Patricia Valenzuela, a parent representative on a state-mandated school security committee, stood up at the group’s first meeting to offer comments about Brownsville’s response to a could-have-been shooting incident on the first day of school.
The incident took place Aug. 16 in the parking lot of Porter Early College High School when Brownsville Independent School District police said they fired warning shots at a car dropping off a student that was driving recklessly in the parking lot.
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The shots set off panic among parents as staff at Porter locked down the school under well established protocols. The car fled along International Boulevard, leading BISD and Brownsville city police on a chase toward Roosevelt Street and McDavitt Boulevard, where the driver, a former Porter student, surrendered after a foot chase, police said.
The car turned out to have been stolen the night before, police said. By 11 a.m. the former student, the one being dropped off and a third juvenile suspect were in police custody. Police seized suspected drugs and the two adult suspects were arraigned the next morning, police said.
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On Aug. 25, the BISD Superintendent’s Safety and Security Committee held its first meeting, as required by the Texas Education Agency and the Texas School Safety Center in San Marcos, under orders from Gov. Greg Abbott in response to the massacre on May 24 at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, in which 19 students and two teachers were killed.
At the meeting, Superintendent Rene Gutierrez outlined how the school safety center will conduct in-person unannounced random intruder detection audits at BISD schools to assess school security and find weak points.
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The audits are to be performed at 75% of BISD schools this school year, meaning safety center inspectors will visit 40 BISD campuses between Sept. 9 and the end of the year, Gutierrez said.
After Gutierrez and Nellie Cantu, the deputy superintendent for Business and Operations, provided additional details, Cantu invited Valenzuela, a parent from Veterans Memorial Early College High School, to the microphone.
“I just want to mention that the first day of class was like a trial for everyone,” said Valenzuela, who serves in a dual role as BISD’s consultant in the Parental and Family Involvement Department for mental health issues.
“I have to say I think the way the whole school system handled it, the way BISD handled it, I’m talking as a mom, it was great, it was fast, it was clear, it was open as fast as you can to give the information,” she said.
“But that day, sadly, it was a huge failure and it was not on your side. The failure came from us the parents and the whole community. We were the ones endangering our own kids by the way we handled misinformation, sharing things that were not even verified or from any other official source. I was so mad, I have to say, by the way parents started to share even years-ago videos that were not even related with what was going on,” she said.
Valenzuela said that after Porter had locked down, parents who were inside began to shoot video with their cell phones and share it on social media, contributing to a sense of panic.
Brownsville community submit questions on how to proactively keep schools as safe as possible at Hanna Early College High School gymnasium during a Brownsville Independent School District Town Hall Meeting on safety and security at BISD schools Thursday as the nation faces another fatal school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. (Miguel Roberts/The Brownsville Herald)
“Parents that were inside the school started to film the lockdowns with the students in the dark and uploading them in social media. We were the ones who failed, and I’m saying this sadly, because we don’t have the information and we only have the data that is making us be very very scared, so we started to run like we say in my hometown ‘gallinias sin cabezas’ just running everywhere, putting in the calls to the campus and starting to call our kids that have been instructed by their teachers not to answer calls, so the parents started to freak out even more,” she said.
Valenzuela thanked BISD for requiring her to show ID before she is even allowed to park her car in the school lot, saying some parents might not like the requirement but she does. She also urged BISD to post official information on Facebook about how to respond to any future incidents.
“So I will honestly request some official protocols that’s from BISD that we can share with the parents to know what to do. For example, I had to do my own homework and I found out that the agencies recommend that the worst thing you can do as a parent when you hear that there is an active shooter in your school is to start calling and calling your kid because you’re telling the person where your kid is hiding because maybe he forgot to put the ring off or whatever, so you are telling the shooter ‘there it is, there’s my kid. Go for it. There’s someone hiding right there. So we are doing the wrong part,” she said.
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“Honestly, as a parent, representing everyone that was running like crazy. As long as you put that letter on social media, a lot of people might not have (the BISD messenger app) but oh boy everyone has Facebook, even the smallest rural areas for BISD, believe me, they do have Facebook, and those people are just waiting to hear from other people that are not the comadre or the vecina or whatever to know what’s going on because they don’t believe the letter, they think you’re hiding something. They don’t believe the letter because the comadre that wasn’t even there was telling the truth because she was sharing a video from three years ago,” Valenzuela said, referring to old video she said was posted during the lockdown.
The BISD Police and Security Services Department took Valenzuela up on her request, preparing a training program for parents on what they should and should not do during a lockdown.
BISD Police Sgt. Cindy Paz and Valenzuela presented the training on Wednesday in the Porter auditorium. The training will be presented again from 9:30-11:30 a.m. on Sept. 20 in the Hanna Early College High School Fine Arts Auditorium and again that evening virtually.
Rosalva Larrasquitu, who leads the Parental and Family Engagement Department, said with all the uproar after Uvalde it might appear that BISD is just now taking steps to be prepared in the event of a school shooting.
Just the opposite is true. For years the Police and Security Services Department has conducted parent police academies to engage parents in school security matters. As well, BISD police have a longstanding collaborative relationship with Brownsville city police and other Cameron County law enforcement agencies.
The Superintendent’s Safety and Security Committee is required to meet three times a year under Abbott’s orders, which apply to all public and charter schools in the state, including the requirement for random intruder detection audits.
BISD committee members include Gutierrez, BISD Board of Trustees President Eddie Garcia, BISD Police Chief Oscar Garcia, BISD board member Denise Garza, Paz, Hodie Ann Leal, Rene Tavarez from the city, Brownsville Police Chief Felix Sauceda, BISD master teacher Alma Salazar, parent representatives Maria Perez and Valenzuela, Cantu, the deputy superintendent, and Brownsville Police Cmdr. Kirk Massey.
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