten felony charges of child endangerment for his response to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting.

Arredondo is one of two law enforcement officers who face criminal charges for their response to Texas’ deadliest school shooting, which left nineteen children and two teachers dead on May 22, 2022. An indictment handed down in June by a Uvalde County grand jury called Arredondo the incident commander and accused him of to ten children by delaying law enforcement’s response to the active shooter and not responding as trained.

In their motion to toss out the indictment, Arredondo’s lawyers say school districts and their employees don’t have a duty to protect students from third-party threats. The lawyers also point out that the children were already in danger when Arredondo responded.

“The indictment does not allege that Mr. Arredondo engaged in any conduct that placed a child in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, or physical or mental impairment,” the filing states. “To the contrary, the language in the indictment itself makes clear that when Mr. Arredondo responded as part of his official duties, an active shooter incident was already in progress.”

Arredondo that he did not think he was the incident commander and that he did not give any orders. Nearly 400 local, state and federal law enforcement officers descended upon the school but failed to act decisively, instead waiting for more than an hour to confront the gunman.

Border Patrol agents ultimately decided to breach the classroom and killed the shooter.

Since the school shooting, families of Uvalde victims have called on local and state elected officials to hold officers accountable for their failures in leadership. Many said they were disappointed that the grand jury indicted only two officers.

In addition to Arredondo, former district officer Adrian Gonzales was indicted on 29 counts of child endangerment. Gonzales violating school district policy or state law. Both officers were released from Uvalde County Jail on bond.

Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As The Texas Tribune’s signature event of the year, brings Texans closer to politics, policy and the day’s news from Texas and beyond. Browse on-demand recordings and catch up on the biggest headlines from Festival events at the Tribune’s .

This article originally appeared in at . The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

It’s once again a harrowing week in America, as the nation grapples with yet another mass school shooting — the campus gunfire incident this year, according to a tally by the folks at the K-12 School Shooting Database. 

Two students and two teachers were killed in Wednesday’s attack at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, the latest victims in a campus firearm death toll that’s surged in the last few years. 

During a campaign stop hours after the attack, Vice President Kamala Harris called the incident “a senseless tragedy, on top of so many senseless tragedies.”&�Բ�����;

“We’ve got to stop it.”&�Բ�����;

‘Building leaders for 2050’

Six and a half years after David Hogg survived one the nation’s deadliest campus shootings at his Parkland, Florida, high school, his latest campaign to bolster the country’s gun laws has drawn major support from deep-pocketed donors and Democratic Party bigwigs. 

Hogg co-founded Leaders We Deserve, a political action committee that’s raised more than $8 million in the past year to help elect young Democrats who support gun control, abortion and other progressive causes. 

My analysis of Federal Election Commission filings and the PAC’s digital ads offers insight into how Hogg has leveraged the trauma and lessons of surviving Parkland to create a well-connected operation to influence state and national elections across the country in November. Leaders We Deserve has already claimed some electoral wins for candidates in Virginia and deep-red Texas.

But the effort, former education secretary and PAC adviser Arne Duncan told me, is much bigger than the upcoming high-stakes presidential election. It’s about building the next generation of Democratic lawmakers. 

“That’s what David’s play is about,” Duncan said. “It’s not about, ‘We’re going to change the entire world tomorrow,’ but it’s, ‘Can we plant a whole bunch of amazing seeds, nurture them, develop them, support them and see what happens.’” 

Read the full analysis here

More on the Georgia shooting

They lost their lives: The victims are two 14-year-old students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, and math teachers Christina Irimie and Richard Aspinwall. |

The perp: A 14-year-old student accused of carrying out the attack was taken into custody and will be charged with murder as an adult. | 

The police response: Minutes after the shooting was reported, two school resource officers and other law enforcement arrived on scene. One of the school-based cops confronted the shooter, who was armed with an AR 15-style rifle, and forced his surrender. | 

An emergency alert system created by the security vendor Centegix was credited with alerting first responders to the shooting. The system includes a lanyard with a button that teachers can push to report danger. | 

Police interviewed the alleged gunman and his father more than a year ago, after the FBI received several tips about someone threatening to “shoot up a school” on the social media platform Discord. “The father stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them,” according to the federal agency. “The subject denied making the threats online.” |/

Just months after an unprecedented parental conviction in Michigan, Georgia prosecutors allege the father’s actions led to the mass school shooting | The 74

The shooter purportedly had a keen interest in past school shootings, most notably the 2018 attack in Parkland. | 

The big picture: This Georgia school shooting was, in many ways, a repeat of past tragedies. The most common scenario is “a surprise attack during morning classes committed by a current student who is allowed to be inside the school.” | 

In other news

California lawmakers passed a first-in-the-nation bill that would prohibit schools from serving food with artificial color additives that officials have linked to hyperactivity and other behavioral effects in children. |

A 33-year-old Latvian hacker has been extradited to the U.S. on charges of being a key player in the cybercrime group Karakurt, which has launched wide-scale ransomware attacks on K-12 schools. |

Four states suing the Education Department over new rules to protect LGBTQ+ kids from discrimination have “a substantial likelihood that they will prevail on the merits,” according to a federal appeals court. |

Meanwhile, the Justice Department and 16 states have weighed in on a lawsuit that charges a Georgia book ban targeting LGBTQ+ literature is unconstitutional. |

Nearly 4,000 “dangerous instruments” — including almost 300 weapons — were seized at New York City’s public schools last year. “Dangerous instruments” is a weird way to say stuff like box cutters and pepper spray. |

Despite school discipline reform efforts, racial disparities in student suspensions persist. |

After six people were killed in a Nashville school shooting last year, Tennessee lawmakers passed zero-tolerance rules mandating a one-year expulsion for students who threaten mass violence at school. As a result, students are being expelled “for mildly disruptive behavior,” ProPublica reported, even when officials found “the threat was not credible.” |

ICYMI @The74

• Immigrant Advocates Call on Massachusetts AG to Probe Enrollment Discrimination

• One New York District’s Old-School Approach to Support Kids’ Well-Being

• Ohio School-to-Prison Pipeline Bolstered by ‘Exclusionary Discipline,’ Absenteeism

Emotional Support

Mika, The 74 editor Nicole Ridgway’s pup companion, found a comfy spot on the beach to soak in some of summer’s final rays. 

The 54-year-old father Friday morning on second-degree murder charges that stem from allegations his 14-year-old son carried out the attack and later told investigators, “I did it.”&�Բ�����;

The father, prosecutors allege, was the gun supplier. Gray bought his son an AR 15-style rifle as a holiday gift in December 2023 “with knowledge he was a threat to himself and others,” according to an arrest affidavit obtained by CNN. Then, the boy used that same gun, police allege, to kill his classmates and the two teachers and injure nine others. Like those before it, the shooting left a much wider swath of trauma that District Attorney Brad Smith referred to Friday.

“You don’t have to have been physically injured in this to be a victim,” Smith said “Everyone in this community is a victim. Every child in that school was a victim.”

The charges fall in line with a law enforcement strategy that’s emerged in the last year to thwart a record number of mass school shootings, which federal data show are most often carried out by aggrieved students with guns obtained — either as a gift or without permission — from close family members. 

Prosecutors have turned their focus to the killers’ parents. 

Just months ago, in early April, Michigan parents Jennifer and James Crumbley were each given decade-long prison sentences in first-of-their-kind convictions: They were held directly accountable for a school shooting that was carried out by their 15-year-old son in 2021 that killed four students. 

