This teacher survived the Uvalde shooting. Here's why she is returning to the job

What we do for our children is what primarily comes to me in this reading of how it must feel to get back into the Uvalde classroom. 

Best wishes and blessings in abundance for Nicole Ogburn and the other courageous and heroic teachers of Uvalde—as well as to all teachers everywhere suffering from violence-related trauma.

-Angela Valenzuela

This teacher survived the Uvalde shooting. Here's why she is returning to the job

Nicole Ogburn shows the new tool that she will use this year to know the 

emotional state of her students.

Verónica G. Cárdenas for NPR

September 2, 2022 6:47 AM | NPR

by Juana Summers, Jonaki Mehta, Alejandra Marquez Janse & 

Ashley Brown

From the doorway, Nicole Ogburn's fourth grade classroom looks bright and unassuming.

New, colorful JanSport backpacks hang from small chairs. Blue and white desks with dry erase surfaces sit in clusters around the room. A green bookshelf filled by rows of books is surrounded by beanbag chairs and fuzzy pillows.

This year, as Ogburn prepares her classroom, her first priority is not the decorations she usually spends the summer picking out. Instead, it's buying things to help her students – and herself – feel safer in the classroom.

"I bought a thing that you jam under the door so that they can't open the door. I bought a curtain to pull down so you can't see in my door if something was happening," Ogburn said. "We've just thought of more safety this year than, 'How cute's my room gonna look?'"

Ogburn is preparing for her first year as a teacher at a newly repurposed campus space, dubbed Uvalde Elementary School. For the seven years prior, Ogburn taught at Robb Elementary. The school shut down after the mass shooting in May in which 19 students and two teachers were killed. Ogburn, her co-teacher and her students survived, and escaped through a window of their classroom with the help of law enforcement.

A hallway in the repurposed campus for kids in Uvalde.

Verónica G. Cárdenas for NPR

New backpacks with school supplies for the students are seen in Ogburn's 

classroom.Verónica G. Cárdenas for NPR

Although the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and state leaders have announced new security measures, the district has been under pressure from parents and other members of the community to offer more transparency and demonstrate its ability to keep students safe at school.

Ogburn said she felt there had been progress, though improvements are taking time.

"We're working towards being safe, and I think we're gonna be OK the first day of school, but it's not gonna be 100% done," she said. "But, it's in the process."

As she thought about physical security measures, she was also trying to anticipate what it would be like when students returned to the classroom for the first time since the May 24 shooting.

"I think I'm scared for how some of these kids are gonna react when they get here, and if I'm gonna be able to handle that part of it," she said.

Ogburn is preparing for a very different year ahead at her school in Uvalde.

Verónica G. Cárdenas for NPR

The site of the repurposed campus, dubbed Uvalde Elementary School.

Verónica G. Cárdenas for NPR

This year, she's added one feature to her classroom to try to help her students express and manage their feelings. It's a black poster that asks students to answer one question: How do you feel? Each student has their own cut out marker, and each day Ogburn and her co-teacher plan to encourage students to put their marker next to a corresponding feeling like, "ready to learn," "confused," or "angry."

"I'm thinking, OK what if this happens this day, and the whole class is feeling anxious or upset? There's no way we're gonna teach a lesson," she said. "We've gotta figure out ... how are we gonna calm 'em down, how are we gonna make this better?"

Ogburn is also concerned for herself.

She said she wanted to get through the year "without being a complete emotional wreck," as she works through her grief, particularly the deaths of fellow fourth grade teachers, Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia.

For several years at Robb, Ogburn and her co-teacher Trisha Albarado taught in the classroom next door to Mireles and Garcia.

"It's already been hard not having my two friends here with us, but having my co-teacher with me has helped a lot," she said. "Cause we both said if you don't come back, I'm not coming back. If we're not together, we're gonna fight to be together. Cause we can't do it without each other right now."

Plush toys and other objects are seen at a makeshift memorial for the victims of the mass shooting, three months after it happened.

Verónica G. Cárdenas for NPR

Ogburn shows her Uvalde Strong bracelets. Verónica G. Cárdenas for NPR

Since the shooting, Ogburn said she's been treated for depression, anxiety and PTSD – as have other teachers who survived. She said what she heard and saw that day is something she'll live with for the rest of her life.

"Every day, there can be something that triggers an emotion that I don't want to have that day," she said. "And right now, every day is a constant reminder, cause everywhere I go, it's right in front of my face."

She almost didn't return to the classroom. But she thought about her own children, as well as Uvalde students.

