Lessons from Uvalde: Meadows Institute Leaders Share Advice, Learnings at Congressional Roundtable Discussion

Today, on the one-year anniversary of the school shooting that occurred at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, Meadows Institute leaders participated in a roundtable discussion on Capitol Hill about the importance of school safety and mental health initiatives to support children in schools, teachers and first responders.

Representatives Tony Gonzales (R-Tex.) and Jared Moskowitz (D-Florida), who represent Uvalde, Texas and Parkland, Florida, respectively, two communities rocked by devastating school shootings, co-hosted the roundtable as part of the launch of the Congressional Bipartisan School Safety and Security Caucus.

The panel featured experts in the school security and mental health spaces and school personnel from Texas, including Dr. Julie Kaplow, executive vice president of trauma and grief programs and policy at the Meadows Institute and executive director of the Trauma and Grief (TAG) Center at The Hackett Center, and B.J. Wagner, the Meadows Institute’s senior vice president of health and public safety.

“It is so important that the lessons learned from these tragic events are communicated down,” said Rep. Moskowitz.

In that spirit, Kaplow, offered several key takeaways from the Meadows Institute’s work in response to the tragedy at Uvalde’s Rob Elementary and the 2018 shooting at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The normalization of mental health problems like post-traumatic stress disorder is key to reducing the stigma to seeking mental health care, Kaplow said. “PTSD is a normative response to an abnormal event. It doesn’t go away on its own.”

That comment clearly resonated with Gary Patterson, superintendent of Uvalde CISD, who shared that PTSD has been a “tremendous issue” for the district and that, for many, “it’s hard to take that first step” toward treatment.

Another lesson, said Kaplow, is that “even the most well-prepared clinicians may not be ready” to respond to a community experiencing the level of trauma and loss faced by communities grappling with school shootings. She explained how the Institute is helping to better equip clinicians to handle the degree of loss and trauma they are seeing, especially out-of-town clinicians.

In addition, not all kids need the same level of care after a traumatic event like a shooting, Kaplow said. A tiered model of care is the best way to ensure that children who are the most affected get the intensive intervention they need.

First responders’ mental health is also a vital consideration, said the Institute’s Wagner. The way for Texas and every state to provide the best public safety services is by taking care of the mental health of officers, she said. “Unhealthy officers cannot respond effectively. When an officer is exposed to trauma and fatigue, we know that that officer makes more mistakes, has more absenteeism.” That’s why the Meadows Institute helped to create The Texas Law Enforcement Peer Network in 2019, a statewide program designed to give every Texas law enforcement officer access to a specially trained peer to address stressors, trauma, fatigue, and other needs to combat workforce burnout and end police suicide and self-harm.

“We took intentional steps to ensure that we don’t have a traumatized workforce five years from now,” Wagner said.

Texas is the only state with such an open-access, statewide and state-funded peer support network for officers. Stressed Wagner: “Every state should be doing it.”