Education For Live - Masters Of Education

May 30, 2022

WATCH: Biden, first lady visit memorial at Uvalde elementary school

UVALDE, Texas (AP) — President Joe Biden grieved with the shattered neighborhood of Uvalde on Sunday, mourning privately for 3 several hours with anguished people still left at the rear of when a gunman killed 19 schoolchildren and two lecturers. Faced with chants of “do something” as he departed a church support, Biden pledged: “We will.”

At Robb Elementary College, Biden visited a memorial of 21 white crosses — 1 for every of these killed — and first girl Jill Biden added a bouquet of white bouquets to those already put in front of the school indicator. The couple then viewed person altars erected in memory of every single scholar, the to start with girl touching the children’s shots as they moved together the row.

Look at the instant in the player above.

Just after browsing the memorial, Biden attended Mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, in which numerous victims’ households are users, and 1 of the family members was in attendance.

Talking directly to the little ones in the congregation, Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller tried out to assuage the fears of the youngsters, some showing about the same age as the victims.

“You have observed the information, you have witnessed the tears of your mother and father, close friends,” he claimed, encouraging them not to be fearful of life. “You are the best reminders to us that the life of the very little types are crucial.”

As Biden departed the church to meet privately with relatives customers, a group of about 100 persons commenced chanting “do a little something.” Biden answered, “We will,” as he acquired into his vehicle. It was not promptly clear what the president was suggesting.

Biden tweeted during the check out that he grieves, prays and stands with the persons of Uvalde. “And we are fully commited to turning this agony into motion,” he said.

The take a look at to Uvalde was Biden’s second excursion in as numerous weeks to console a local community in reduction soon after a mass shooting. He traveled to Buffalo, New York, on Could 17 to meet up with with victims’ people and condemn white supremacy soon after a shooter espousing the racist “replacement theory” killed 10 Black individuals at a grocery store.

The two shootings and their aftermath place a contemporary highlight on the nation’s entrenched divisions and its incapability to forge consensus on actions to minimize gun violence.

“Evil arrived to that elementary college classroom in Texas, to that grocery retail store in New York, to far much too lots of destinations the place innocents have died,” Biden said Saturday in a commencement handle at the College of Delaware. “We have to stand stronger. We need to stand much better. We are unable to outlaw tragedy, I know, but we can make America safer.”

Biden later on met with very first responders in advance of his return trip to his home in Delaware. It was not clear if the group integrated officers who were being associated in the immediate response to the shooting.

Biden frequented amid mounting scrutiny of the police reaction. Officials disclosed Friday that pupils and teachers regularly begged 911 operators for assist as a police commander informed additional than a dozen officers to hold out in a hallway. Officials claimed the commander believed the suspect was barricaded within an adjoining classroom and that there was no more time an energetic assault.

The revelation brought on more grief and lifted new queries about no matter whether lives have been lost simply because officers did not act more rapidly to end the gunman, who was finally killed by Border Patrol tactical officers.

The Justice Division declared Sunday that it will assessment the regulation enforcement reaction and make its conclusions community.

“It’s simple to issue fingers correct now,” claimed Ronnie Garza, a Uvalde County commissioner, on CBS’ “Face the Country,” just before adding, “Our local community requires to concentration on healing right now.”

Mckinzie Hinojosa, whose cousin Eliahana Torres was killed Tuesday, claimed she highly regarded Biden’s selection to mourn with the individuals of Uvalde.

“It’s far more than mourning,” she explained. “We want modify. We want motion. It carries on to be a thing that takes place in excess of and in excess of and more than. A mass shooting occurs. It is on the information. People today cry. Then it is long gone. No person cares. And then it happens all over again. And once more.”

“If there is just about anything if I could inform Joe Biden, as it is, just to regard our neighborhood though he’s here, and I’m certain he will,” she added. “But we want transform. We want to do anything about it.”

Authorities have claimed the shooter lawfully purchased two guns not long in advance of the faculty attack: an AR-design rifle on May well 17 and a next rifle on May perhaps 20. He had just turned 18, allowing him to get the weapons below federal legislation.

Hrs immediately after the taking pictures, Biden shipped an impassioned plea for more gun manage legislation, inquiring: “When in God’s title are we likely to stand up to the gun lobby? Why are we inclined to dwell with this carnage? Why do we hold letting this come about?”

Around the yrs, Biden has been intimately involved in the gun control movement’s most notable successes, such as the 1994 assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004, and its most troubling disappointments, which include the failure to pass new laws just after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

As president, Biden has tried out to handle gun violence through executive orders. He faces couple of new selections now, but executive action may well be the finest the president can do, presented Washington’s sharp divisions on gun management legislation.

In Congress, a bipartisan group of senators talked above the weekend to see if they could arrive at even a modest compromise on gun safety laws just after a decade of largely failed initiatives.

Encouraging point out “red flag” guidelines to continue to keep guns absent from individuals with psychological health and fitness difficulties, and addressing faculty protection and psychological wellbeing sources were on the table, stated Sen. Chris Murphy, who is major the energy.

While there is nowhere near plenty of aid from Republicans in Congress for broader gun safety proposals popular with the community, like a new assault weapons ban or universal history checks on gun buys, Murphy, D-Conn., told ABC’s “This Week” that these other suggestions are “not insignificant.”

