For 24/7 mental health support in English or Spanish, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s at 800-662-4357. You can also reach a trained crisis counselor through the by calling or texting 988.

Kimberly Mata-Rubio sat before a crowd on Thursday at the Austin Convention Center, hands tightly clasped to tell a story about the darkest day of her life, when she knew her daughter was one of the shooting victims at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.

The crowd intently listened as she described the scenes of chaos and confusion that surrounded that day when 19 students, including her 10-year-old daughter, and two teachers were killed by a gunman in the deadliest school shooting in Texas history.

“The days after were just filled with questions. How did this happen to her? How did this happen to me? How did this happen to us?” Mata-Rubio said while her voice quivered with emotion.

Mata-Rubio was one of three keynote speakers for a SXSW EDU school safety panel, held in partnership with The Texas Tribune, that raised questions about gun policy, social media and mental health using the backdrop of the tragic May 24 school shooting.

Nine months ago, she found herself part of an ever-growing community of parents who have lost their children to school shootings.

“It was comforting to meet them in a way. There is no judgment and they share this pain and they understand,” Mata-Rubio said about meeting other parents whose children died in school shootings. “It’s also terrifying because they are a mirror of what my future is and there is so much pain still. That you never get better. That you will walk around with this pain until your time is over and you are reunited with your loved one again.”

Odis Johnson Jr., executive director of the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Safe and Healthy Schools, and Nick Allen, a professor at the University of Oregon and director of the Center for Digital Mental Health, both spoke about the need for gun policy changes before trying to address mental health.

“Very often mental health is used as an alternative to gun safety policy, but these things must work together,” Allen said.

In the past six decades, the state has experienced at least that have killed a total of nearly 200 people and wounded more than 230 others.

Yet state leaders have repeatedly voted against measures that would limit access to guns, on publicly carrying them while making it harder for local governments to regulate them.

“There are thousands of laws on the books across the country that limit the owning or using of firearms, laws that have not stopped madmen from carrying out evil acts on innocent people,” Gov. said in to the National Rifle Association just three days after the Uvalde shooting.

But on Wednesday, senators of this legislative session — one that would close a loophole in state law that had allowed gun sales to people who were involuntarily hospitalized for mental illness between the ages of 16 and 18. The gunman responsible for the Uvalde mass shooting had not been previously hospitalized but did have a history of mental illness.

The term “aggrieved entitlement” was used multiple times during Thursday’s discussion to describe the mindset of certain school shooters.

“Often the person has a sense they were owed or deserved something from life that they haven’t received,” Allen explained.

Allen said many men who fit this description do not seek mental health assistance in the first place because they view it as a weakness or a challenge to their manhood.

“Different kinds of programs that help identify these particular young men who are isolated and disassociated might help. It would also be very good if they didn’t have access to guns,” Allen said.

The state’s Republican leaders have focused on mental health and school safety as the policy response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, mostly resisting gun-control measures.

Texas leaders agreed last year to dedicate more than $100 million in state funds to boost school safety and mental health services following the Uvalde massacre. Nearly half the money — $50 million — is going toward bullet-resistant shields for school police officers, while an additional $17.1 million will go to school districts to buy silent panic alert technology.

Texas House Speaker announced his support this week for several bills addressing gaps in school safety, one of which would to adopt active-shooter preparedness plans. The bill would require districts to send maps of each campus to the Texas Education Agency, provide opportunities for law enforcement to conduct walk-throughs of all buildings and lay out the costs necessary to meet the state’s established safety standards.

“Schools in the top third of the nation for their use of cameras, school resource officers and other security measures had lower mathematical scores and college-going rates than the [schools] in the lower third for security measures,” Johnson said. “The primary mission of schools is to educate and equip kids to be successful, healthy and happy, and what we have done is double down on surveillance technology that undermines that mission. Students shouldn’t feel like suspects.”

All three speakers agreed that in order for there to be real change, the gun reform issue will have to be taken on in the political realm.

Last year, President Joe Biden signed into law the first major gun safety legislation passed by Congress in nearly 30 years. The legislation includes incentives for states to pass so-called red flag laws that allow groups to petition courts to remove weapons from people deemed a threat to themselves or others.

“Legislation was a breaking point. It’s not where we need to be, but the framework is there. The essential components are now there,” Johnson said as the crowd cheered. “The problem has been that for a long time, we have lacked the political will to do this and the only solution to this is a political solution.”

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

In October 2020, for instance, a found that parents whose kids attended school in-person were far more likely to say they were “very satisfied” with the way school was handling instruction: 54% vs. just 30% whose kids received online instruction only.

But Patricia Brantley, who leads the 15-school network of Friendship Charter Schools in Washington, D.C., said developing and maintaining virtual learning systems will be critical to public schools going forward. Friendship began investing in virtual learning before the pandemic and has actually expanded its virtual offerings since 2021. 