In both cases, according to prosecutors, parents gave gifts to their kids that were later used to commit mass murder despite knowing that their children were on the brink of acting violently. Still, legal experts said the Crumbley prosecution — which Georgia officials have set the groundwork to replicate — reverses a bedrock legal principle that people cannot be held liable for the actions of others. 

“Look, I thought this case could go either way and still when the result came out I was a bit stunned because it’s such a deep legal principle,” Ekow Yankah, a University of Michigan law professor, told The 74 in February after Jennifer Crumbley’s landmark conviction. 

“Maybe this kind of case will have an effect,” he said. “Maybe parents will be more attentive.”

In Michigan, the shooter — to life in prison without parole after pleading guilty — was gifted a 9-millimeter pistol for Christmas that he later celebrated online as “my new beauty.” In Georgia, that Gray allegedly gave to prosecutors puts his gift weapon purchase just months after investigators questioned the father and son about reported online threats of a school shooting. 

Last year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the then-13-year-old posted on the social media site Discord a threat to “shoot up a middle school.” Local police investigated the tip but failed to link the Discord comments to the teen, even though the account traced back to the boy’s email address. The boy denied making the threats and claimed he deleted the account because it kept getting hacked. Written in Russian, the translated to the last name of the shooter behind the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. 

The New York Times reported this week that police searching the teen’s room found evidence of his interest in , particularly the 2018 killings in Parkland, Florida. 

Meanwhile, Colin Gray acknowledged to police he had hunting rifles at home but that his son did not have “unfettered” access to them. 

Charges filed against Gray include four counts of involuntary manslaughter, eight counts of cruelty to children — and two counts of murder in the second degree. His son, whose age makes him ineligible for the death penalty, will be tried as an adult, prosecutors said, and faces life in prison on four counts of murder. Lawyers for the father and son did not seek bail and the two

Though the Crumbley case in Michigan presented a novel conviction, it wasn’t the first time a parent has been held legally responsible for crimes committed by their children —including in helping their child secure a firearm later used in a mass shooting. Last year, an Illinois father pleaded guilty to misdemeanor reckless conduct on charges stemming from a shooting that his son carried out in 2022 at an Independence Day parade in suburban Chicago. That case centered on how his son, who was 19 at the time, obtained a gun license.��

In Texas, meanwhile, survivors of the 2018 shooting at Santa Fe High School to hold the gunman’s parents accountable for the carnage. In a civil case filed by survivors and victim’s family members, a jury found Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos were not liable of negligence after being accused of failing to secure their guns at home and ignoring violent warning signs before their 17-year-old son opened fire at his high school and killed eight students and two teachers.��

Outside of courtrooms, other firearm measures passed at the state level in recent years have sought to tackle parents’ role in mass casualty events carried out by their offspring. now have laws requiring gun owners to keep their weapons locked up or that penalize them if a child gains access. 

Georgia lacks both secure storage and child-access laws, according to an . A new state law, however, seeks to incentivize parental responsibility. 

, the new law who purchase firearm safety devices like gun safes and trigger locks. A similar incentive was rolled out in Virginia in 2023, providing a tax break of up to $300. In its first year, accepted the deal.  

Relatives of 17 children killed and two kids injured in Texas’ deadliest school shooting are suing Texas Department of Public Safety officers who were among hundreds of law enforcement that the gunman at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary, lawyers announced last week.

“Nearly 100 officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety have yet to face a shred of accountability for cowering in fear while my daughter and nephew bled to death in their classroom,” Veronica Luevanos, whose daughter Jailah and nephew Jayce were killed, said in a statement.

The legal action against 92 DPS officers came days before the two-year anniversary of the shooting in which an to kill 19 students and two teachers in two adjoining fourth-grade classrooms.

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Relatives of most of those students killed and two who were injured also announced last week that they are suing Mandy Gutierrez, who was the principal at Robb at the time, and Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, who was the school district police chief, for their “inaction” that day.

The families’ attorney also announced that the city of Uvalde will pay them $2 million to avoid a lawsuit. Additionally, the city will provide enhanced training for current and future police officers, designate May 24 as an annual day of remembrance and work with victims’ families to design a permanent memorial at the city plaza, among other things.

A DPS spokesperson declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

During a press conference in Uvalde, an attorney for the families, Josh Koskoff, said the state’s failure to prevent the deaths began long before the shooting occurred. He said Texas failed to provide small communities like Uvalde with enough resources to train their officers.

“You think the city of Uvalde has enough money, or training, or resources? You think they can hire the best of the best?” Koskoff said. “As far as the state of Texas is concerned, it sounds like their position is: You’re on your own.”

Koskoff also hinted that the families could also sue state and federal agencies, but did not name which ones. He also said the families are negotiating an agreement with the county, which would also avoid a lawsuit.

Javier Cazares, the father of one of the victims, Jacklyn Cazares, said it had been an “unbearable two years” since the massacre that took his daughter.

“There was an obvious system failure out there on May 24. The whole world saw that,” Cazares said. “The time has come to do the right thing.”

The family’s lawsuit will likely need to overcome a judicial doctrine called qualified immunity, which shields government officials, including law enforcement officers, from liability in lawsuits. Overcoming that immunity will require establishing that the officers violated a constitutional right.

“We think that this situation where kids, after all, are required to lock down in their classrooms, their freedom is constrained,” Koskoff said. “In this situation we feel like qualified immunity is not applicable.”

State Sen. , a Democrat who represents Uvalde in the Legislature, filed a bill last year that sought to end qualified immunity. Like filed in response to the massacre, that bill failed to pass.

Koskoff, who has also represented the families of children killed in the , said city officials had also failed to hold their officers accountable but praised the city for working with the families to implement changes aimed at preventing another tragedy like the 2022 shooting.

Hundreds of law enforcement officers from scores of local, state and federal agencies have been heavily criticized for waiting more than an hour to confront the gunman, which conflicted with training that instructs them to confront a shooter if there is reason to believe someone is hurt. The U.S. Justice Department’s concluded that the delay likely caused some deaths and that failures in leadership and training contributed to law enforcement’s ineffective response.

Koskoff noted that law enforcement outnumbered the gunman 376 to 1.

“On paper, it should have been no contest. So what happened?” Koskoff said. “Maybe it just turns out that if a kid has a military weapon, the military weapon — the AR-15 — and you get access to it easily, maybe it’s not that simple to stop a kid like that. Of course, they didn’t give themselves a chance, these 376 officers.”

In the settlement with the city of Uvalde that families’ lawyers announced May 22, local officials will implement a new “fitness for duty” standard for Uvalde police officers, to be developed in coordination with the Justice Department and provide enhanced training for current and future police officers.

“For two long years, we have languished in pain and without any accountability from the law enforcement agencies and officers who allowed our families to be destroyed that day,” Luevanos said. “This settlement reflects a first good faith effort, particularly by the City of Uvalde, to begin rebuilding trust in the systems that failed to protect us.”

In a written statement, city officials called the 2022 shooting the “community’s greatest tragedy.”

“We will forever be grateful to the victims’ families for working with us over the past year to cultivate an environment of community-wide healing that honors the lives and memories of those we tragically lost,” city officials said.

An investigation by a Texas House committee found “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” by nearly everyone involved in the response.

That panel’s 77-page report revealed that a total of 376 law enforcement officers descended upon the school in an uncoordinated manner, disregarding their own active shooter training.