The group will fulfill again this coming week below a 10-day deadline to strike a deal.

“There are more Republicans fascinated in chatting about finding a route forward this time than I have ever seen considering the fact that Sandy Hook,” explained Murphy who represented the Newtown location as a congressman at the time of the Sandy Hook shooting. “And when, in the finish, I might conclusion up staying heartbroken, I am at the desk in a extra considerable way appropriate now with Republicans and Democrats than ever before.”

AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro in Washington and AP video clip journalist Robert Bumsted in Uvalde, Texas, contributed to this report.

May 29, 2022

Public education is in a ‘race to the bottom’

Moms and dads across the nation have trustworthy their young children to K-12 public
educational institutions
. Trusting that a pursuit of educational excellence is becoming prioritized. Trusting that college students are getting geared up to be educated and engaged members of society.

But a
pandemic
, school closures, and compelled on the net learning uncovered to quite a few of these exact parents that their children’s education is getting compromised. Academic excellence has taken a backseat to a political
ideology
, and it did not come about right away.

In his new book Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Key Forces Destroying American Community Instruction, Luke Rosiak investigates the public faculty method and exposes the hidden agendas that have been pushed for many years by unique interest teams and negative actors. He identifies how instruction got to the state it is in nowadays, who enabled it, and why.

It all starts off with “schools placing their resources into almost everything other than making ready our children for school or careers,” Rosiak writes. And it is not a revenue problem. Billions of pounds have been used on initiatives promising to remedy racial inequalities and boost educational effectiveness but that rather do the job versus the very ideas of excellence.

That hasn’t saved university leaders from selecting for-gain racial fairness consultants and partnering with philanthropic foundations far more involved with tagging any “system” that highlights racially unequal benefits as inherently “systemically racist” than pursuing means to enable all college students excel.

As Rosiak unravels the spider’s world-wide-web, he finds that these bent on turning our education method into a thing it was never intended to be are included with numerous front teams.

Considerably from “merely the wealthy family members who compensated for some artwork museums or public tv programming,” philanthropic foundations have spent billions of bucks, amassed by means of capitalism, to build many associations and activist teams to battle in opposition to it. “The foundation income serves as seed income that is finally leveraged by a different supply,” Rosiak writes. “The foundations have produced their possess mouthpieces and gotten others to pay back for it. There are hundreds of these types of activist groups, nearby and countrywide, pushing grievances about ‘systemic racism,’ fairness, and the evils of capitalism to public universities and kids.”

Just take the MacArthur Foundation. Rosiak points out how the controversial 1619 Venture likely noticed the light of day thanks to the basis. In 2014, MacArthur awarded a $1 million a few-year grant to ProPublica, a liberal nonprofit information outlet for which Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote about race troubles. She joined the New York Times the adhering to yr and soon just after manufactured her 1619 Task collection. The Pulitzer Centre, the nonprofit business that has pushed faculty curricula based mostly on the 1619 Task, is also funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Moreover, “MacArthur secured a position for Hannah-Jones as a professor at Howard University, wherever she would train her racial concepts and continue the 1619 Task, by donating $5 million to the college.”

National political interest teams have also employed local education and faculty boards as key authentic estate to amass “extraordinary control, all about the state.” In Fairfax County, Virginia, out-of-state bucks affected nearby strategies, and new university board members ended up driven to pursue a variety of agendas, couple of which experienced to do with schooling.

Specialist Glenn Singleton’s Pacific Academic Group has manufactured “millions of pounds implanting radical ideas into K-12 schools” and laid the groundwork for the rhetoric that now dominates a substantial portion of college districts. His instructor trainings have focused on “white privilege” and even bundled separating attendees into racially segregated teams, Rosiak files.

All this concentration on funds and equity, Rosiak proceeds, has resulted in crumbling educational benchmarks, the outcomes of which will harm children in approaches that will affect them for decades.

If there is a silver lining to COVID-19, it is that it has resulted in a “long-overdue wake-up call” about the condition of the public education system, Rosiak concludes. “For the sake of our kids’ joy, for the sake of our constitutional republic, for the sake of a modern globe fueled by scientific and technological progression, we can never ever, ever go back again to rest.”

Catrin Wigfall is a plan fellow specializing in education and learning at the Center of the American Experiment.

May 29, 2022

The Future of Higher Education Is the Hybrid Campus — Campus Technology

On the net Learning

The Foreseeable future of Better Education Is the Hybrid Campus

Blending the very best of deal with-to-facial area instruction with the versatility of on the net studying can enrich the bigger ed encounter for all kinds of learners, reduced the price tag of a diploma and improved put together students for the workforce.

By Dr. Jeffrey R. Docking
05/26/22

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From the start off of the COVID-19 pandemic, short term changes were built throughout industries to change to our new, isolated actuality. Nevertheless, as we arise from the pandemic, it is very clear that many of these non permanent modifications will inevitably be the truth of the long term. For greater ed, the wholesale change to distant understanding dramatically adjusted numerous of our establishments, like my possess, practically overnight. Whilst our sector is thrilled to see a lot of features of the standard campus encounter return to standard, on-line studying is probably to stay a side of our versions for the lengthy expression. If something, the pandemic was merely the ember wanted to change a design that was ripe for disruption.