The move is largely driven by parents, she said, who see the value of virtual learning for their kids. She noted one parent who wrote that her child requires a wheelchair to attend “a fair amount of medical appointments.” Online learning works in large part because classes are recorded for later viewing. The woman’s son, once an average student, is “now above grade” level, she wrote. Brantley also said the move has fostered “incredibly strong connections between families and with the faculty.”

Three years after the first pandemic closures, Brantley said virtual learning will also be key to attracting young teachers to the profession as other white-collar industries offer the option to work remotely. She’ll be talking about her experiences this week at South by Southwest Edu, part of a panel that . 

The 74’s Greg Toppo, who will be moderating the session, caught up with Brantley by email in advance of the session. 

The interview was edited for length and clarity.

The 74: The panel at South by Southwest Edu asks “Is Virtual Learning the Disruptor Teaching Needs?” What’s your short answer to this question?

Patricia Brantley: Virtual learning is the solution teaching needs. There’s an age-old question: How do we best educate our young and prepare them for the world? Assuming that we can do it in the same way that it’s been done for 100 years or more, when the world has changed, is worse than naive. It is failing generations of students in ways that we may not recover. 

In my opinion, the true disruptor isn’t the availability of virtual learning, it’s the convergence of factors illuminated by the pandemic. Those factors include the rise of parent-driven schooling through pods and micro schools that often rely partially on online delivery; the decline of traditional enrollment and rise in private, homeschool, online and charter options, and the flexibility now being given in other professions that make them more attractive to young college graduates than teaching. I see these factors converging in a way that is ultimately forcing changes in the way we historically have approached schooling, especially in traditional settings. Virtual learning isn’t the disruptor. It is a critical tool to support the way education must adapt to a changing world. 

Friendship is D.C.’s first public, tuition-free online education provider. Can you talk a little about what you’ve built and what your enrollment trends are?

We began investing in online education years before the pandemic, opening in 2015 for grades K to 8 and expanding to high school in 2019. Our original families knew that traditional settings weren’t serving their children well. The truth is we followed them to online learning as the solution. We were proud of our very specialized, small virtual community that featured incredibly strong connections between families and with the faculty.

Then, as many families were hesitant or unable to return to in-person schooling during the 2021-2022 academic year, our enrollment exploded. We went from barely 200 students to 700. Our staff grew from four full-time teachers to a staff of 40, with a faculty that includes master teachers, guidance counselors, social workers, parent liaisons and resident artists that are leading students through deep experiences in the fine arts. Our growth is an indication of the effectiveness and appeal of online learning environments.

Part of our success here is likely due to our intentional approach to design. Since 2015, our priority has been to design an online program with the learner at the center. Interestingly, by centering the learner, we also designed a new experience for the teacher, one that creates flexibility and evolves the profession. By doing this, we saw significant interest from teachers to take on this role and high satisfaction rates from those who did. This experience gives us reason to question the prevailing idea that there is a shortage of people who want to teach. Rather, what we see is that many teachers want the freedom and flexibility to evolve. In that way, virtual learning can be as attractive and impactful for educators as it is for students and families.

What have some of your early successes been?

While our enrollment trends are strong indicators of our program’s success, I’m even more pleased with the academic results we continue to achieve. Ensuring access to effective small learning environments and robust online options for students and families are absolute priorities for us. That’s why we are so proud to see results like those from the from (educational consultants) EmpowerK12, which found that Friendship Online students previously deemed “at-risk” for academic failure outpaced citywide growth in both English and Math during the pandemic.

I also consider it a success that we haven’t gotten locked into one way to meet families’ needs. As we’ve continued to grow and learn, we’re piloting other learning environments that push the limits on traditional school. Our microschools and hubs, which also emerged as part of the need created by the pandemic, were a game changer for many of our families. When we looked at the data, kids who were in those pods achieved larger academic gains than their peers who were not. Some even progressed faster than they did before the pandemic.  

I understand you’re using an AI system that listens to kids’ reading and reports back to teachers. What other innovations are you able to bring to the table?

We are constantly driven by the question: “What do families, students, and teachers need right now, today?” We are always asking ourselves this question and we push ourselves to remain open-minded about where the answers might lead us. Over the course of the past few years, this has certainly included expanding our online options and microschools, but it’s also included innovations that aren’t necessarily connected to technology.

For example, since the pandemic taught us that learning can happen anywhere, we’ve made investments in more experiential learning for our students. Partnering with at Friendship Blow Pierce Academy has made the entire city part of our students’ learning journey. We’ve also developed a career coaching program for students to help them prepare for the future and discover career paths they never knew existed. In addition to their teachers and peers, our students are also learning from members of their community.

During the pandemic, we heard so much about how online learning was problematic. Yet your work suggests there’s huge interest from families. What does the conventional wisdom miss about online learning in 2023?