"I thought, I gotta go back and show them first of all, we can't live in fear. I mean, you just never know when something's gonna happen," she said. "So I thought, I have to try not to live in that fear. I have to go forward and show these kids, OK, Ms. Ogburn can go back to school, then so can I."

Angel wings, pinwheels and a white cloth are seen near the entrance 

where the shooter entered Robb Elementary School back in May.

Verónica G. Cárdenas for NPR
Gaby Olivares and Yvette Benavides of Texas Public Radio translated this article into Spanish.

Funeral update to Uvalde tragedy Victim, Uziyah S. Garcia, San Angelo, Texas

Friends:

Here is the funeral update to Uvalde tragedy victim, Uziyah S. Garcia, from the Facebook page of Gutierrez' Funeral Home in San Angelo: https://tinyurl.com/37askmmt   

This is the same Uziyah appearing in the featured post to this blog titled, "Remembering Uziyah Sergio Garcia (August 13, 2011 ~ May 24, 2022) of San Angelo, Texas."

This is so sad and painful. May he rest in eternal peace. 

-Angela Valenzuela

#RememberUziyah #WeAreAllWestTexas

 

Where we've gotten to as a country... 

Be alert, everybody! 

-Angela Valenzuela

Feds warn that Uvalde massacre, impending abortion ruling and midterm elections could spur more acts of violence

In a bulletin, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said that recent and upcoming events could be “exploited to justify acts of violence against a range of possible targets.”

BY JADEN EDISON JUNE 8, 20226 PM CENTRAL

A boy places a flower beside a memorial in honor of the 21 victims killed at a school shooting in Uvalde in May. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a bulletin that the shooting and other recent events could spur more public violence.  rity said in a bulletin that the shooting and other recent events could spur more public violence. Evan Le'Roy Texas Tribune

The Department of Homeland Security has issued a warning about a potential increase in extremist violence fueled by recent mass shootings, including the massacre in Uvalde last month; an expected Supreme Court ruling on abortion rights; and November’s midterm elections.

“In the coming months, we expect the threat environment to become more dynamic as several high-profile events could be exploited to justify acts of violence against a range of possible targets,” DHS said in a bulletin released early Wednesday.

The warning comes in the aftermath of an 18-year-old gunman killing 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. Just weeks before, a white supremacist in Buffalo, New York, walked into a neighborhood grocery store and killed 10 people, most of whom were older Black residents.

Officials said future targets of extremist violence could include more people of color and religious minorities, government personnel and members of the press. The department also said it is working with the FBI and other government agencies to share timely information and provide “tools and resources” to federal, state, local and tribal entities.

In 2022, the U.S. has seen more than 250 mass shootings — events in which four or more people were shot or killed — according to the Gun Violence Archive. Since the Uvalde massacre, the deadliest school shooting in the state’s history, Texas Republican officials have expressed little interest in implementing stricter gun laws. In April 2021, 59% of Texans surveyed in a poll by the University of Texas at Tyler and The Dallas Morning News said they disagreed that elected officials were doing enough to prevent mass shootings. Only 38% of respondents agreed.

At some point this month, the Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a ruling that could potentially overturn Roe v. Wade and leave Texans without abortion access.

The agency said the threat is expected to last until Nov. 30.

The G.O.P. War on Civil Virtue by Paul Krugman | New York Times | May 26, 2022

Texans deserve better than our current Texas Republican leadership, beginning with Gov. Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Senator Ted Cruz, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. How the heck do they still get voted into office? Beats me.

This incredulity is the thrust of a May 29th opinion by the Editorial Board of the Austin American-Statesman titled, "After Uvalde, we must demand change," as well as this New York Times piece by Paul Krugman that calls out the GOP attack on civil virtue. To date, this gallery of reckless leadership has unilaterally decided that having fun with guns is more important than children's and teacher's lives. Worse yet, as Krugman states,

"if you take the proposals by Cruz, Patrick and others literally, they amount to a call for turning the land of the free into a giant armed camp." 

And arming teachers with guns is NOT a serious proposal as summed up well by this meme posted by Facebook group, Living Blue in Texas.

Short of Congress passing comprehensive gun legislation, our states can learn from Florida, as mentioned by the Statesman's Editorial Board:

"A Florida law enacted in 2018 after the Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting imposed a three-day wait for gun purchases, raised the minimum legal age for buying guns from 18 to 21, and enacted stricter gun ownership measures for those with mental health problems."