The majority of the responders were federal and state law enforcement –– 149 U.S. Border Patrol and 91 state police –– whose responsibilities include responding to “mass attacks in public places.” The other responders included 25 Uvalde police officers, 16 sheriff’s deputies, and five police officers with the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District as well as neighboring county law enforcement, U.S. marshals and federal Drug Enforcement Administration officers.

The myriad of law enforcement mistakes stemmed from an absence of leadership and effective communications, according to the House report. DPS who responded to the shooting.

A trove of recorded investigative interviews and body camera footage obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE showed that officers failed to set up a clear command structure and spread incorrect information that caused them to treat the shooter as a barricaded suspect and not an active threat — even as children and teachers inside the classrooms called 911 pleading for help. No single officer engaged the shooter for more than an hour despite training that says they should do so as quickly as possible if anyone is hurt.

Following intense criticism of their response, several law enforcement officers resigned or were fired in the months following the shooting. Arredondo, the school district police chief at the time, was fired in August 2022.

About 72% of the state and local officials who arrived at Robb Elementary before the gunman was killed received some form of active shooter training throughout their law enforcement careers. But of those who received training, most had taken it only once. After the shooting, Texas mandated that officers receive 16 hours of active shooter training every two years.

A Uvalde County grand jury is currently considering potential criminal charges against responding officers. The county’s prosecutor declined to comment this week on the status of those proceedings.

DPS is fighting the release of records from its investigation into the shooting. In the aftermath of the massacre, agency leaders that cast local law enforcement as incompetent.

Koskoff criticized DPS for deflecting blame away from state police.

“As if they didn’t know how to shoot somebody?” he said.

Pooja Salhotra contributed to this story.

This article originally appeared in at . The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

The mother of Alyssa Alhadeff, a student who was killed in her English class during the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, stood before a room full of lawmakers and state officials on Wednesday. 

Lori Alhadeff held a portrait of her daughter in her arms as she applauded Utah for becoming the sixth state to pass “Alyssa’s Law,” legislation mandating silent panic alarms in classrooms that are directly linked to law enforcement.

“We are taking momentous steps forward in safeguarding our children’s well-being,” Alhadeff said, adding the bill represents “our collective commitment to providing a secure learning environment for every child in Utah.”

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Anti-school shooting bill

The 2024 Utah Legislature last month passed , and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed it into law on March 12. The sweeping school safety and security bill includes not only “Alyssa’s Law,” but also creates a set of uniform, minimum safety standards all Utah schools must adhere to. It designates armed school employees as guardians, requires threat reporting if employees are aware of a particular safety concern, and links the state’s SafeUT Crisis Line to Utah’s intelligence database.

To enact HB84, the Utah Legislature approved $100 million one-time money and $2.1 million in ongoing funding.

To highlight HB84 — along with seven other bills packaged together as legislation that will benefit Utah’s future generations — Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson ceremoniously signed the bills on Wednesday at the University of Utah’s Bennion Center.

HB84’s sponsor, Rep. Ryan Wilcox, R-Ogden, said his bill is meant to address a reality in the U.S. that “isn’t going away for us.” School shootings, he said, are not a tragedy that “we can pretend isn’t happening.”

He thanked the parents of the Parkland, Florida shooting victims for helping craft Utah’s legislation and ensuring “when our kids go to school, all they’re worried about is learning rather than catastrophic violence.”

“That isn’t something that they should have to worry about. But it is something that we do,” Wilcox said. “It is a responsibility of parents, the schools, of the adults who can do a lot more to prepare and make sure that they don’t have to worry about it.”

Henderson stood in for Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who originally was expected to attend the signing but was unable to due to a family emergency. His wife, first lady on Wednesday to remove degenerative discs in her neck after “weeks of debilitating pain,” according to the governor’s office.

Henderson applauded HB84 and other bills aimed at improving opportunities for Utah’s youth and parents.

“We are a family friendly state,” Henderson said. “We care about our children, our educators, our education system. We care about the future. And this is an opportunity that we put our money where our mouth is.”

The full list of bills Henderson ceremoniously signed included:

• provides $1.5 million to provide instruction on child sexual abuse and human trafficking. It was supported by the nonprofit , which hopes it will help reduce sexual abuse.
• allows a state employee to use parental leave for a variety of reasons, including time for a child or an incapacitated adult with whom the employee is assuming a parental role, including foster care. It also allows a state employee to use postpartum recovery leave to recover from a childbirth that occurs at 20 weeks or greater and provides flexibility so they don’t have to use the leave in a single continuous period of time.
• uses $8.4 million in one-time state money to increase the amount of funding available to teachers for classroom supplies. It provides $500 to go to elementary school classroom teachers and $250 to go to middle and high school teachers specifically for classroom supplies.
• mandates school districts to develop paid leave policies for parental and postpartum recovery. It requires a minimum of three weeks off for someone adopting, becoming a foster parent, a grandparent taking custody, or a spouse of someone giving birth, as well as requiring six weeks of paid postpartum leave for Utahns who give birth.
• uses $8.4 million to give stipends of $6,000 to support educators while they’re full-time student teachers.
• raises legal standards in child custody cases with the intention of protecting kids from abusive parents. It was named “” after Leah Moses’ 16-year-old son, Om Moses Gandhi, who was murdered by Moses’ ex-husband.
• uses over $100 million in one-time money and $2.1 million in ongoing funding to increase .  uses $3.3 million to create a pilot project called the , which provides stipends and scholarships to young adults who participate in a year of community service, according to the University of Utah. Participants would receive an hourly stipend and a $7,400 scholarship in exchange for 1,700 hours of service with an approved partner organization.

Pew Research Associate Luona Lin called the findings released Thursday “jarring”: Nearly a quarter of educators said they experienced a lockdown due to a gun — or fears of one — on their campus last school year.

Teachers who work in high schools, and those located in urban areas, were far more likely to experience lockdowns. Among high school educators, 34% reported at least one gun-related lockdown during the 2022-23 school year, as did 31% of those who teach in urban areas.

“One of the most striking findings is just the sheer number of teachers who say they have experienced a lockdown,” Lin told The 74. Pew sought to probe educators’ perspectives of school gun violence after researchers conducted interviews to understand their “day-to-day lives and their perspectives” on hot-button issues, she said. Gun violence came up again and again. 

“A lot of teachers definitely talked about worrying about school shootings happening in their school,” she said. “One of the teachers we talked about it with actually said, ‘I think about it every day.’”

Though the Pew data don’t offer insight into the frequency that firearms are ultimately found, tallies on campus attacks have shown a staggering upward trend, with record numbers over the last three years.

Just this week, James and Jennifer Crumbley to 10-15 years in prison after being found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for their role in failing to prevent a 2021 school shooting that was carried out by their then-15-year-old son. The shooting at his Oxford, Michigan, high school led to the death of four students. The Crumbleys are the first parents in U.S. history to be sentenced to prison in response to an active shooting perpetrated by their child. More than two-thirds of active shootings at K-12 campuses were carried out by perpetrators between the ages of 12 and 18, . 

For some teachers who participated in the Pew poll — 59% of whom say they worry about a school shooting unfolding at their schools — gun-related lockdowns are frequent. While 15% said they experienced one lockdown last school year, 8% said they were forced to take cover at least twice. 

The new data on the opinions of K-12 teachers comes roughly 25 years after the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in suburban Denver, which became a national flashpoint on school violence after two student gunmen killed 13 of their classmates before taking their own lives. Since then, national spending on school security has surged — and so, too, have the number of campus attacks.

