A Chronicle analysis of staffing at all 1,200 public school and open-enrollment charter districts in Texas during the 2020-2021 school year found that:

The vast majority – 98 percent – of students attended districts that did not meet the Texas Education Agency’s recommendation of one counselor per 250 students.

The Texas Model for Comprehensive Counseling Programs, which schools must use to build their counseling program, sets a lower recommendation – one counselor per 350 students. Still, less than 3 percent of students attended districts that met that standard.

The National Association of School Psychologists recommends one psychologist per 500 students. Just 25 districts met that standard.

Only four districts met the 250 students per social worker standard recommended by the National Association of Social Workers.

Two-thirds of districts failed to meet the ratio of one nurse per 750 students, as recommended by the National Association of School Nurses.

......The state does not provide districts funding specifically earmarked for hiring these four positions. Districts have to cobble together resources from federal, state and local revenue, as well as partnerships with philanthropic organizations.

“While the state provides recommendations for appropriate staffing ratios in a variety of areas, ultimately it is local school system leadership that decide to allocate funds for any given position,” the TEA said in a statement. “School systems have tended to prioritize teaching positions. With more teaching positions, less funds remain for other positions.”

A Chronicle analysis of staffing at all 1,200 public school and open-enrollment charter districts in Texas during the 2020-2021 school year found that:

The vast majority – 98 percent – of students attended districts that did not meet the Texas Education Agency’s recommendation of one counselor per 250 students.

The Texas Model for Comprehensive Counseling Programs, which schools must use to build their counseling program, sets a lower recommendation – one counselor per 350 students. Still, less than 3 percent of students attended districts that met that standard.

The National Association of School Psychologists recommends one psychologist per 500 students. Just 25 districts met that standard.

Only four districts met the 250 students per social worker standard recommended by the National Association of Social Workers.

Two-thirds of districts failed to meet the ratio of one nurse per 750 students, as recommended by the National Association of School Nurses.

......The state does not provide districts funding specifically earmarked for hiring these four positions. Districts have to cobble together resources from federal, state and local revenue, as well as partnerships with philanthropic organizations.

“While the state provides recommendations for appropriate staffing ratios in a variety of areas, ultimately it is local school system leadership that decide to allocate funds for any given position,” the TEA said in a statement. “School systems have tended to prioritize teaching positions. With more teaching positions, less funds remain for other positions.”

Eight days before a Texas teenager killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School, the manufacturer of the rifle used in the massacre posted an ad on social media that featured a toddler holding a similar weapon.

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it,” read the post from Daniel Defense on May 16, the same day the Robb Elementary shooter turned 18.

The ad represented the kind of provocative marketing that has helped the Georgia-based gun company become one the largest privately owned firearms manufacturers in the country. ,,,,,

Busse, the former firearm executive, said the industry largely shunned marketing campaigns like these 15 years ago, but now it's not unusual to see ads focused on AR-15s and gear like bulletproof vests, which he said are often cloaked with political and religious messaging — and sometimes feature scantily clad women.

“I look at it and think how can you be surprised that 19-year-old kids are attracted to this,” Busse said.

It’s hard to imagine a more righteous anger than that of the parents being kept at a distance from Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., on Tuesday. A gunman was inside the building with their children while police were outside, holding them back. Any parent can explain the often-irrational anguish that comes from being unwillingly separated from their children. That the immediate barrier between these parents and their kids were police, the people entrusted to keep these kids safe, must have been fully enraging.

What’s still not entirely clear is the extent to which that anger was justified. There were police outside, managing the crowd, but there also appear to have been police inside the school. Parents were furious that the police outside weren’t acting to protect their families, but they couldn’t see what was happening within the school’s walls.

We can say with some confidence that the police outside the building may not have been communicating with those parents clearly, given the way the public story about law enforcement’s response has evolved since the massacre took place. We can also say with some confidence that the response did not reflect the expectations that residents of Uvalde probably had for their police force.....