Now is the time for "we the people" to "do something." And that something for right now can be reaching out to whoever represents you in office. 

You can visit this Texas Tribune who-represents-me website if you don't know. Also, Texas is holding an election on November 8, 2022 where you can vote for our state's next governor, attorney general, and so on. If you're a new voter, link here to start a new voter registration application.

-Angela Valenzuela

#Uvalde #UvaldeStrong #vote2022

The G.O.P. War on Civil Virtue

by Paul Krugman | New York Times | May 26, 2022

It’s hard to say which of the Republican responses to the latest mass shooting was most reprehensible. The reliably awful Senator Ted Cruz attracted considerable attention by insisting that the answer is to put armed guards in schools, never mind that Uvalde’s school system has its own police force and officers seem to have been on the scene soon after the shooter arrived.

And the Buffalo supermarket that was the location of a mass shooting just 10 days earlier also had an armed security guard, who was killed because his gun was no match for the shooter’s body armor.

But if you ask me, the worst and also most chilling response came from Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas. What we need to do, declared Patrick, is “harden these targets so no one can get in, ever, except maybe through one entrance.”

That restriction would have interesting consequences in the event of a fire. But in any case, think about Patrick’s language: In a nation that’s supposedly at peace, we should treat schools as “targets” that need to be “hardened.” What would that do to public education, which has for many generations been one of the defining experiences of growing up in America? Don’t worry, says a writer for The Federalist: Families can keep their kids safe by resorting to home-schooling.

Actually, if you take the proposals by Cruz, Patrick and others literally, they amount to a call for turning the land of the free into a giant armed camp. There are around 130,000 K-12 schools in America; there are close to 40,000 supermarkets; there are many other venues that might offer prey for mass killers. So protecting all these public spaces Republican-style would require creating a heavily armed, effectively military domestic defense force — heavily armed because it would face attackers with body armor and semiautomatic weapons — that would be at least as big as the Marine Corps.

Why would such a thing be necessary? Mass shootings are very rare outside the United States. Why are they so common here? Not, according to the U.S. right, because we’re a nation where a disturbed 18-year-old can easily buy military-grade weapons and body armor. No, says Patrick, it’s because “We’re a coarse society.”

I know it’s a hopeless effort to say this, but imagine the reaction if a prominent liberal politician were to declare that the reason the United States has a severe social problem that doesn’t exist elsewhere is that Americans are bad people. We’d never hear the end of it. But when a Republican says it, it barely makes a ripple.

And I guess I should say for the record that I personally don’t believe that Americans, as individuals, are worse than anyone else. If anything, what has always struck me when returning from trips abroad is that Americans are (or were) on average exceptionally nice and pleasant to interact with.

What distinguishes us is that it’s so easy for people who aren’t nice to arm themselves to the teeth.

OK, I think everyone realizes that none of what Republicans are saying about how to respond to mass shootings will translate into actual policy proposals. They’re barely even trying to make sense. Instead, they’re just making noise to drown out rational discussion until the latest atrocity fades from the news cycle. The truth is that conservatives consider mass shootings, and for that matter America’s astonishingly high overall rate of gun deaths, as an acceptable price for pursuing their ideology.

But what is that ideology? I’d argue that while talk about America’s unique gun culture isn’t exactly wrong, it’s too narrow. What we’re really looking at here is a broad assault on the very idea of civic duty — on the idea that people should follow certain rules, accept some restrictions on their behavior, to protect the lives of their fellow citizens.

In other words, we should think of vehement opposition to gun regulations as a phenomenon closely linked to vehement (and highly partisan) opposition to mask mandates and vaccination in the face of a deadly pandemic, vehement opposition to environmental rules like the ban on phosphates in detergent, and more.

Where does this hatred of the idea of civic duty come from? No doubt some of it, like almost everything in U.S. politics, is related to race.

One thing it doesn’t reflect, however, is our national tradition. When you hear talk of home-schooling, remember that the United States basically invented universal public education. Environmental protection used to be a nonpartisan issue: The Clean Air Act of 1970 passed the Senate without a single nay. And Hollywood mythology aside, most towns in the Old West had stricter limits on the carrying of firearms than Gov. Greg Abbott’s Texas.

As I suggested, I don’t fully understand where this aversion to the basic rules of a civilized society is coming from. What’s clear, however, is that the very people who shout most about “freedom” are doing their best to turn America into a “Hunger Games”-type dystopian nightmare, with checkpoints everywhere, loomed over by men with guns.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Correction: 

May 27, 2022

An earlier version of this column misattributed the suggestion that families could keep their children safe by home-schooling them. It was made by a writer for the online publication The Federalist, not by the Federalist Society.

