Under fire from scathing legislative probe, Uvalde school board gets an angry earful

About 200 people kept a scheduled 45-minute public forum going for more than three hours Monday evening — many of them using the opportunity given them by the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District board to yell for the district’s leadership to be wiped clean. At June’s school board meeting, a similar crowd had demanded the firing of the district’s police chief, Pete Arredondo, who had been widely blamed for the paralysis and confusion that marked the police response to the 18-year-old shooter at Robb Elementary School who killed 19 students and two teachers on May 24. But on Monday, a month later— and a day after a Texas House committee report showcased a long list of damning failures by the school district leading up to the tragedy — the calls for firing had expanded to include the superintendent, the principal at Robb Elementary, and the district’s communications director.

The entire school board should step down, several said. “You need to clean house. You need to start from zero,” said Rachel Martinez, a mother of four children in the district. “Hire experienced, trained officers who are prepared to take on the responsibility to protect our children. Not people who are complacent.” The House panel faulted the police response as a “systemic failure” by hundreds of officers and their senior leaders at the scene, not just Arredondo, who had been singled out for blame weeks earlier by Texas Department of Public Safety director Steven McCraw. But the report also blamed the school district for a myriad of failures that left Robb Elementary unprepared to stop — or even to slow down — an armed intruder. The five-foot fence around its perimeter was too short to impede the gunman and a culture of noncompliance with security rules saw school staff frequently prop open doors and it was widely known that the door to Room 111 was usually not locked because “an extra effort was required to make sure the latch engaged” and no one had placed a work order to repair it, the report said.