Complete undergraduate enrollment dropped 3.1{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} from the slide of 2020 to the fall of 2021, bringing the overall decrease considering the fact that the drop of 2019 to 6.6{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} — or 1.2 million learners. This decline begs the dilemma: What methods are we using to be certain that America’s compact liberal arts faculties capitalize on an opportunity to embrace modify and ground breaking learning methods to maximize these numbers?

What Students Want

Students and families are significantly rethinking irrespective of whether a regular faculty training is worth the financial commitment, leaving larger ed leaders looking for progressive techniques to showcase their school’s benefit and entice college students. When we feel about what students really want, they want a lot more than a diploma — they want abilities schooling that will assure a well-paying, rewarding vocation. In simple fact, 62{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} of higher education pupils say they would be much more very likely to re-enroll if their institution provided “new packages and certificates personalized to the new economic system” with superior-need majors and education that connects them to employability. This helps make feeling due to the fact employers are continuing to come across benefit in students building a “wide talent base that can be utilized across a array of contexts.”

College students are also continue to wanting for the four-year quintessential school expertise they have arrive to expect. They want to have interaction in on-campus and in-human being social activities such as sporting activities, leisure, Homecoming, convocation, commencement, late nights in the library, and midnight food items runs. You can find also no denying the usefulness of in-human being studying with the interpersonal consideration and engagement in between university student and teacher. As arms-on finding out will become far more important in today’s job market, nonetheless, we may perhaps discover expertise-based mostly understanding is additional suited for student-trainer interactions, when classroom substance might be superior delivered on the internet.

It’s this crossbreed of the two instructional studying techniques that will unlock the ability to give college students what they want in a way that on the web-only or pure face-to-experience does not allow on its have. Students are hunting for new-age benefit when creating their higher education determination. They are in search of a mastering ecosystem that builds a hybrid local community that will enable them to share articles and encounters, construct extra associations and determine get the job done options.

Embracing the Hybrid Campus

I was in the beginning skeptical of on the net discovering. I equated it with faceless, impersonal encounters. I noticed what happened in the for-profit house and fearful it could possibly be antithetical to the modest private faculty. But above the previous numerous decades, and just after observing the success of it at Adrian Faculty, I’ve grow to be confident that the long term of household colleges is not facial area-to-facial area or on the web, but an intelligent blend of equally modalities.

May 29, 2022

Remote learning apps tracked kids for ads

Millions of children had their online behaviors and personal information tracked by the apps and websites they used for school during the pandemic, according to an international investigation that raises concerns about the impact remote learning had on children’s privacy online.

The educational tools were recommended by school districts and offered interactive math and reading lessons to children as young as prekindergarten. But many of them also collected students’ information and shared it with marketers and data brokers, who could then build data profiles used to target the children with ads that follow them around the Web.

Those findings come from the most comprehensive study to date on the technology that children and parents relied on for nearly two years as basic education shifted from schools to homes.

Researchers with the advocacy group Human Rights Watch analyzed 164 educational apps and websites used in 49 countries, and they shared their findings with The Washington Post and 12 other news organizations around the world. The consortium, EdTech Exposed, was coordinated by the investigative nonprofit the Signals Network and conducted further reporting and technical review.

What the researchers found was alarming: nearly 90 percent of the educational tools were designed to send the information they collected to ad-technology companies, which could use it to estimate students’ interests and predict what they might want to buy.

Researchers found that the tools sent information to nearly 200 ad-tech companies, but that few of the programs disclosed to parents how the companies would use it. Some apps hinted at the monitoring in technical terms in their privacy policies, the researchers said, while many others made no mention at all.

The websites, the researchers said, shared users’ data with online ad giants including Facebook and Google. They also requested access to students’ cameras, contacts or locations, even when it seemed unnecessary to their schoolwork. Some recorded students’ keystrokes, even before they hit “submit.”

The “dizzying scale” of the tracking, the researchers said, showed how the financial incentives of the data economy had exposed even the youngest Internet users to “inescapable” privacy risks — even as the companies benefited from a major revenue stream.

“Children,” lead researcher Hye Jung Han wrote, were “just as likely to be surveilled in their virtual classrooms as adults shopping in the world’s largest virtual malls.”

Did we really learn anything about schools in the pandemic?

School districts and the sites’ creators defended their use, with some companies saying researchers had erred by including in their study homepages for the programs, which included tracking codes, instead of limiting their analysis to the internal student pages, which they said contained fewer or no trackers. The researchers defended the work by noting that students often had to sign in on the homepages before their lessons could begin.

The coronavirus pandemic abruptly upended the lives of children around the world, shuttering schools for more than 1.5 billion students within the span of just a few weeks. Though some classrooms have reopened, tens of millions of students remain remote, and many now depend on education apps for the bulk of their school days.

Yet there has been little public discussion of how the companies that provided the programs remote schooling depends on may have profited from the pandemic windfall of student data.

The learning app Schoology, for example, says it has more than 20 million users and is used by 60,000 schools across some of the United States’ largest school districts. The study identified code in the app that would have allowed it to extract a unique identifier from the student’s phone, known as an advertising ID, that marketers often use to track people across different apps and devices and to build a profile on what products they might want to buy.