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

Uvalde Police Officers, Middlemen Minorities, and the Coloniality of Power: Deepening the Analysis

To Dr. Emilio Zamora's point in his recent reflection posted on Monday to this blog and now appearing as an op-ed in Sunday's Austin American-Statesman that was based on our weekend trip to Uvalde, we must consider the wider social context in order to more fully understand how mostly-Mexican Uvaldeans already suffered from pre-existing social trauma and subordination even before the deadly shootings of May 24, 2022. This is precisely the focus that Neil Meyer, writing for the Washington Post, describes below.

I take this opportunity to deepen the analysis. 

"Colonialism"—or to borrow from Quijano (2000), the "coloniality of power," or Valenzuela's (2019) "colonial matrix of power"—capture the sociopolitical dynamics at play characterizing so much of what Texas IS for people of color under white settler colonialism. This is hardly hyperbole, but rather a lived experience under white supremacist patriarchy that helps explain the NRA's stranglehold on the Republican Party.

Upon reading Meyer's piece and critically consuming vast amounts of news media and seeing how ignorantly and dismissively Uvalde is portrayed, it's time to resurrect not only these concepts of coloniality, but also the notion of "middleman minorities" as coined by Blalock (1967) and theorized by University of California Riverside sociologist Dr. Edna Bonacich (1973) in her classic piece titled, "A Theory of Middleman Minorities." 

Such minorities are the entrepreneurs and middlemen who play an intermediary role between dominant and subordinate groups in society. Their clients or customers are most often members of marginalized racial/ethnic groups that are themselves living lives that are separate from the dominant group (or groups) in power that we may also understand as the white power structure that includes Eurocentric school curriculum.

The images we are seeing on the news every day speak to this dynamic of coloniality that very much convey not solely the history, but also the contemporary circumstance, of living under white supremacy in Texas. For example, read this May 27, 2022 El Paso Times piece by Martha Pskowski andNicole Foytitled, "Uvalde school shooting, Mexican-Americans fought for decades to improve school system). But for the coloniality of power, just struggles like this shouldn't take decades.

A larger point is that just because we're seeing brown faces on TV among the Department of Public Safety police and immigration officers in leadership positions or a Latino 18-year old who committed this horrible atrocity against children, doesn't at all mean that white supremacy isn't at play. After all, we are still talking about a white power structure and its ideologies that systematically promote racial ignorance and self-hatred that minoritized youth experience in the form of internalized racism or oppression. 

For more understanding of internalized oppression, I encourage you to read one of my published pieces along these lines titled, Uncovering Internalized Oppression. You can read it online in an excellent anthology by Mica Pollock (2008) titled, "Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school.

To wit, at the grassroots level here in Austin, locals refer to UT-Austin as "the plantation," an organic term that reflects locals' relationship to the powerful, exclusionary class the UT symbolizes. Not that we're not becoming more diverse, but rather that Austin youth are not getting into UT according to numbers suggesting greater parity and opportunity that living in Austin would seem to warrant. Similarly, Uvalde is also a "plantation," if you will, a hierarchy with deep roots in Juan Crow segregation and racism in West Texas. 

While the "man" in "middleman" needs to get updated as a term to current gender-conscious standards, it nevertheless turns out that what we largely see is indeed mostly Latino males holding power in these self-policing spaces. As middlemen minorities, their job is to control their own people, reifying time-honored patriarchal, masculinist identities that get casually reinforced and mystified as "Wild West mythology" as noted by Meyer.

THIS is what those opposing the so-called teaching of CRT in schools don't want you to know—even when the evidence before our very eyes is a flashing neon sign.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

#WeAreAllWestTexas

References

Blalock, H. M., Jr. (1967). Toward a Theory of Minority Group Relations. New York: John Wiley.

Bonacich, E. (1973). A theory of middleman minorities. American sociological review, 583-594.

Pollock, M. (Ed.). (2008). Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school. The New Press.

Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology, 15(2), 215-232.

Valenzuela, A. (2019). The struggle to decolonize official knowledge in Texas’ state curriculum: Side-stepping the colonial matrix of power. Equity & Excellence in Education, 52(2-3), 197-215.

I’m from Uvalde. I’m not surprised this happened.

