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6 days ago
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“I have been emotionally at my wit’s end with the violence.”
Gabriela Rangel is a glass dispatch coordinator in California City, California, and mother to a five-year-old. Like many parents across the nation, she was horrified to learn about the 27 August shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Two children were killed and 17 other people were injured.
Gabriela is one of 10 parents who joined a WhatsApp group to regularly chat with Guardian journalists about how it feels to raise kids now. Less than two weeks after the mass shooting in Minneapolis, Charlie Kirk was shot at the University of Utah. On the same day, another school shooting occurred in Evergreen, Colorado.
The Guardian asked the parents about their experiences amid so much school and political violence.
How are you all feeling in the wake of these shootings and violent events?
All of the parents in the group expressed near-constant fear over the possibility of a school shooting or violence in schools.
Gabriela said her son just had his first school lockdown drill as a kindergartener: “It does break my heart that these drills are now more common than the fire and earthquake drills of our day.”
Other parents like David Rodriguez, a barber who lives in Pharr, Texas, echoed the sentiment, saying that for him it used to be tornado drills, not active-shooter drills. He said the Minneapolis shooting hit particularly close to home, as the Uvalde school shooting happened about a four-hour drive from where he lives with his wife and five-year-old son, Russell.
Russell just started kindergarten in August, but he also already has had an active-shooter drill at his elementary school. David said the experience terrified his son: “The alarms had gone off unexpectedly and they had to hide and be quiet all within a minute.”
After the drill, David and his wife did the best they could to explain what had happened and why. Then the five-year-old asked whether his dad would be able to come save him and his friends if there was a shooter at the school.
“It struck a chord so hard in my body I started to cry,” David said. “I let him know I will always be by your side to protect you until my last breath.” David also told his son the police would come “faster than he ever could” but Russell continued to ask him if he would be there to protect his class.
According to Pew Research Center, a quarter of teachers say that their school had at least one gun-related lockdown in 2023. Two parents from our Guardian group shared that since the school year began around late August, their kid’s school had already had a real threat that triggered a temporary lockdown.
Isabel Hernandez, another parent from the WhatsApp group, had no idea there had been a threat at the San Bernardino high school that her daughter Alina attends until 6pm the day it happened. The school’s security team received a tip about a weapon on campus and were able to recover it “without incident”. Alina had been off campus for a water polo game, but Hernandez was still frustrated by the lack of communication.
Alba Ávila’s 17-year-old daughter Bella also experienced a lockdown last year when a student brought a gun onto her high school campus: “She texted me and told me she loved us and saying goodbye. It was heartbreaking.”
This year, her daughter’s school has banned cell phones, so she and her husband have no way of getting in touch with her if there were to be an emergency: “All I have to do is pray she will come home.”
The shooting of Charlie Kirk at the University of Utah on 10 September also reverberated within the Guardian parents group. When asking the parents again about their reactions to the news, there were fewer, more distraught answers.
Isabel Hernandez, whose eldest child Alina had recently had the lockdown at her school, has two other daughters Natalia, 12, and Valentina, 3. Both Alina and Natalia had seen the video of the shooting on TikTok, and Alina also showed her mother clips circulating of Charlie Kirk’s speeches and debates, which Isabel described as “not so nice”.
“I explained to her I really didn’t know who he was [prior to the shooting]. No one should ever be killed because they don’t have the same beliefs or values as another person,” she said.
“It’s hard for us parents explaining these things to our children. I just wish these shootings didn’t have to happen so often.”
How do you cope with your fears for your kids’ safety?
Some of the parents found that taking any action, including volunteering in their children’s schools, helped ease some of their anxieties. Along with other support roles, Alba checks in school visitors at the front desk of her son’s elementary school. She scans their IDs, which immediately go through the Raptor system, a software that quickly searches for those people in sex-offender and other databases. Earlier this year, she stopped a person from entering the school after they had been flagged by the database.
David also volunteers at his son’s school, which is equipped with the Raptor system, as well as bulletproof doors and armed guards. He acknowledged the importance of the precautions but said it takes away from the normal childhood experience. Due to school policy, they weren’t allowed to walk Russell to his classroom for the first time.
Jennifer Wilson, a courtesy clerk at Albertsons grocery in Bakersfield, California, said that she’s trained her son Joaquin to always run from violence or fights at school: “When it comes to school shootings … I pray for my kid’s safety. That’s all I can do. He has to go to school.”