Though school shootings are politically fraught and carry devastating consequences for communities, they remain statistically rare. Between 2000 and 2021, there have been 46 “active shooter incidents” at K-12 campuses, which resulted in 108 deaths and 168 injuries, according to . Active shootings are defined as those where a gunman fires indiscriminately at people in a public place like a school. 

Beyond active shootings like those at Oxford and Columbine, federal data on campus gun incidents indicate 188 shootings that resulted in casualties during the 2021-22 school year— more than twice as many as the year earlier, which at the time was a record high.

While a majority of educators fear school shootings, 39% said their school has done a fair or poor job preparing for one while 30% — particularly those with school-based police officers — said their district has done an excellent or very good job. 

In preventing future attacks, 69% of educators endorsed efforts to improve mental health screenings and treatments for children, 49% supported campus cops and 33% favored metal detectors. 

Just 13% of teachers who participated in the Pew survey said arming educators would be an extremely or very effective approach to prevent the tragedies. 

Teachers’ responses were often similar to those offered by parents and students in previous Pew surveys on school shooting fears and preparation — with all parties being swayed, at least in part, by partisan politics. 

Republican-leaning educators were more likely than their Democratic colleagues to support campus police, metal detectors and arming teachers. Democratic teachers were more likely than GOP educators to support efforts to improve students’ mental health. 

In , two-thirds of parents said they were at least somewhat worried about a shooting unfolding at their child’s school, and 63% endorsed improvements in mental health for students as a way to prevent shootings, a rate higher than any other intervention. 

In , from 2018, 57% of teens said they were somewhat or very worried about a school shooting occurring on their campus. 

Pew’s educator survey included responses from 2,531 public K-12 teachers in October and November who are members of , a nationally representative sample of U.S. educators. 

“Gun violence and all of these gun policy issues, they are definitely partisan,” Lin said. “The views of teachers, the views of parents, are reflective of the overall population’s views on this, and definitely the partisan differences as well.”

James Crumbley, the father of the Oxford High School shooter, was found guilty Thursday of involuntary manslaughter for his role in the killings of four students in 2021.

The verdict will not bring back anyone’s children, Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said at a press conference after the verdict was read, flanked by the parents of the students who were killed.

“I will forever remain in awe of their strength and perseverance that they have shown in the last two and a half years,” McDonald said. “It’s a privilege to do this and we know that it can’t take the pain away, but It’s one small step towards accountability.”

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The decision in Crumbley’s case follows the February conviction of Crumbley’s wife, , on the same charges, one involuntary manslaughter charge for each child their son killed. The cases mark the first time in the U.S. parents of a mass shooter have been held directly responsible for the deaths their child caused.

The shooter was sentenced to life without parole in December.

The prosecution had the task of proving that Crumbley’s actions or inactions made the shooting possible, as Crumbley had the legal duty as a parent to prevent his child from harming others and should’ve taken reasonable actions to mitigate possible harm.

Nicole Beausoleil, the mother of Madisyn Baldwin who was killed in the shooting, thanked the other parents standing with her over the course of the two and a half years since the shooting for their friendship and support through all three prosecutions. All four families of the victims are forever changed and will continue fighting for accountability on behalf of their children, she said.

“This is not just a verdict for attention or media,” Beausoleil said at the press conference. “This is a verdict that actually needs to be put to the platform that it is: How are we going to use this verdict to actually make that change?”

For five days, , witnesses relayed the events leading up to and following the Nov. 30, 2021, shooting at Oxford High School, as well as the horror and violence individuals faced as James Crumbley’s son opened fired at teachers and students, injuring seven people and killing four of his classmates: Baldwin, Hana St. Julianna, Justin Shilling and Tate Myre.

There were several small actions Crumbley could have taken to prevent the shooting and signs of mental distress from his son that a parent should have acknowledged and sought out help for, McDonald said in her closing arguments Wednesday.

“There were 1,800 students at Oxford High School. There was one parent who suspected that their son was the school shooter and it was James Crumbley,” McDonald said, , telling the operator that a gun was missing from his house.

Crumbley’s lawyer, Mariell Lehman, told the jury during her closing arguments that although the prosecution has shown them “haunting things; tragic things,” they have not shown evidence that Crumbly knew that his son was a danger to others. If they had evidence to prove Crumbley knew what his son was planning, jurors would have seen it.

“The prosecution wants you to find that James could foresee that his son was a danger to others and that James acted in a grossly negligent manner or breached a duty that he owed to other people, despite having no information at the time,” Lehman said during her closing arguments. “You saw no evidence that James had any knowledge that his son was a danger to anyone. You heard no testimony and saw no evidence that James Crumbley knew what his son was planning.”

Crumbley had bought his son the gun used in the shooting four days before the killings, having taken him to the shooting range on several occasions and supervising his usage there.

But during Crumbley’s trial, as well as that of Jennifer Crumbley, questions were raised on .

Ultimately, it would have taken “just one tragically small measure of ordinary care to avoid four deaths” McDonald said calling attention to the meeting the Crumbleys were called to at the school the day of the shooting after the shooter drew a sketch of the gun his father had bought him days prior on his math assignment.

Shawn Hopkins, the school counselor at the meeting the day of the shooting, testified during Jennifer Crumbley’s trial that he was , or that their son would be able to access it. In addition to the drawing of the gun, there was a drawing of a body with blood coming out of it and a few statements including “the thoughts won’t stop” and “help me.”

Hopkins said on Monday that he didn’t tell either parent that they absolutely had to take their son home and the shooter expressed interest in returning class. Hopkins said he did insist that the parents seek out mental health care for their son who had told him that he was experiencing sadness over the recent death of his dog and grandma and was missing his friend who had moved away.

And though neither parent told their son at the meeting that they cared about him after Hopkins told him at the end that he cared about him, Hopkins said James Crumbley did speak to the shooter.

“He was talking to his son and mentioned that, you know, ‘You have people you can talk to; you can talk to your counselor; you have your journal; we talk’ and it felt appropriate at that time,” Hopkins said.

If the shooting had not happened, Hopkins said it was his plan to check in with the shooter to see if his parents had sought out any mental health services for him. And if not, he said he would have called Child Protective Services.

On Tuesday, Oakland County Sheriff’s Office Detective Lt. Timothy Willis offered insight on the shooter’s journal saying that in all the 22 pages the shooter wrote in, he referenced wanting to commit a school shooting. There were also passages where the shooter talks about wanting to get help.

One entry reads: “I have zero HELP for my mental problems and it’s causing me to SHOOT UP THE F—ING SCHOOL.” Another entry reads: “I want help but my parents don’t listen to me so I can’t get any help.”

Later entries chronicle the shooter receiving his gun from Crumbley and detailing his plan to kill people at his school.

Edward Wagrowski, an Oakland County Sheriff’s detective at the time of the shooting, testified last week, showing the jury text messages between the shooter and his friend months before the shooting detailing mental health struggles, including hearing voices.

One text from the shooter reads, “I actually asked my dad to take [me] to the Doctor yesterday but he just gave me some pills and told me to ‘Suck it up.”

If Crumbley had done the simplest of things, as he knew his son was struggling, four kids would still be alive, McDonald said in her closing arguments. If he had listened to his son or read his journal and believed what it said, he could have intervened as the violence his son was planning was foreseeable.

