The shooting has cast a gloomy tone in the final days and weeks of the school year.
“Sometimes I don’t know what to say in public,” Deborah Gist, the superintendent of schools in Tulsa, Oklahoma, wrote in a Facebook post. “I feel a huge responsibility to use the right words. But how do I express the horror, indignation, frustration, disappointment, pain and fear of an event like the Uvalde shooting? It is the worst nightmare of a parent, a teacher, a principal and a superintendent.”
In New Jersey on Wednesday morning, Cindy Cucaz, 47, received a message from her daughter’s high school principal in Belleville, stating that local police would be coming for the drop-off and discharge.
“Hopefully this will bring some comfort and relief to students, teachers, administrators and parents,” Ms. Cucaz, who works in medical billing in Manhattan, read from an email sent to the students.
But Ms Cucaz said it would do little to ease her anxiety from the time her daughter, Catalina, 17, started school until she returned home in the afternoon.
“I send her away every day with prayers that she will come back in one piece. Because of the way the world is,” Mrs. Cucaz said. “I just pray she comes home.”
In Buffalo, not far from where a racist gunman killed 10 black people at a nearby grocery store less than two weeks ago, the Texas shooting piled fear upon fear. Patricia Davis paused before dropping off her 13-year-old son at school on Wednesday morning.