The first thing that’s missed is the idea that you can paint family and student needs with a broad brush. Does online learning work for everyone? Certainly not. But for those families and students who gravitate towards online learning, it can be a game changer. The pandemic forced all of us to adopt online learning, so of course there were going to be plenty of situations where that wasn’t the ideal learning environment. Now that we can integrate choice into the equation, you start to see that those families and students who opt in to this kind of learning are usually the ones who have great success with it. The idea here is that families need to be empowered to choose the best learning environment for them and we need to be prepared with diverse options to meet their needs.

The other thing that was missed in the urgency created by the pandemic is that you can’t lose human relationships in the shift to online learning. Despite what some may think, a high-quality online learning environment is still centered on people and relationships, not technology. If you leverage technology — and the flexibility it affords — to allow the student-teacher relationship to thrive, that’s when you see the kind of success we’ve been able to achieve over time.

South by Southwest Edu returns next week to Austin, Texas, running March 6–9. As always, the event offers hundreds of panels, discussions, film screenings and workshops on education policy, politics, innovation, and of course, this being 2023, the rise of artificial intelligence.

One keynote session will feature the renowned architect Frank Gehry chatting with his younger sister, educator Doreen Gehry Nelson, about creativity, critical thinking and collaboration in education. In another, pollster John Della Volpe will share new data from the November 2022 midterm elections and discuss how to engage with rising Gen Z leaders. 

In yet another, filmmakers will screen a new documentary featuring Oakland-based activist Kareem Weaver, who, fed up with bleak reading scores in his home city, filed a petition with the NAACP demanding change in early reading instruction. 

There’s actually too much to see and hear in the span of just four days, so The 74 has streamlined the selection process. We’ve scoured the schedule to highlight a few of the most significant presenters, topics and panels that might be worth your time. 

Here’s a highly subjective list of 23 sessions you shouldn’t miss in 2023:

Monday, March 6:

: In this session by two educators and a psychologist who treats addiction, panelists will share the neuroscience behind teen brains’ unique susceptibility to tech — and how adults can help students fight it via a science-based digital media curriculum and resources designed to empower teens to develop healthy relationships with their devices. .

: The LEGO Foundation’s Bo Stjerne Thomsen joins experts in early childhood education, critical thinking, and game-based learning to discuss how educators can chart student progress in hard-to-measure areas while kids play. This discussion will explore new ways to engage kids in creative play in a way that develops essential skills and new methods for assessing growth. .

: The lab director of Community & Implementation at Stanford d.school joins two leading philanthropic leaders to explore opportunities for change that happen when we treat our schools as “vital pieces of community infrastructure.” Panelists will discuss what we unlock when educators draw on what students are capable of across physical space, tech innovation and social connection. .

: The pandemic exposed millions of students to the opportunities and limitations of virtual learning. Three years after the most significant disruption to schooling in recent memory, a panel of educators and advocates ask how virtual learning can reshape how we recruit, train, hire, and deploy teachers and how a virtual education workforce could provide new solutions to ongoing staffing problems. This session is moderated by The 74’s Greg Toppo. .

: The pandemic accelerated a looming teacher shortage, with a twist: Just 20% of teachers are people of color, even as non-white students comprise the majority of U.S students, according to the Education Trust. Yet 40% of public schools do not have a single non-white teacher on record. How can we rethink teacher recruitment and training to ensure that teachers represent the students they serve? This panel explores a national initiative to recruit 1 million teachers of color over the next decade. .

: Polarization in education policy threatens to erode the broad support that schools have long enjoyed. The Aspen Institute and a bipartisan group of state policymakers developed Opportunity to Learn principles to undergird a new, positive bipartisan agenda for improving public education. The panel features Aspen’s Ross Wiener as well as two state lawmakers (one Democrat and one Republican) to explore how this approach can help rebuild support for public education. .

: Mesa Public Schools, Arizona’s largest school district, has committed to building team-based staffing models in half of its schools. It now has 30 schools with innovative staffing models, and early results are promising. This panel features a representative of Mesa schools as well as two scholars from Arizona State University, which is partnering with the district on new ways to address teacher shortages and workforce design. .

Tuesday, March 7:

(keynote, livestreamed): In this keynote session, renowned architect Frank Gehry chats with his younger sister, Doreen Gehry Nelson, about their respective careers, sharing their perspectives on the roles that “creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration” play in education. Gehry Nelson created a well-known method of design-based learning, a teaching methodology that has been applied in K-12 classrooms worldwide since 1969. .

: In this session, the National Association for Media Literacy Education will discuss implementing “train-the-trainer” models for scaling media literacy education and instruction in schools, districts and communities. This session is led by Donnell Probst, a NAMLE associate director and former college reference librarian. .