“He sees that drawing that morning when he goes to the school and what does it say? It says, ‘help me.’ How many times does this kid have to say it? He says it in his journal. He says it to his friend and what is he saying? ‘I asked my parents; I asked my dad,’” McDonald said. “And if that isn’t enough, he writes the words “help me” on a piece of paper and his parents, James Crumbley is called to the school to see it and what did he say? He says, ‘We gotta go work.’”

The defense only called on one witness as the burden of proof was not on them. Crumbley’s sister, Karen Crumbley, talked about seeing her brother and nephew, the shooter, in April and then again in the summer, months before the shooting.

Crumbley, who lives in Florida, said she and James Crumbley had been in the hospital with their mother as she was sick at the time. Karen Crumbley said their mother died on April 6, 2021, and the shooter came to Florida to visit shortly after. She didn’t observe anything that would have raised concerns for her.

When she came to Michigan for a summer 2021 visit, she said she didn’t observe anything that gave her reasons to worry about her nephew’s mental state or what kind of care he was receiving from his parents. When asked by the defense if she would have done anything had she observed anything wrong, she said she would have.

“I would have addressed it and if I would have known anything I would have talked to him. I would have took him home with me if there was any kind of inclination that anything was wrong,” Karen Crumbley said. She added that she would have told her brother if she thought something was wrong, but there was nothing she was concerned about.

Moving forward, more needs to be done to address the ways in which children in America are dying from gun violence, Steve St. Juliana, the father of Hana St. Juliana, said at the press conference after the verdict reading. More needs to be done to tackle kids’ declining mental health and other issues and people can’t simply stand behind Second Amendment rights and not talk about what is killing kids.

“We can put people on the moon; we can build skyscrapers, huge monuments like the Hoover Dam and we can’t keep our kids safe in schools?” St. Juliana said. “I think people just need to wake up and take action. Stop accepting the excuses. Stop buying the rhetoric. It is not a Democratic or Republican issue. It’s nonpartisan. Do not accept any excuse from any of the politicians. This needs to be solved and it needs to be solved now. We do not want any other parents to go through what we’ve gone through.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan J. Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on and .

A year after the tragic shooting that claimed the lives of three students on Michigan State University’s campus, students are and trying to honor everything they lost on Feb. 13, 2023.

But they can’t properly mourn this week, MSU student Saylor Reinders said Thursday at an MSU student rally on the Michigan Capitol steps. As the MSU, Northern Illinois University and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School communities deal with painful anniversaries of shootings at their schools this week, a mass shooting on Wednesday during the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl victory celebration injured more than 20 people, with one death confirmed as of Thursday.

There have been in 2024 so far.

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“It’s everywhere. It’s all the time. We can’t escape it,” Reinders said from the Michigan Capitol steps. “No words can really describe what the past year has been like, but I can say that despite the anger, sadness, grief, confusion, and just trying to be a college student, we never stopped showing up. I’m proud of the tireless work of students who showed up right here at the Capitol a year ago, and everyday since to demand change.”

And the pressure was on, MSU student and gun violence prevention organizer Maya Manuel said during a talk with Democratic lawmakers after the rally.

Manuel recalled meeting with lawmakers, including state Sen. Sam Singh (D-East Lansing), exactly a year ago, begging for something to be done. Hundreds of students gathered at the Capitol for a rally just two days after the shooting that killed Alexandria Verner, 20; Brian Fraser, 20; and Arielle Anderson, 19 and seriously injured five other students.

To her surprise, lawmakers introduced gun safety bills days later, which exactly one year after the MSU shooting.

“I remember looking at you, directly in your eyes and saying that the next one is going to be on you,” Manuel said. “And you took that and you went to your colleagues and you pushed out those bills just two days later.”

The new laws, written in response to the MSU shooting, require gun owners to safely store firearms from minors, implement universal background checks when purchasing a firearm, create extreme risk protection orders and expand prohibitions on firearm ownership for those convicted of crimes involving domestic violence.

But more progress is needed to prevent gun violence in Michigan, Manuel said. MSU was not Michigan’s first school shooting and the deadly Oxford High School shooting was only two years ago.

“There’s so much emotion in the words that I told you when I said that I needed you, and I still need you. So what do you think you guys will do moving forward to push for your colleagues to listen?” Manuel asked the few lawmakers that met with MSU students in the Capitol Thursday: Singh, Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, Rep. Emily Dievendorf (D-Lansing) and Rep. Penelope Tsernoglou (D-East Lansing).

Brinks said the Michigan House’s current 54-54 partisan split due to two Democratic members winning mayoral races last as a hindrance for further action on gun policy was primarily carried by Democratic votes. Special elections are scheduled for April 16.

“We don’t have any Republican members who are willing to vote yes on gun safety,” Brinks said. “There’s a lot of policy left to be done and it can be frustrating to watch from afar. I will also say it’s frustrating to watch up close so we share a lot of your concerns about that and we’ll continue to work.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan J. Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on and .

She had just taken her son out to target practice in what she described on social media as a “mom and son day testing out his new Christmas present:” a 9-millimeter pistol the high schooler referred to online as “My new beauty.”

The images were pivotal to an unprecedented conviction this week that legal scholars predict could create a new tool for prosecutors as the nation looks for ways to stem a record-setting uptick in mass shootings.

“This is the last picture we have of that gun until we see it murder four kids on Nov. 30, and the person holding it is Jennifer Crumbley,” Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said before a jury convicted the mother on four counts of involuntary manslaughter — one for each of the students her son gunned down at Oxford High School. 

“She’s the last person we see with that gun,” McDonald said. 

Crumbley is the first parent to be held directly responsible for a school shooting carried out by their child, turning on its head a bedrock legal principle: People cannot be held responsible for the actions of others.

“Look, I thought this case could go either way and still when the result came out I was a bit stunned because it’s such a deep legal principle,” Ekow Yankah, a University of Michigan law professor, told The 74.

And if other parents are charged in connection with shootings acted out by their children, Yankah said, the Crumbley conviction may make them more likely to accept a plea deal behind closed doors.

“Prosecutors will be tempted to use this power in ways that we don’t see,” he said. “A prosecutor is going to sit across from a parent when people are crying out for somebody to be held accountable and the prosecutor is going to be able to say, ‘I’m offering you three years to five years in prison, but if you don’t take this deal, I will prosecute for 15 years.’ ” 

For gun control advocates and the parents of children killed in their classrooms, the landmark trial’s outcome was welcomed. Craig Shilling, the father of Oxford shooting victim Justin Shilling, told a local TV station the conviction is “definitely a step towards accountability.” About three-quarters of school shooters obtain their guns from a parent or another close relative, according to a . In about half of cases, the guns had been readily accessible. 

The conviction is in many ways a watershed moment that hinged heavily on portrayals of Crumbley as a neglectful mom who paid more attention to her horses and an affair than to the son she’d gifted a gun to as he struggled with his mental health and exhibited violent behaviors. 

In this case, the gunman was charged as an adult while his mother was found guilty of crimes that stemmed from her role as an egregiously aloof and reckless parent. The gunman pleaded guilty in October 2022 to 24 charges, including first-degree murder and terrorism causing death, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole in December. 

The shooter’s father, James Crumbley, is scheduled to face a similar trial next month. 

Yankah, the UMichigan law professor, told The 74 he wasn’t aware of any other cases where a parent was held liable for the crimes of a child who was simultaneously considered “a legal agent” and therefore responsible for his own actions. 

It’s not the first time a parent has been held legally responsible for crimes committed by their children —including in helping their child secure a firearm later used in a mass shooting. Still, experts said the Crumbley case does present a significant escalation in a generations-long push to hold parents accountable for the misdeed of their kids.