A representative for PowerSchool, which developed the app, referred all questions to the company’s privacy policy, which said it does not collect advertising IDs or provide student data to companies for marketing purposes. But the policy also says the company’s website uses third-party tools to show targeted ads to users based on their “browsing history on other websites or on other devices.” The policy did not say which third-party companies had received users’ data.

The policy also said that it “does not knowingly collect any information from children under the age of 13,” in keeping with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, the U.S. law that requires special restrictions on data collected from young children. The company’s software, however, is marketed for classrooms as early as kindergarten, which for many children starts around age 4.

Virtual learning is the new fault line in education: It’s either on the way out or on the rise

The investigation acknowledged that it could not determine exactly what student data would have been collected during real-world use. But the study did reveal how the software was designed to work, what data it had been programmed to seek access to, and where that data would have been sent.

School districts and public authorities that had recommended the tools, Han wrote, had “offloaded the true costs of providing education online onto children, who were forced to pay for their learning with their fundamental rights to privacy.”

The researchers said they found a number of trackers on websites common among U.S. schools. The website of ST Math, a “visual instructional program” for prekindergarten, elementary and middle school students, was shown to have shared user data with 19 third-party trackers, including Facebook, Google, Twitter and the e-commerce site Shopify.

Kelsey Skaggs, a spokeswoman for the California-based MIND Research Institute, which runs ST Math, said in a statement that the company does not “share any personally identifiable information in student records for the purposes of targeted advertising or other commercial purposes” and does not use the same trackers on its student platform as it does on its homepage.

But the researchers said they found trackers not just on ST Math’s main site but on pages offering math games for prekindergarten and the first grade.

How the pandemic is reshaping education

Google spokesperson Christa Muldoon said the company is investigating the researchers’ claims and will take action if they find any violations of their data privacy rules, which include bans on personalized ads aimed at minors’ accounts. A spokesperson for Facebook’s parent company, Meta, said it restricts how businesses share children’s data and how advertisers can target children and teens.

The study comes as concern grows over the privacy risks of the educational-technology industry. The Federal Trade Commission voted last week on a policy statement urging stronger enforcement of COPPA, with Chair Lina Khan arguing that the law should help “ensure that children can do their schoolwork without having to surrender to commercial surveillance practices.”

COPPA requires apps and websites to get parents’ consent before collecting children’s data, but schools can consent on their behalf if the information is designated for educational use.

In an announcement, the FTC said it would work to “vigilantly enforce” provisions of the law, including bans against requiring children to provide more information than is needed and restrictions against using personal data for marketing purposes. Companies that break the law, it said, could face fines and civil penalties.

Clearly, the tools have wide impact. In Los Angeles, for example, more than 447,000 students are using Schoology and 79,000 are using ST Math. Roughly 70,000 students in Miami-Dade County Public Schools use Schoology.

Both districts said they’ve taken steps to limit privacy risks, with Los Angeles requiring software companies to submit a plan showing how student information will be protected while Miami-Dade said it had conducted a “thorough and extensive” evaluation process before bringing on Schoology last year.

The researchers said most school districts they examined had conducted no technical privacy evaluations before endorsing the educational tools. Because the companies’ privacy policies often obscured the extent of their monitoring, the researchers said, district officials and parents often were left in the dark on how students’ data would be collected or used.

The FTC takes aim at education technology companies

Some popular apps reviewed by the researchers didn’t track children at all, showing that it is possible to build an educational tool without sacrificing privacy. Apps such as Math Kids and African Storybook didn’t serve ads to children, collect their identifying details, access their cameras, request more software permissions than necessary or send their data to ad-tech companies, the analysis found. They just offered simple learning lessons, the kind that students have relied on for decades.

Vivek Dave, a father of three in Texas whose company RV AppStudios makes Math Kids, said the company charges for in-app purchases on some word-search and puzzle games designed for adults and then uses that money to help build ad-free educational apps. Since launching an alphabet game seven years ago, the company has built 14 educational apps that have been installed 150 million times this year and are now available in more than 35 languages.

“If you have the passion and just try to understand them, you don’t need to do all this level of tracking to be able to connect with kids,” he said. “My first beta testers were my kids. And I didn’t want that for my kids, period.”

The researchers argued that governments should conduct data-privacy audits of children’s apps, remove the most invasive, and help guide teachers, parents and children on how best to prevent data over-collection or misuse.

Mass school closures are driving a new wave of student surveillance

Companies, they said, should work to ensure that children’s information is treated differently from everyone else’s, including by being siloed away from ads and trackers. And lawmakers should encode these kinds of protections into regulation, so the companies aren’t allowed to police themselves.

Bill Fitzgerald, a privacy researcher and former high school teacher who was not involved in the study, sees apps’ tracking of students not only as a loss of privacy but as a lost opportunity to use the best of technology for their benefit. Instead of rehashing old ways to vacuum up user data, schools and software developers could have been pursuing fresher, more creative ideas to get children excited to learn.

“We have outsourced our collective imagination and our vision as to what innovation with technology could be to third-party product offerings that aren’t remotely close to the classroom and don’t have our best interests at heart,” Fitzgerald said.