: Adequate school funding is a key to educational attainment, but the benefits don’t stop there. It affects earnings, crime and poverty, research shows. Join a panel of experts from the Learning Policy Institute, the Public Policy Institute of California and the Tennessee Department of Education to hear how funding becomes more equitable to ensure better outcomes, especially as schools tap federal pandemic relief funds. This session is led by The Dallas Morning News’ Eva-Marie Ayala. .

: Emerging approaches to demonstrating mastery, as well as advanced computational methods, hold the power to improve assessment while reducing time and administrative costs. Hear leaders across research, government and philanthropy talk about how innovation is creating the assessments of the future. .

: This new documentary film features Oakland-based NAACP activist Kareem Weaver, who was fed up with bleak reading scores in his own community and filed a petition with the NAACP demanding change in early reading instruction. The session also features American Public Media’s Emily Hanford, whose breakout podcast “Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong” is shining a light on the Science of Reading. .

: For the first time, Arizona State University is offering its courses for credit through YouTube. The partnership, called Study Hall, aims to help potential college-goers navigate higher education by earning credit for their first year of college online. The session features Study Hall’s Hank Green, a popular YouTuber who has been called “one of America’s most popular science teachers.” His videos have been viewed more than two billion times on YouTube. .

: About 15 million students in the U.S. live with unstable internet access — or no access at all. A $65 billion broadband-for-all plan is in place, but the effort isn’t expected to reach the last mile for all students until 2030. In the meantime, what are low-barrier options for students without internet access to access carefully curated resources of digital content on their devices? Hear Endless OS Foundation’s talk about alternatives. .

Wednesday, March 8:

: John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, has been called one of the world’s leading authorities on global sentiment, opinion, and influence, especially among youth in the age of digital and social media. In this discussion hosted by the Walton Family Foundation, he’ll share new data from the November 2022 midterm elections and the panel will explore how to engage with rising Gen Z leaders to bring their unique vision for unity and collaboration to fruition. . 

: In this 90-minute interactive workshop led by Stanford d.school educators, participants will engage in the fundamental concepts underpinning Artificial Intelligence through symbolic play and hands-on design work. Participants will learn how AI can be used to address societal challenges, explore classroom applications, identify ethical implications and prototype different outcomes for social justice and the education system. .

: Experts say K-12 schools must increasingly offer education that’s personalized, skill-based, and interdisciplinary. But traditional school transcripts are ill-suited to capture the richness of these approaches. This panel discussion by representatives of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, the XQ Institute, the Aurora Institute and Big Picture Learning will explore insights and lessons learned from their credential design efforts. .

: Pandemic learning loss has engendered countless tutoring initiatives nationwide. Could tutoring be not just a short-term fix but an enduring feature of the U.S. education system? And what does research show about the benefits of online and hybrid models? This session, featuring former Tennessee Commissioner of Education Kevin Huffman and current Tennessee Chief Academic Officer Lisa Coons, will look at new research and on-the-ground implementation of evidence-based tutoring programs that improve outcomes for all students, particularly those historically excluded from such services. .

: As the pandemic recedes across the U.S., K-12 superintendents are retiring in droves. Top executive-search firms say business is brisk, with departures as high as any in recent memory. The American Association of School Administrators last fall found that about one in four superintendents had left their jobs in the past year, a marked increase from previous years. In their wake they leave a shallower recruiting pool. So is it time to rethink the superintendent pipeline? Should districts be more engaged in succession planning and growing future superintendents from within? This panel explores Texas school districts that were intentional about developing leaders and whose boards picked high-performing successors from within, allowing the district to keep raising the bar without losing momentum. .

: Educators should be intentionally designing the learning experience, say two experiential learning experts from the Minerva Project, an innovative college program that has made waves in higher education. This workshop will show how they design integrated online and offline immersive experiences that connect the curriculum to the real world “using awe and wonder as pedagogically useful tools.” .

: As drag queen story hours come under fire from conservatives nationwide, advocates say it’s more important than ever to understand their aim: Using drag as a traditional art form to promote literacy, teach about LGBTQ lives and activate children’s imaginations. This session, featuring three drag queens, will discuss the importance of LGBTQ family programming. .

Thursday, March 9

: This session features of Sandy Hook Promise, who will discuss the group’s “Know the Signs” school shooting and violence prevention programs. The session will bring together leaders who are equipping students with social and emotional skills to spot warning signs in their peers and intervene safely.

: In this session, two educators from the Groundswell Project UK will talk about young people and extremism, and how we can best challenge hate narratives in our schools and communities. Groundswell has been working in schools to counter hate narratives from the far-right to Islamism to misogynist extremism and other forms of violence. This session will offer best practices to educate youth on these issues. The session will also include personal testimony and examples of how young people can be misguided into extremist thinking — and how to help support vulnerable young people. .

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation and XQ Institute provide financial support to The 74.