One , published in the Utah Law Review in 2008, noted that such efforts appeared cyclical, noting that “every couple of decades or so” lawmakers claimed to “discover” the idea of holding parents to account for teenage crimes. 

Punishing parents

which impose civil or criminal liability on adults under the premise that their failures to take control as parents led to their kids’ bad acts. There is research that ties youth delinquency to poor parenting. 

One recent parental responsibility law, , specifically addressed guns. It imposed civil liability on parents for negligence or willful misconduct if they allow their minor children to use or possess guns if the child has been adjudicated delinquent, was convicted of a crime, has the propensity to commit violence or intends to use the weapon unlawfully. 

Efforts to hold parents accountable for their children’s behaviors are rooted in the very origins of the nation’s juvenile justice system in the early 1900s, which authorized the state to intervene when parents failed in their duties, and their constitutional implications. By the 1970s, the report notes, lawmakers began to place a greater emphasis on parents as a factor in juvenile crime and turned to

Little is known, however, about whether such efforts have been effective in reducing juvenile crime. Eve Brank, a professor of law and psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told The 74 that she is unaware, after decades of researching the emergence of parental responsibility laws, of “any empirical research that shows that imposing punishments on parents because of the actions of the children will decrease juvenile crime.”

She is also unaware of any data indicating how frequently those laws are used. In 2015, she , who reported infrequent enforcement. Through her research, Brank has identified three types of such laws: civil liability, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and parental involvement. 

Under the statutes, parents can be held responsible for helping or encouraging their child to commit a crime and financially liable for damages. They can also be required to pay fines or attend parenting classes due to their children’s criminal acts. 

Among them are truancy laws, which require students to attend school. In New Jersey, for example, parents who don’t compel their children to attend school can face disorderly conduct charges and fines. Such efforts, however, have been heavily criticized — including during the 2016 presidential election when Vice President Kamala Harris was that imposed jail time and fines on parents in truancy cases while she served as state attorney general. 

In 2017, Pennsylvania lawmakers reformed state truancy rules and made them less punitive after a Reading County woman was found dead in 2014 while serving a two-day jail sentence for her children’s truancy because she was unable to pay a $2,000 fine. 

“Many of those statutes came under a lot of strain in the last say 15 years,” including ones around truancy, Yankah said, adding that people were skeptical about whether they addressed the root causes underlying the social problems they sought to address and could uphold long standing racial disparities in the judicial system. “Frankly, communities of color really learned that — as is so often the case — when we pass more criminal statutes the people who are in the crosshairs are politically vulnerable. It was a lot of Black mothers, and so those statutes kind of faded out of popularity.”&�Բ�����;

In some cases, parental responsibility laws have failed under court scrutiny. Among them is an ordinance in Maple Heights, Ohio, that for “failing to supervise a minor” if their child committed what would be considered a misdemeanor or a felony if it had been carried out by an adult. The in 2008 after a parent faced charges after her 17-year-old son was accused in juvenile court of carrying a concealed weapon, resisting arrest and failing to comply with a police officer. 

Meanwhile, officials have also sought to hold parents responsible when their children bully other kids. In 2016, the city council in Shawano, Wisconsin, passed an ordinance that on parents who failed to address their child’s harassment directed at other kids. 

In a high-profile cyberbullying case from 2013, a Florida sheriff bemoaned his of a girl who was charged criminally for harassing a 12-year-old classmate so relentlessly online that it led the girl to die by suicide. Among the harassment was an online message encouraging the 12-year-old to “drink bleach and die,” yet the parents continued to give the bully access to social media. 

“I’m aggravated that the parents aren’t doing what parents should do,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd told reporters at the time. “Responsible parents take disciplinary action.”&�Բ�����;

A new category of parental responsibility

Crumbley’s conviction, Brank said, “doesn’t fit into any of these categories” of traditional parental responsibility laws and is instead a first-of-its-kind extension of the manslaughter statute. 

As officials seek to crack down on mass shootings, the Crumbley case is one of several recent examples where prosecutors sought to hold parents accountable when their children carried out what once were unthinkable acts of violence.

In December, a Virginia mother was for felony child neglect after her 6-year-old son brought a gun to his Newport News elementary school and shot his first-grade teacher. In a separate prosecution, the mother pleaded guilty to using marijuana while owning a firearm and for making false statements about her drug use. 

In a separate prosecution that may have laid the groundwork for the Crumbley case, to misdemeanor reckless conduct on charges that stemmed from a shooting carried out by his son at a 2022 Highland Park Independence Day parade, which left seven people dead. That case centered on how his son, who was 19 at the time, obtained a gun license.��

At the time of the massacre, the gunman was too young to apply for a firearm license so his father sponsored his application despite knowing his son had a history of behaving violently. Several months before the attack, a relative reported to police that the teenager had a large collection of knives and had threatened to “kill everyone.”&�Բ�����;

In the Highland Park case, was explicit: The father’s guilty plea, he said, should be a “beacon” to others that parents can be held accountable for the actions of their children. 

“We’ve laid down a marker to other prosecutors, to other police in this country, to other parents, that they must be held accountable,” Lake County State Attorney Eric Rinehart said. “The risk of potentially losing this innovative prosecution — and not putting down any marker — was too great for our trial team.”&�Բ�����;

Yankah said it’s important to look at new parental accountability efforts through their historical contexts. 

“Looking back at history,” he said, “shows us that our historical experiments with this kind of liability for parents has rarely solved the underlying problem,” he said. “Maybe this kind of case will have an effect, maybe parents will be more attentive. But to speak honestly, I think what a case like this shows is how many different things we as a society have to work on if we really want to be free of this violence.”

A Michigan jury found Jennifer Crumbley, the mother of the Oxford High School shooter, guilty of involuntary manslaughter Tuesday.

In a , the jury found that Crumbley bore enough responsibility for the deaths caused by her son’s actions that she should be held criminally liable.

At age 15, Crumbley’s son shot and killed four of his classmates at Oxford High School on Nov. 30, 2021, days after his father bought him a gun. Crumbley’s son was sentenced to life without parole in December.

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Crumbley’s husband, James Crumbley, has a separate trial scheduled for March.

After two days of deliberations, a jury in Oakland County Circuit Court in metro Detroit delivered the guilty verdict for Jennifer Crumbley on four counts of involuntary manslaughter, one for each of the students killed: Madisyn Baldwin, Tate Myre, Hana St. Julianna and Justin Shilling.

The jury had been tasked by the court to determine whether Crumbley’s actions warranted involuntary manslaughter charges, which marks new legal ground for determining responsibility for a mass shooting.

Crumbley now faces up to 15 years in prison ahead of her sentencing scheduled for April 9.

Her defense argued during the trial that began on Jan. 25 that Crumbley couldn’t have known what her son was going to do. She was portrayed as an attentive parent who was aware that her son was going through a hard time, but nothing indicated he would become a school shooter.

“It was unforeseeable; no one expected this,” Shannon Smith, a lawyer for Crumbley, said in her closing arguments. “No one could have expected this, including Mrs. Crumbley.”

But the prosecution argued that Crumbley failed as a parent to perform her legal duty to exercise reasonable oversight to her son to prevent him from harming others and was negligent to the point that it harmed human life.

The prosecution proved Crumbley’s role in the shooting and how she could have intervened at several points beforehand to get her son help or secured the firearms in the home, but she didn’t, Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said in her closing arguments.

