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The principal of Robb Elementary School, who was placed on administrative leave more than two months after a mass shooting there, has pushed back on some of a Texas House committee’s conclusions about campus security.
In a letter to the House committee investigating the May 24 shooting, Mandy Gutierrez argued that the door to the classroom the gunman is believed to have entered had a functioning lock, that she was trained not to use the school’s public address system during shooting situations and that there was not a culture of complacency about security at Robb Elementary.
“It is unfair and inaccurate to conclude that I ever [became] complacent on any security issue of Robb Elementary,” Gutierrez said.
The House committee report pointed to several failures in law enforcement’s response to the shooting and issues at Robb Elementary that allowed the shooter to enter the school unobstructed before killing 19 children and two teachers.
Gutierrez’s letter responds to parts of the House committee report in which she was mentioned. The report concluded that while Robb Elementary’s active-shooter policy called for classroom doors to be locked, multiple witnesses said employees often left interior and exterior doors unlocked or propped open. School staff didn’t reliably receive notices from the Uvalde schools alert system, and some personnel didn’t always respond with urgency, the report said. It also noted that the school had unreliable Wi-Fi service, hampering a mobile app alert system.
Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s spokesperson, Anne Marie Espinoza, did not respond to a request for comment for this story on Wednesday.
In a text message to the The Texas Tribune, the committee’s chair, state Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, said, “I have not received the letter Ms. Gutierrez claims to have sent. The committee relied upon the testimony of interviews of multiple employees of the Uvalde CISD (including staff and administration) and the Uvalde CISD Police Department in coming to its conclusions related to the practices that took place at Robb Elementary School.”
Gutierrez is the third local official and the first school administrator to be suspended since the shooting.
Uriel J. García contributed to this story.
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