“The conversation the industry wants us to have is: What’s the harm?” he added. “The right conversation, the ethical conversation is: What’s the need? Why does a fourth-grader need to be tracked by a third-party vendor to learn math?”

Back in the classroom, teachers are finding pandemic tech has changed their jobs forever

Abby Rufer, a high school algebra teacher in Dallas, said she’s worked with a few of the tested apps and many others during a frustratingly complicated two years of remote education.

School districts felt pressured during the pandemic to quickly replace the classroom with online alternatives, she said, but most teachers didn’t have the time or technical ability to uncover how much data they gobbled up.

“If the school is telling you to use this app and you don’t have the knowledge that it might be recording your students’ information, that to me is a huge concern,” Rufer said.

Many of her students are immigrants from Latin America or refugees from Afghanistan, she said, and some are already fearful of how information on their locations and families could be used against them.

“They’re being expected to jump into a world that is all technological,” she said, “and for many of them it’s just another obstacle they’re expected to overcome.”

May 29, 2022

The names: 19 children, 2 teachers killed in Uvalde school

Crosses with the names of Tuesday’s shooting victims are placed outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Thursday, May 26, 2022. The 18-year-old man who slaughtered 19 children and two teachers in Texas left a digital trail that hinted at what was to come. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Jae C. Hong

AP

UVALDE, Texas

Nineteen children were looking forward to a summer filled with Girl Scouts and soccer and video games. Two teachers were closing out a school year that they started with joy and that had held such promise. They’re the 21 people who were killed Tuesday when an 18-year-old gunman barricaded himself in a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School in the southwestern Texas town of Uvalde. Some families have been willing to share their stories with The Associated Press and other media. Others asked for privacy. Here are their names.

Nevaeh Alyssa Bravo, 10

Her aunt noted that Nevaeh’s first name is heaven spelled backward. In a Facebook posting, Yvonne White described Nevaeh and her friend Jailah Silguero as “Our Angels.”

___

Jacklyn Cazares, 9

Javier Cazares said his daughter was someone who would give the “shirt off her back” to help someone. “She had a voice,” he said. “She didn’t like bullies, she didn’t like kids being picked on. All in all, full of love. She had a big heart.” Annabell Rodriguez, also a victim, was Jacklyn’s second cousin.

___

Makenna Lee Elrod, 10

Makenna’s father asked on Tuesday if he could go to the local funeral home to search for his daughter because he feared “she may not be alive,” TV station KTRK reported. Her family later asked for privacy.

___

Jose Manuel Flores Jr., 10

Jose’s parents told CNN that the 10-year-old was helpful around the house and loved his younger siblings. “He was just very good with babies,” his mother said. His father told CNN that Jose loved baseball and video games and “was always full of energy.” A photo taken at school Tuesday shows him smiling and proudly holding a certificate to show he made the honor roll.

___

Eliahna Garcia, 10

Eliahna’s relatives recalled her love of family. “She was very happy and very outgoing,” said her aunt, Siria Arizmendi, a fifth-grade teacher at Flores Elementary School in the same district. “She loved to dance and play sports. She was big into family, enjoyed being with the family.”

___

Irma Garcia, 48

Irma Garcia was finishing up her 23rd year as a teacher at Robb Elementary School. In a letter posted on the school’s website at the beginning of the school year, Garcia told her students that she had been married for nearly a quarter of a century and that she and her husband, Joe, had four children — a Marine, a college student, a high school student and a seventh grader. She told the students that she loved barbeque, listening to music and taking country cruises with her husband. On Thursday, Joe Garcia died of a heart attack, according to a nephew.

___

Uziyah Garcia, 10

Uziyah’s grandfather called him “the sweetest little boy that I’ve ever known.” Manny Renfro said he last saw Uziyah when the boy came to his home over spring break. “We started throwing the football together and I was teaching him pass patterns. Such a fast little boy and he could catch a ball so good,” Renfro said. “There were certain plays that I would call that he would remember and he would do it exactly like we practiced.”

___

Amerie Jo Garza, 10

Amerie loved to paint, draw and work in clay. “She was very creative,” said her grandmother Dora Mendoza. “She was my baby. Whenever she saw flowers she would draw them.” For her 10th birthday, Amerie was given her first cellphone. Her father, Angel Garza, recalled that her face “just lit up with the happiest expression.” Garza said that Amerie’s friend told him that Amerie had tried to call the police on her phone before she was shot.

___

Xavier Lopez, 10

Xavier had been eagerly awaiting a summer of swimming. “He was just a loving … little boy, just enjoying life, not knowing that this tragedy was going to happen,” said his cousin, Liza Garza. “He was very bubbly, loved to dance with his brothers, his mom. This has just taken a toll on all of us.”

___

Jayce Carmelo Luevanos, 10

Carmelo Quiroz’s grandson had begged to be allowed to join his grandmother on Tuesday as she accompanied her great-granddaughter’s kindergarten class to the San Antonio Zoo. But, he said, the family told Jayce it didn’t make sense to skip school so close to the end of the year. Besides, Jayce liked school. “That’s why my wife is hurting so much, because he wanted to go to San Antonio,” Quiroz told USA Today. “He was so sad he couldn’t go. Maybe if he would have gone, he’d be here.” He died with his cousin, Jailah Nicole Silguero.