“We have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that she is guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter. It’s a rare case. It takes some really egregious facts. It takes the unthinkable and she has done the unthinkable and because of that four kids have died,” McDonald said.

Despite audibly crying at several points throughout the trial, Crumbley didn’t have a substantial reaction to the verdict being read. McDonald and other members of the prosecution hugged family members of the slain children.

In addition to the four students who were killed, the shooter injured six other students and a teacher. Molly Darnell, the teacher who was shot in the arm, was the first witness to testify at the start of the trial in January. A total of 22 witnesses spoke during the trial, including Crumbley, members of law enforcement and people who had interactions with Crumbley.

A major element of the prosecution’s justification for the involuntary manslaughter charges was Crumbley’s actions the day of the shooting after she and her husband were called to the school because the shooter had done a drawing of his gun on his math assignment.

Four days prior, the shooter and his father went to a gun shop and the father purchased the gun used in the killings on Black Friday as an early Christmas present.

After the meeting at the school where Crumbley and her husband were advised to seek out professional help for their son, the prosecution brought in witnesses from the school and law enforcement to show that neither parent took the shooter out of school for the day. Neither parent checked their son’s backpack where he had the gun. And neither parent asked their son where his gun was or checked to see if it was still at home.

There had been other meetings with the shooter’s parents, Shawn Hopkins, the school counselor at the meeting the day of the shooting, said during the trial. He said he was hoping one of the parents would take the shooter home. Although Hopkins didn’t tell them they had to, he thought it was strange they didn’t.

“She sat down in the chair; [I] felt she was a little bit distant. … It felt like it was a little bit of an inconvenience to be there,” Hopkins said of Crumbley during the meeting.

Hopkins said the shooter showed signs of possible suicidal thoughts and he didn’t want him to be alone. Hopkins added that he did not know that the shooter’s father had bought him a gun.

In addition to the drawing of a gun, the shooter’s assignment had the words, “my life is useless” and “the thoughts won’t stop help me,” written in addition to other statements and drawings.

When school officials asked Crumbley and her husband to go to the school, Crumbley testified she thought the shooter had sketched the gun in defiance of a recent conversation they had about his falling math grade, during which he had his phone taken away and was told he couldn’t go to the shooting range until his grade improved.

This was the first time she and her husband had been called to the school on an “immediate” time frame, Crumbley testified and she had told her boss she would be back at work an hour later.

Crumbley said she expected her son to get in trouble and get suspended, but the meeting was “nonchalant” and “brief.”

“There is never a time where I would refuse to take him home,” Crumbley testified, adding that she told her husband to start calling mental health professionals suggested by Hopkins.

Crumbley said she and her husband lost everything, adding she doesn’t feel like she failed as a parent and she had no reason to think her son was a danger to anyone else. She said she doesn’t look back and think she would have done anything differently.

“You spend your whole life trying to protect your child from other dangers. You never would think you have to protect your child from harming somebody else,” Crumbley testified, adding that she wished he would have killed her and her husband instead of the other kids at the school.

The shooter’s father was responsible for gun storage as firearms were not really her thing, Crumbley said. The gun that was bought for her son’s use was secured using a cable lock and the key to unlock it was hidden in one of the many decorative beer steins throughout the house.

The prosecution “cherry-picked” evidence to make Crumbley look like a negligent mother and conflate the magnitude of the tragedy with Crumbley’s parenting, Smith said as part of Crumbley’s defense. Hours of the trial were dedicated to members of law enforcement going over the gruesome details of the shooting. But Smith said the case came down to the prosecution improperly asking the jury to come to the assumption that Crumbley could have conceived what no parent would think their child would be capable of.

“When you look back in hindsight, with 20-20 vision … it is easy to say this could have been different, that could have been different, this would have changed,” Smith said.

Due to the community impact of the shooting and the future legal implications for parents of mass shooters in the future, the case has garnered national attention.

The jury’s verdict stands as a reminder to parents and gun owners that they are responsible for ensuring children can’t access their firearms unsupervised, Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a statement after the verdict was read.

“Plain and simple, the deadly shooting at Oxford High School in 2021 should have — and could have — been prevented had the Crumbley’s not acquired a gun for their 15-year-old son,” Suplina said. “This decision is an important step forward in ensuring accountability and, hopefully, preventing future tragedies.”

The decision marks Michigan setting a standard for the legal response to “when our kids are killed in their sanctuaries,” U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Holly) said in a statement Tuesday. She applauded .

“Today is a historic day in Michigan, and really for the whole country. Having watched the Oxford community go through this school shooting firsthand, and seeing the lifelong hole it ripped in the lives of everyone involved, this verdict feels like a small moment of relief,” Slotkin said. “It is my hope that it brings a bit of peace to the survivors and to the entire community, as I know everyone in Oxford has worked to heal together over the past two years.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan J. Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on and .

Publicly traded Evolv Technology acknowledged that the Federal Trade Commission had “requested information about certain aspects of its marketing practices” in last week, of its technology in promotions that could give customers, including schools, a false sense of security. 

Citing two anonymous sources, is the subject of an FTC investigation into whether its scanners — essentially next-generation metal detectors with a — employ artificial intelligence to identify weapons in the ways that it claims.

It’s unclear whether Massachusetts-based Evolv’s sales pitches to the education sector are part of the federal probe. An FTC spokesperson declined to comment Tuesday. In its Oct. 12 disclosure form with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in a statement this week to The 74, Evolv said the company was “pleased to answer” regulators’ questions. 

“When Evolv receives inquiries from regulators, our approach is to be cooperative and educate them about our company,” the statement continued. “The company stands behind its technology’s capabilities and performance track record.”

The company has that it uses AI to scan for the unique “signatures” of tens of thousands of weapons, allowing it to distinguish “all the guns, all the bombs and all the large tactical knives” out there from everyday items like keys and laptops. 

Yet the — including its — has faced pushback for several years, particularly by IPVM, an independent security and surveillance industry research group that tests and evaluates products. Conor Healy, the group’s director of government research, said that false and misleading marketing claims have been “a pattern with the company” for years. Among the inaccurate assertions, he said, is that the tool “eliminates the friction” that students experience when they pass through security everyday. 

“That has been shown to be just simply not true at all,” Healy told The 74 this week. “There’s quite a lot of friction. The schools that we’ve looked at have .”&�Բ�����;

Districts have increasingly turned to “weapons detection” systems from Evolv and competing security vendors in response to fears of school shootings — anxiety that the company says “keeps both students and staff from doing their best work.”

Evolv “combines powerful sensor technology with proven artificial intelligence” to identify threats like guns in hundreds of U.S. schools. Capable of scanning more than 4,000 people an hour, Evolv says its devices are “10X faster than metal detectors,” and “help reduce opportunities for bias” by decreasing secondary screenings by humans.

Evolv extols the benefits of its scanners well beyond schools’ physical safety. While frequent false alarms by traditional metal detectors lead to “security anxiety” and “inconvenient delays,” according to the company’s website, Evolv scanners offer “a more effective and dignified solution, fostering a safer, more inclusive environment that bolsters academic achievement and staff retention.”&�Բ�����;

IPVM has accused the company of is 10 times faster than traditional metal detectors, and found the scanners . Meanwhile, IPVM has documented instances where false alarms were by water bottles, binders and laptops.

In a statement to Pennsylvania-based IPVM last month, Evolv said “we understand if any of our past statements appeared to generalize our capabilities,” which may violate an FTC rule that requires company claims to be evidence-backed. 

