Parents got the chance to voice their concerns at the Uvalde CISD school board meeting.
Next school year is being delayed, while the school district assesses what changes they will be making to enhance school security.
The interim report released by the special Texas House Committee investigating the shooting is creating mixed reaction within Uvalde.
According to a statement from Uvalde CISD Superintendent Dr. Hal Harrell the report “provides our district with information that will be helpful in guiding our efforts to improve and enhance safety and security, training, and resources.”
The interim report says some of the school safety procedures were not followed the day of the shooting.
The report says Robb Elementary had a culture of non-compliance with safety policies requiring doors to be kept locked, which turned out to be fatal.
According to a part of the preliminary report, multiple witnesses told the Committee that people at Robb Elementary commonly left doors unlocked. During walkthroughs by school district police officers, they would find doors unlocked and remind teachers to keep them locked and in the event of repeat offenders, they would document the violations.
Teachers would often use magnets and rocks to prop open exterior doors. Initial reports stated the door the shooter entered into the school was propped open, but the committee’s report issued this weekend states the door was unlocked the entire time.
According to the report, the locks for Room 111 were faulty, but a work order to fix the lock was never issue. Staff knew about the door lock issues as early as March 2022. According to the committee, the head custodian’s testimony stated he never heard about any problems for the doors to Room 111 or Room 112.
According to the report, the door to Room 111 was probably not locked. The door required special effort to lock it, one of the surviving teachers had no memory of doing so. The committee states if the door to Room 111 had been locked, the shooter likely would’ve been slowed down for some time.
“Having stuff like this coming out in bits and pieces is going to make things more frustrating, I think on my point. The information wasn’t completely worthless, it’s gives us a brief summary of what they’ve collected so far and kind of what happened,” Alfred Garza III, father of Amerie Jo Garza told KENS 5 after a meeting to discuss the report.
Garza says he is patiently waiting to see the report released by the Uvalde District Attorney and the Texas Rangers before jumping to conclusions.
“We need to make sure we collect all the data, all the information because there’s not going to be one person put to blame on this. It’s going to be multiple people, multiple agencies, multiple people. There were some systemic failures and a lot of people messed up that day,” Garza said.