By Neil Meyer

May 29, 2022 at 1:42 p.m. EDT | Washington Post

President Biden pays his respects at a memorial outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., on Sunday. (Dario Lopez-Mills/AP)

From: THE WASHINGTON POST

OPINION: I’m from Uvalde. I’m not surprised this happened.

By Neil Meyer

May 29, 2022 at 1:42 p.m. EDT

Neil Meyer, a retired lawyer, is a fifth-generation Texan. He now lives in Bethesda.

I was born in Uvalde, Tex., lived there recently and love its complex history and people. Like most, I’ve been struggling under the weight of grief to understand the violence that left 19 children, two teachers and a young killer dead last week. But I’m not surprised.

First, you would be challenged to find a more heavily armed place in the United States than Uvalde. It’s a town where the love of guns overwhelms any notion of common-sense regulations, and the minority White ruling class places its right-wing Republican ideology above the safety of its most vulnerable citizens — its impoverished and its children, most of whom are Hispanic.

Second, at news of the shooting, I was struck to hear the words “Robb Elementary” because I knew of its centrality to the struggle in Uvalde over the past half-century to desegregate its schools. Robb sits in the city’s southwest quadrant. So I knew the victims of the shooting would largely be Hispanic. They have been locked into that school for decades.

In Uvalde, simply put, everything north of Highway 90 is primarily White Republican, and everything south is mostly Hispanic Democrat. The city has about 15,000 residents; more than 80 percent identify as Hispanic or Latino.

Most of Uvalde’s political leadership and the heads of the largest employers are White. At the center of town on the courthouse grounds, you’ll find a monument to Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president — installed when the Ku Klux Klan dominated Uvalde politics. (Some of us tried to get the monument removed after the murder of George Floyd, but that’s a story for another day.)

When I heard reports about the shooter, a young Latino, I winced at the reflexive disclaimer that he wasn’t an “illegal immigrant.” It wasn’t surprising to learn that he was bullied for a speech impediment, may have come from a broken family struggling with drug use and had experienced problems in school. Drug use plagues the city, and the courts struggle under the weight of young people’s encounters with the legal system. About 1 in 3 Uvalde children live in poverty.

The killer allegedly bought his guns at the Oasis Outback, a popular lunch spot for wealthier Uvaldeans, known for its large buffet, hunting supplies and gun shop. On most days you’ll also see groups of Border Patrol agents and local law enforcement there. It’s a monthly meeting place for groups such as the Uvalde County Republican Women, whose Facebook page includes posts decrying “the border invasion.” The Oasis reflects the establishment’s deep cultural reverence for guns, hunting and the Wild West mythology. I wasn’t surprised that an 18-year-old could walk in and easily buy tactical weapons without anyone being concerned.

I wasn’t surprised to see the Republican panel of politicians at a news conference the day after the shooting, almost all White and in top positions of power in the community and the state, taking the lead. In Uvalde, the custodians of order — the chief of police, the sheriff, the head of the school district police — are Hispanic, but here they were largely silent. Unsurprisingly, they now bear the primary blame for the disastrous response at the school.

Finally, I wasn’t surprised to see victims being flown to San Antonio for treatment. The Uvalde hospital was converted in recent years to a critical access facility, limiting its number of beds. The hospital benefited financially, but many residents seeking health care must now travel to distant locations. The negative impact on a community with high rates of poverty — families who can’t afford this burden — is obvious.

President Biden and the first lady visited Uvalde on Sunday to offer comfort to the families of victims at Robb. But Uvalde and other towns like it need more than comfort — we need to know that American leaders will take the overdue steps necessary to keep these communities safe.

Let’s start with banning assault weapons and limiting young people’s access to firearms. The freedom to own weapons that facilitate mass murder is less important than the safety of our children, they’re not needed for hunting, and they don’t need to be sold to 18-year-olds. Most Americans and many Texans agree, despite the rhetoric of Republican leaders.

Let’s also recognize that Uvalde has a sufficiently large law enforcement presence, between the police department, the sheriff’s office, the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Texas Rangers, Customs and Border Protection and the FBI. We won’t succeed in creating “hardened targets” by arming teachers and other civilians.

Finally, the social conditions that gave birth to deadly violence and the killer’s mental condition can be addressed through our support of community organizations, health-care systems and schools — by supplying resources and legal avenues to identify and deal with emerging threats such as the one posed by this young man.

The deaths at Robb Elementary were predictable and avoidable. Uvalde, the state of Texas and the United States of America failed the children and teachers who died there. We owe it to their memory and to current and future generations to avoid yet another, similar tragedy.