___

Tess Mata, 10

Faith Mata told The Washington Post that her sister loved TikTok dance videos, Ariana Grande, the Houston Astros, and having her hair curled.

___

Maranda Mathis, 11

The mother of a close friend described Maranda as “very loving and very talkative.” She told the Austin American-Statesman that her daughter and Maranda had been in the same classes and that Maranda would ask to have her hair done like her daughter’s.

___

Eva Mireles, 44

In a post on the school’s website at the start of the year, the fourth-grade teacher said she had been teaching for 17 years. Mireles loved running and hiking. She said she and her husband, a school district police officer, had an adult daughter and three pets.

___

Alithia Ramirez, 10.

Alithia Ramirez loved soccer and she really loved to draw. Her father Ryan Ramirez’s Facebook page includes a photo, now shown around the world, of the little girl wearing the multi-colored T-shirt that announced she was out of “single digits” after turning 10 years old. The same photo was posted again Wednesday with no words, but with Alithia wearing angel wings.

___

Annabell Rodriguez, 10

Polly Flores told the New York Times that her great-niece Annabell Rodriguez was an honor roll student and close to her second cousin Jacklyn Cazares.

___

Maite Rodriguez, 10

After a rough time with Zoom classes during the pandemic, Maite Rodriguez made the honor roll for straight As and Bs this year and was recognized at an assembly on Tuesday, said her mother, Ana Rodriguez. Maite especially liked physical education, and after she died, her teacher texted Ana Rodriguez to say she was highly competitive at kickball and ran faster than all the boys. Her mother described Maite as “focused, competitive, smart, bright, beautiful, happy.” Maite wanted to be a marine biologist and after researching a program at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi she told her mother she wanted to study there.

___

Alexandria “Lexi” Rubio, 10

Lexi’s mother, Kimberly Rubio, posted on Facebook that her daughter was honored for earning all A grades and received a good citizen award in ceremonies at the school shortly before the shooting. The fourth-grader was a softball and basketball player who wanted to be a lawyer. Lexi’s father, Felix Rubio, is a deputy with the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office. The couple told CNN that he was among the law enforcement officers who responded to the shooting.

___

Layla Salazar, 11

Layla’s father said she loved to run and swim, dance to TikTok videos and play games including Minecraft and Roblox with friends. He said she won all six of her dashes and hurdles races at the school’s past three annual field days. He said each morning as he drove her to school in his pickup, he would play “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses and they would sing along.

___

Jailah Nicole Silguero, 10

Jailah’s mother tearfully told Univision that her daughter did not want to go to school the day of the shooting, and thought that maybe she sensed something was going to happen. Jailah and her cousin, Jayce Luevanos, died in the classroom.

___

Eliahana Cruz Torres, 10

Adolfo Torres told the Associated Press that his granddaughter, Eliahana, died in the shooting. Television station KIII reported that Eliahana was set to play the last softball game of her season that day. The team members kneeled for a moment of silence to remember Eliahana and the other victims.

___

Rojelio Torres, 10

Rojelio Torres’ mother, Evadulia Orta, told ABC News her son was a very smart and loving child. “I lost a piece of my heart,” she said.

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This story has been corrected to show Uziyah Garcia was 10, not 8. It also corrects the spelling of the first name of another victim. Her name was Maranda Mathis, not Miranda Mathis.

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Find more of the AP’s coverage of the Uvalde school shooting at https://apnews.com/hub/school-shootings

May 29, 2022

Robb Elementary School massacre: 80 minutes of horror in Uvalde, Texas

Within hours, the little aspiring lawyers, police officers, dancers and biologists of Robb Elementary would cross paths with the high school dropout who gifted himself two AR-15 style rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition he legally purchased for his 18th birthday one week earlier.

At 11:33 a.m. Ramos entered the school, unimpeded, through a rear door that a teacher had left propped open. He fired more than 100 rounds in the school and two adjoining classrooms. A Border Patrol tactical team fatally shot him more than an hour after the terror began.

Grieving parents planned funerals as they seethed over the delayed response. Law enforcement officials for days offered conflicting explanations. A public safety department colonel admitted Friday that waiting in a school hallway while trapped students made 911 calls was the “wrong decision” by the commanding officer at the scene. It’s not clear how many lives the mistake may have cost.

Uvalde’s nearly 16,000 working-class, mostly Latino residents are now the latest mourners in an eerily familiar American tragedy.

“It was something I never want to see again,” said Judge Eulalio “Lalo” Diaz, who, as Uvalde County justice of the peace, had the task of identifying the slain children and teachers in a county with no medical examiner. “These are our children.”

‘Just wait for it’

Ramos, who had no criminal record, had few friends and largely kept to himself. In the weeks leading up to the massacre, he exhibited a dark side in livestreams on the social media app Yubo. Several users who witnessed the recent videos said he told girls he would rape them, showed off a rifle he bought, and threatened to shoot up schools. They didn’t take him seriously until now.

At about 11 a.m. on Tuesday he called a 15-year-old girl in Germany. He had befriended her earlier this month on the social media app.

Uvalde gunman threatened rapes and school shootings on social media app Yubo in weeks leading up to the massacre, users say

The young man and the teen from Frankfurt spoke daily on FaceTime. They also communicated on Yubo and played and chatted on the Plato gaming app. He was curious about life in Germany. He confessed to spending a lot of time alone at home.

