As of this writing, nineteen dead students and two dead teachers. All massacred by an eighteen-year-old monster, with malice aforethought.
Most of you know me as a teacher of high school students. I have been a teacher in that role since February 1998, when I started teaching classes of homeschool students, most of the students in Grades 8-12.
Before 1998, however, I taught elementary school students in a private school, from 1978-1997. Furthermore, in that private school, I taught Grades 2-4 from 1978-1986. I know first-hand that students in that age group are "babies," as Judge Jeanine Pirro called them yesterday on The Five. As a former teacher of the same student age group as that of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, when the story broke yesterday, I felt as if I'd been punched in the stomach.
The story of the massacre also took me back to a period of my life some thirty years ago.
I well remember when the school where I worked had to "harden the target" from spring to the close of school that year — because of the maniacal estranged husband of one of our teachers. He was threatening, in his words in a phone call to the school's office, to "shoot up the school." All of a sudden, within only a few minutes, we had armed guards to protect us and could not allow our classes to have free-play time outside; neither could students wait outside for their carpools without armed guards posted.
I still recall the youngest students' terrified faces. The bogeyman under the bed had suddenly become very real for them.
The situation was so strained even weeks after the initial threat that the teacher with the maniacal estranged husband resigned her position to protect the school's students in future school terms. What's more, she herself had to go into hiding to save herself. She lost her teaching career — and she was a fine teacher.
And the school where I worked did indeed lose considerable enrollment for the next few years. Understandable, in my view.
Frankly, I don't have a positive view of "hardening the target" by fencing in a school and by having armed patrols in a school, particularly in a school with students as young as those in Robb Elementary School. Maybe "hardening the target" is what we must do to protect students and teachers. But the impact on education under those circumstances is not a good one for the promotion of learning. I've seen and lived that impact myself.
Here's what I know for a fact about the aftereffects of the Uvalde Massacre....
The parents affiliated with Robb Elementary School will never be the same. Neither will the surviving students. Neither will the surviving teachers. And the change will not be a good one. Lord, have mercy!
Addendum
I found something quite interesting at the WaPo, and this might "explain" why Ramos attacked Robb Elementary School:
...Uvalde High School school [seniors] had visited Robb Elementary School just a day before the massacre, wearing their graduation robes and high-fiving the grade-schoolers, who lined up in the hallways — a community tradition....See this Tweet, dated Monday, May 23, the day before the massacre.
Salvador Ramos was not on track to graduate with his class this year.
See 