We can’t gloss over Olivarez’s other point, though, that officers were wary of moving forward out of the risk of being shot. We should apply the same caution to his presentation of the officers’ state of mind as we should to any other secondhand commentary. But if that is true, it’s a remarkable deviation from what the public has been taught to expect from law enforcement......

So those parents were there, outside of the school with the police, while their kids were inside with the shooter. They expected more police to rush in; some parents even floated with the idea of running in themselves. One mother did, according to the Wall Street Journal: After being detained by police, she found an unguarded area and sneaked into the building to take her kids out. But what the parents saw was caution they found inexplicable. What an official told Wolf Blitzer is that “caution” was the watchword within the school’s walls, as well.

Noah Orona still had not cried.

The 10-year-old’s father, Oscar, couldn’t understand it. Just hours earlier, a stranger with a rifle had walked into the boy’s fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School and opened fire, slaughtering his teachers and classmates in front of him. One round struck Noah in the shoulder blade, carving a 10-inch gash through his back before popping out and spraying his right arm with shrapnel. He’d laid amid the blood and bodies of his dead friends for an hour, maybe more, waiting for help to come......

The children and adults who die in school shootings dominate headlines and consume the public’s attention. Body counts become synonymous with each event, dictating where they rank in the catalogue of these singularly American horrors: 10 at Santa Fe High, 13 at Columbine High, 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary. And now, added to the list is 21 at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Tex.

Those tallies, however, do not begin to capture the true scope of this epidemic in the United States, where hundreds of thousands of children’s lives have been profoundly changed by school shootings. There are the more than 360 kids and adults, including Noah, who have been injured on K-12 campuses since 1999, according to a Washington Post database. And then there are the children who suffer no physical wounds at all, but are still haunted for years by what they saw or heard or lost.

When Curtis Lavarello walks through the vendor hall at the huge school safety conference his organization sponsors this July, he will stop and marvel at just how useless some of the technology being marketed to schools is.

It won’t help prevent a shooting, he said, and could even hurt.

He cited a $400,000 system that fills hallways with smoke in hopes of stopping a shooter, noting that this same smoke would also obstruct law enforcement trying to intervene and children trying to escape.

“You’re going to see bizarre things you would never want to see in your child’s school,” said Lavarello, executive director of the School Safety Advocacy Council.

Experts call it “school security theater" — the idea that if a school system buys enough technology or infrastructure, it can keep its children safe from the horrors of a gunman......

On paper, the Uvalde school district had a robust security plan in place. That included dedicated police officers, threat assessment teams, a visitor management system, perimeter fencing, alarm systems, security cameras, radios and trainings for students and staff. It also tells teachers to keep classroom doors closed and locked at all times. But that doesn’t mean it was properly implemented.

The moment of silence didn’t last long this time. Someone in the crowd at Boston’s TD Garden interrupted it by yelling, “Do something!,” per reporters in the arena Friday night. Then others yelled, too.

When the scoreboard flashed a message urging fans to “SUPPORT COMMON SENSE GUN LAWS” and “CONTACT YOUR U.S. SENATORS,” the masses roared, just like crowds in San Francisco and Miami had done upon seeing similar messages at other NBA games after the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde.

In terms of bold statements, this wasn’t much. But it was something, at least, and with their cheers, it was as if the fans were screaming, “Finally!” As Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr so eloquently noted a few hours after 19 students and two teachers were killed on Tuesday, people are tired of empty condolences and hollow platitudes.

Not long ago, NBA teams would have been terrified to post anything tangential to politics on their Jumbotrons. A Major League Baseball manager would have rather ordered Barry Bonds to bunt than to publicly announce his plans to skip the national anthem, as the Giants’ Gabe Kapler did this week. And MLB owners would have had their public-relations teams fired for spending an entire game dedicating their Twitter accounts to facts about gun violence, the way the Yankees and Rays did Thursday night.