With AI a constant, if little understood, buzzword across many sectors right now, the FTC in February the capabilities of their artificial intelligence offerings, adding that “false or unsubstantiated claims about a product’s efficacy are our bread and butter.”&�Բ�����;

“The minute you hear the word AI in marketing, alarm bells should go off in your head,” said Healy, whose group has also done and the routinely installed in schools. 

“As far as [Evolv’s] artificial intelligence goes, it does not appear to be very intelligent,” he said, because it routinely fails to differentiate everyday school supplies like Chromebooks from weapons like guns. “What AI is actually in the system? That is something that Evolv has not told us very much about.”&�Բ�����;

Evolv has resisted calls to disclose additional information about the ways its scanners function. While scanners’ sensitivity settings can alter their performance, a company spokesperson previously told The 74 that publicly sharing information about those settings “is irresponsible and puts people at greater risk.”&�Բ�����;

“We must assume any published information regarding details of a physical screening system will be studied and leveraged by a bad actor seeking to do harm,” the statement continued. The company declined to comment on the false alarm rates reported by its customer districts, which include ,, and

 “Our systems are designed to detect many types of weapons and components of weapons, but there is no perfect solution that will stop 100% of threats, including ours, which is why security must include a layered approach that involves people, process and technology.”&�Բ�����;

Knives became a point of conflict last year after the school district in Utica, New York, spent nearly $4 million to install Evolv scanners across 13 of its campuses. The scanners were ultimately removed after a student was stabbed multiple times with a knife during a fight in a high school hallway. The knife-wielding student had passed through an Evolv scanner with the blade in his backpack, a later investigation revealed. 

While the detectors had false alarms, including on a student’s lunch box, an Evolv scanner failed to alarm when an off-duty police officer accidentally brought a service revolver to a Utica district open house.

Meanwhile, in Buffalo, New York, Evolv scanners were credited for keeping a high school safe. Earlier this month, an to a criminal weapons possession charge after he was caught trying to bring a handgun into a high school. A school security officer reportedly found the disassembled “ghost gun” in the teenager’s backpack as he passed through a weapons detector. Buffalo schools earlier this year. A Buffalo schools spokesperson declined to comment.

As companies increasingly market products with artificial intelligence capabilities to schools, school security consultant Kenneth Trump predicts — or at least hopes — that regulation is imminent. He pointed to new rules in . The ban was adopted after an upstate school district’s decision to install surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities prompted an outcry. 

“The marketing claims are so off the charts by many vendors that there’s really no chance for the average school administrator to know what’s true, what’s false and really the gaps and the limitations that these products have,” said Trump, president of Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services. Though he expects regulators to soon reign in security companies, “up until that happens, how many school districts are going to fall victim to questionable marketing and grandiose ideas that don’t come to fruition?”

Martin, editor-in-chief of the student paper The Daily Tar Heel, mapped her escape route in case an active shooter broke through the library’s glass walls. 

By midnight, Martin was finally alone, safe but at a loss for how to visualize the crisis for the paper’s front page.

Scrolling through unanswered texts and classmates’ online posts, she found her answer. 

“That’s when I realized that that is what our front page had to be,” Martin told The 74, “because those text messages — the sentiment of ‘are you safe’ was something that was shared by everyone who experienced this, but also by anyone who has been in an active shooter situation across the nation and across the world.”&�Բ�����;

Within 72 hours, she and her Tar Heel colleagues were thrust into the national spotlight as their front page coverage from the campus shooting , reaching President Joe Biden’s desk and amassing nearly 8 million views on X, formerly known as Twitter. During what would’ve been an open house to attract new staffers, editors instead shared their stories on NBC, CNN, MSNBC and PBS.

In what may be the darkest stream of consciousness to catalog the emotions of a generation constantly plagued by gun violence, the cover strings together text messages between students and their loved ones as chaos unfolded: “Are you safe? I wish these never happened. Someone is already shot. Run if you can. I love you.”&�Բ�����;

As the font gets smaller and smaller, reality sets in: the pain, outrage and fear is endless. 

“We wanted to tell the story of three hours and ten minutes. Of just being scared, not knowing how many people may be on campus, not knowing how many people may have died, or been injured,” the Tar Heel’s print managing editor Caitlyn Yaede told The 74. 

im still reeling from the events of yesterday. my heart goes out to the family and friends of the victim, as well as the entire chapel hill community. i never thought i would experience something like this and wanted to share my conversation with my mom and dad as the events unfolded.

The Daily Tar Heel is both a student-run nonprofit publication, independent of university funding, and the only print publication for Orange County, read by locals for generations.

Editors intentionally highlighted messages that would do justice to the full spectrum of emotions, choosing not to censor expletives. News organizations around the country have preserved the graphic’s language in its entirety, too. 

“We had people whose response was expletives, ‘What the F is happening?’ And there are people who say, ‘I love you, I love you so much, call me.’ No matter how you express that stress and overwhelming concern, that’s shared humanity. I think that the width of that and the breadth of that and the range of that is really captured in that cover,” Yaede said. 

Their work struck a chord: Locally, Wednesday’s papers ran out by 1 p.m. Faculty, staff, students and community members came by the newsroom on Franklin Street in the heart of Chapel Hill to ask for more copies. 

While the nation has been exposed to frantic messages sent during shootings — notably those from and — the cover’s unique design landed like a gut punch. 

For the first 10 hours, “nothing felt right,” Martin said. Editors deliberated and discarded other versions of the front page: a quote spread, or full blank page with key words like 3 hours, 10 minutes, 1 dead — which may have understated the death of associate professor Zijie Yan. 

Once they’d agreed on the string of texts, over 36 editors collaborated to gather content, collecting anonymous screenshots from peers. Yaede and Martin weeded through them to find common themes, an order, and begin transcribing. 

“If there was a moment when I was going to break down, it was reading those,” Martin said. Some of the messages came from close friends. “I can hear their voice.”&�Բ�����;

The order and jumbled nature of the texts was also intentional, “even if it may have not been the most straightforward approach in terms of readability,” said multimedia managing editor Carson Elm-Picard. The block mimicked the experience of those on campus sitting in silent, panicked rooms receiving message after message. 

Elm-Picard helped fine tune the design throughout Tuesday, changing what would’ve been a black background with light blue highlights to the final white background with black and red highlights.

“The association with Tar Blue is something that our students normally think of as a good thing. We’re proud of it. It’s like our color,” Elm-Picard said. “I saw that and I just thought that this event, this isn’t something we really want to associate with that.”

Trying to heal together

The Tar Heel’s coverage spanned well beyond the graphic cover. This week’s stories included how the , and training that left many in the dark, and . 

While the coverage has been necessary, it’s also been traumatic and draining for everyone involved. Going viral was the last thing staff expected.

“It’s hard to say any of this feels good. Because it doesn’t,” said Elm-Picard, who grew up near Columbine High School in Colorado and is all too familiar with gun violence. He knows the site of the Aurora shooting; many of his friends attend school near the site of the Boulder grocery market shooting. 

“Our whole entire generation, it’s not really that foreign to us, but it’s different when it’s where you live and where you feel comfortable,” he added.

In the Daily Tar Heel newsroom, staffers share meals, check in with each other and have been encouraged to take time off when needed. Student journalist alumni have reached out with support in droves. 

“To be honest, it’s been a horrible two days for everyone in the newsroom,” Martin said. “To see such a huge response from our community and also people across the nation has helped us keep going on.”