“He looked happy and comfortable talking to me,” said the girl, whose mother gave permission for her to be interviewed.

Still, some chats alarmed her. He admitted hurling dead cats at houses. And he never mentioned plans to meet friends.

In videos and text messages, Ramos spoke of visiting his new friend in Europe. One message included a flight itinerary.

“I’m coming over soon,” he wrote.

On Monday, Ramos told the girl he had received a package of bullets that expanded upon entering tissue.

Why? she asked.

“Just wait for it,” he said, ominously.

The next day, in the call just after 11 on the morning of the shootings, he told the girl he loved her.

Screen shots of messages Ramos sent soon after the call show he complained that his grandmother had contacted AT&T about “my phone.”

“It’s annoying,” he wrote.

At 11:06 a.m. came a chilling message: “I just shot my grandma in her head.”

His final text to his new online friend was at 11:21 a.m. local time — then early evening in Germany: “Ima go shoot up” an elementary school.

Gunman opens fire, then enters school

The shooter drove a pickup to the school campus and crashed the truck in a ditch.

With days left in the school year, the second- through fourth-graders of Robb Elementary collected their awards Tuesday morning.

The children smiled and posed for pictures. Students watched Disney’s “Lilo & Stitch” in the waning days of a long semester.

Less than a mile away, Ramos — after shooting his 66-year-old grandmother in the face and texting his German friend one last time — drove a pickup to the school campus and crashed the truck in a ditch. It was 11:28 a.m. local time.

He opened fire on two people outside a funeral home across the street but did not hit them. His grandmother managed to call 911. She was airlifted to a hospital in San Antonio and is expected to survive.

Derek Gonzalez was near the school when he heard the gunfire.

“Shooting! Shooting!” he recalled a woman shouting outside as bullets struck the ground.

Within minutes, Ramos made his way from the road to the school parking lot and began firing at classroom windows. Moments before he pulled open the building’s unlocked rear door, a school safety officer in a patrol car drove right by the gunman, who had hunkered down behind a car.

At 11:33 a.m. Ramos moved down a hallway and into one of two adjoining classrooms — 111 and 112. At no time since crashing the truck did police confront him.

Minutes later, seven officers arrived at the school. Three officers approached the locked classroom where the gunman had now barricaded himself. Two officers were shot from behind a door and suffered graze wounds.

A barrage of more than 100 rounds echoed through the halls of Robb Elementary in the slaughter’s first minutes. It was at least the 30th school shooting at a K-12 school this year.

He said ‘goodnight,’ then shot teacher

Miah Cerrillo, 11, was watching the Disney movie with classmates. Alerted to a shooter in the building, teachers Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia moved to protect their young charges. When one teacher tried to lock the classroom door, the gunman shot out a door window.

The teacher backpedaled and the gunman followed her. He said “Goodnight,” then shot her. He turned and opened fire on the other teacher and Miah’s classmates.

Children are Uvalde's pride and joy. After school shooting, the town is reeling from mass tragedy

The girl cried at times and wrapped herself in a blanket as she recalled the horror. She heard screams and more shots when the gunman entered a connected classroom. Between rounds, the shooter played music Miah described as “sad — like you want people to die.”

Miah feared he would come back for her and a few surviving friends. She covered her hands with the blood of a classmate slain next to her and smeared herself with it. She played dead.

At one point Miah and a classmate managed to use the phone of their dead teacher to call 911.

“Please come,” she told the dispatcher. “We’re in trouble.”

Commander makes ‘the wrong decision’

Around the time students started making 911 calls as many as 19 law enforcement officers had already taken cover in the hallway, at 12:03 p.m. They took no action and waited for classroom keys and tactical equipment.

At 12:16 p.m. a girl who made several 911 calls told a dispatcher that eight or nine children were alive in her classroom.

“The on-scene commander at that time believed that it had transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject,” Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Col. Steven McCraw said on Friday, describing the call not to confront the shooter as “the wrong decision, period.”

“There’s no excuse for that,” he added.

Steven McCraw, director and colonel of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said the decision not to confront the shooter sooner was wrong.

The official who made the decision not to breach the classroom was the school district police chief, Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, who has not spoken publicly since two very brief press statements on the day of the shootings. He has three decades of law enforcement experience. There was no response to attempts to reach Arredondo at his home on Friday.

Before the end of the noontime hour on Tuesday, at least 10 911 calls were made from classrooms, including several from the same girl pleading for help. She whispered at one point that multiple bodies surrounded her in Room 112.

Amerie Jo Garza turned 10 years old weeks before the attack. She got her first cell phone as a gift. Classmates would later tell her stepfather, med aide Angel Garza, that she was killed while trying to call 911.

“She was just trying to call authorities,” said Angel Garza, sobbing as he cradled a photo of Amerie holding an honor roll certificate.

“I just want people to know she died trying to save her classmates.”

The chaos extended to outside the school

Students run to safety after escaping from a window at Robb Elementary School on Tuesday.

During the siege, some responding officers helped evacuate students and teachers in other parts of the school.

Frustrated parents gathered outside during the rampage. They urged officers holding them back to storm the school to stop the bloodshed.

One parent, Victor Luna, pleaded with officers to give him their gear. His son Jayden survived the shooting but he didn’t know that at the time.

Luna and other parents watched nervously as officers escorted students from the school. Video from the scene showed officers physically restraining some parents.

Throughout the night distraught families gathered at the SSGT Willie de Leon Civic Center, where buses delivered survivors. DNA samples were collected from parents to confirm whether their children were among the victims.

As the death toll grew, relatives who spent hours watching as others were reunited with their sons and daughters walked away sobbing from the makeshift reunification center.

Doctors treat ‘destructive wounds’

The AR-15 rounds struck the heart of a small town.

Xavier and Lexi, the honor roll students, were among the victims. As were teachers Mireles and Garcia, who had taught together for five years. Two days after Garcia’s death, her husband, Joe, suffered a fatal heart attack. Their relatives said he died of a broken heart.

Other young victims were José Flores Jr., 10, and Eliana “Ellie” Garcia, who was 9. Nevaeh Alyssa Bravo was 10. Jacklyn Jaylen Cazares, 10, was killed along with her 10-year-old cousin and classmate Annabell Guadalupe Rodriguez.

There was Makenna Lee Elrod, 10; Uziyah Garcia, 10; Jayce Carmelo Luevanos, 10; Tess Marie Mata, 10; Maranda Mathis, 11; Alithia Ramirez, 10; Maite Rodriguez, 10; Layla Salazar, 11; Jailah Nicole Silguero, 10; Eliahana ‘Elijah’ Cruz Torres, 10; and Rogelio Torres, 10.

These are the faces of those killed in the attack.

Nearly 20 people were injured in the attack with a rifle that has been used in some of the most notorious and deadly mass killings in recent history.

The AR-15 style rifle was engineered to maximize its kill rate by raking enemy soldiers with high-velocity rounds. The original designers explained that the speed of the impact causes the bullet to tumble after it penetrates tissue. The result: Catastrophic injuries.

“We were treating destructive wounds and what that means is that there were large areas of tissue missing from the body,” said Dr. Lillian Liao, pediatric trauma medical director at University Hospital in San Antonio, which treated three children from Uvalde. “They required emergency surgery because there was significant blood loss.”

It was hard knowing many victims were likely already dead by the time police killed the shooter.

“When we’re dealing with high-velocity firearm injuries, we may not get a whole lot of patients,” she said, wiping away tears. “I think that’s what has hit us the most. Not the patients that we did receive and we are honored to treat … but the patients that we did not receive.”

A grieving dad has but one question

Mourners on Friday attend a memorial for victims of the attack on the school.

In all, 80 minutes elapsed between the time officers were first called at 11:30 a.m. to the moment a federal tactical team entered locked classrooms and killed the gunman at 12:50 p.m.

To Miah, the 11-year-old survivor, it felt like three hours. She was there on the classroom floor covered in the blood of a classmate.

At 12:43 p.m. and again four minutes later a girl in the school called 911.

“Please send the police now,” she implored. It’s unclear if that was Miah on the line.

'Somebody was wrong.' Texas shooting victim's father demands accountability over police delays at school

After waiting about 35 minutes outside the classroom, a US Border Patrol tactical team used a key to open a door. They had been at the school since 12:15 p.m. The teenage gunman kicked open the door of a classroom closet and opened fire, said a source familiar with the situation.

One agent held a shield. At least two others behind him engaged the shooter.

“It’s going to haunt them forever,” the source said, referring to the agents who responded and what they saw at the scene.

The siege was over.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had earlier in the week praised the “amazing courage” of the responding officers. On Friday he was in Uvalde for a news conference announcing state aid for the families affected by the shooting.

Abbott, who had canceled his appearance that day at the National Rifle Association convention 280 miles away in Houston, said he was “absolutely livid” that he was initially “misled” about the police response.

In the chaos outside the school on Tuesday, Angel Garza, the med aide, came upon a little girl who was covered in blood. She was crying. Her best friend had been killed.

Amerie Jo Garza, 10, eiyh her stepfather, Angel Garza.

Angel Garza asked her the name of the dead girl. It was his stepdaughter, Amerie Jo. That’s how he learned Amerie was gone.

Amerie’s biological father, Alfred Garza, was also outside the school as the massacre unfolded.

Days later, as gun enthusiasts and politicians gathered at the NRA convention and the governor questioned the actions of law enforcement, the grieving father had one question.

“Who’s going to pay for this?” Alfred Garza said.

CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, Nicole Chavez, Eric Levenson, Virginia Langmaid, Shimon Prokupecz, Nora Neus, Isabelle Chapman, Daniel A. Medina, Tina Burnside, Carroll Alvarado, Adrienne Broaddus, Bill Kirkos, Joe Sutton, Travis Caldwell, Michelle Krupa, Elizabeth Wolfe, Jamiel Lynch, Whitney Wild, Andy Rose, Amanda Musa, Alexa Miranda, Monica Serrano, Amanda Jackson, Holly Yan, Jason Carroll, Linh Tran, Isabelle Chapman, Jeff Winter, Casey Tolan and Ed Lavandera contributed to this report. It was reported and written by Ray Sanchez in New York.