The Board Member
For Rusty Norman, it's time to 'move forward' after a horrific school shooting
Rusty Norman doesn’t mince words. If you tell him you’re going to do one thing and then do another, he has no use for you. If you keep your word, he’s more than happy to help.
Four years ago, sitting opposite Norman and then-Superintendent Leigh Wall in a conference room at the Santa Fe ISD administrative office, I asked about the steps the district was taking to recover from the May 18, 2018 school shooting that left 10 dead and 13 injured. My interest, then and now, was not in chasing gossip or stirring up controversy, but in looking at how this small district could rebuild trust in the wake of something so horrific.
About this series:
This is the first of six pieces that expand on my freelance article focusing on how the Santa Fe, Texas, school district is moving forward following an on-campus shooting in May 2018. To read the story, which appears in the December 2022 issue of American School Board Journal, click on this link.
Norman, the board chairman then and now, was blunt in his assessment.
“We’ve done as much as we can in hardening the schools, but that’s only a deterrent. It’s not a fix to the problem. It’s the longer-term things, especially around mental health and counseling, that we don’t have all the answers to yet,” Norman told me that day. “We don’t know the time frame for that, or how far this actually reaches. We just don’t know.”
Rusty Norman stands inside the board room at the Santa Fe Independent School District’s administrative building.
In the wake of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, this past May, I thought about Norman’s quote and what had taken place in Santa Fe since “After It All Falls Apart” appeared in the December 2018 issue of American School Board Journal. What had officials in the Santa Fe district learned? What happened to the staff, especially at the high school where the shooting took place? What lessons could district officials share about the long path to recovery?
Norman, who said my first story was “fair” in its reporting, agreed to speak with me for “Moving Forward,” which appears in the magazine’s current issue. He and Kevin Bott, Wall’s successor who moved to the district in 2021, helped open doors and set up interviews for the nearly 3,000-word article.
The interviews, which were conducted over three days in Santa Fe in September, were compelling and insightful. But writing the story, which seemed relatively straightforward when I pitched it, was difficult. I simply had too much material, too much history, to include everything I had learned in the detail I wanted.
Now that the story is published, I’ve decided to write profiles of several of the key people who were interviewed this past September. While this is not an all-encompassing take on the shooting and the aftermath, my hope is these six essays will provide additional insight into those who have had key roles in the school district’s long, often painful journey to recovery.
The story, then and now, starts with Norman.
Rebuilding Trust
A Galveston County native who moved to Santa Fe in 1987, Norman spent 40 years working at Amoco (now BP) and Marathon in nearby Texas City. His wife, Christie, worked in the school district and both of his children graduated from Santa Fe High School. Two of his three grandchildren are currently students in Santa Fe.
Elected to the board in 2007, Norman has served as the chairman since 2018. Over the past four years, the seven-person board has added four new members who have brought “a fresh perspective,” he said. “All of them are active in the community. They have kids in the district. They are working to stay as engaged as possible.”
Sitting in the same conference room where we met four years earlier, Norman looked back at a contentious school board meeting that took place in September 2018, the night before our first interview. At the time, angry and grieving parents and community members, as well as outsiders who don’t live in the district, were protesting Santa Fe’s handling of the shooting. With a group of TV reporters filming the scene from the back of the room, the crowd demanded that Wall and the board resign.
“The problem is there was no trust. We were doing nothing but backpedaling against mistaken information,” Norman said. “Everything we were doing was playing catch up, and it was prohibiting us from moving forward.”
Soon after that meeting, Norman was determined “not to continue beating my head against the wall and listening to the same thing over and over again.” The format of the board’s business meetings was changed so public comment came at the end instead of the beginning. Items not directly related to school business are not discussed.
“We finally had to take the stance that we are here to educate children,” Norman said. “If you’re bringing something solid to the board that you really need to discuss, that’s one thing. But this is the board’s meeting. At the end of the day, we’ve got a responsibility to educate children and to provide a safe experience for our kids. We do the best we can to do that.”
Safety and Mental Health
Norman estimates Santa Fe spent more than $2 million from its surplus to “harden” the schools in the aftermath of the May 18 shooting. Audible alarms were put on every exterior door at the high school. Bullet resistant walls were added at the entrances to every school building and the central office lobby also was made more secure.
Today, at the entrance to every school, everyone goes through a metal detector. Backpacks and bags are inspected by a plain clothes security officer. Visitors are directed to the information desk, where driver’s licenses are scanned and name badges printed, with the directive that the badges must be returned. Cameras monitor every move.
The hypervigilance may seem extreme, but Norman and others insist it’s all in the interest of security much of the community continues to demand. He also noted that implementing most of security measures was “the easy part” of the district’s recovery.
“It hasn’t been perfect, but we will always focus on safety and security. That will always be a focus,” Norman said. “We spent that money to harden our schools and we did so in a sense of urgency, but all of our focus since then has been much more on helping kids understand what they’re facing today, how they can meet the challenges of what they’re doing today, and how we can help them tomorrow.”
What continues to worry Norman is whether students’ mental health and social/emotional needs are being addressed, especially in a district that has been hit by Hurricane Harvey, the shooting, and COVID over the past five years.
“Early on, I was asked numerous times, mostly by politicians, what could be done, and the sad reality was we were asking for money,” Norman said. “We got great help from the state of Texas and at the federal level, not just for hardening the schools, so we could help the community feel like it was safe to send the kids back to the school and for the kids to feel safe once they got here.
“What I was concerned about then, and I remain concerned about now, was whether we would get the funding to have the counselors and additional staff available to ensure that our kids’ mental health needs and social wellbeing were being addressed. Kids face things that are totally different than when you or I went to school many, many years ago. We have to make sure that we have people around to help them through those problems, too.”
‘There’s no playbook’
Over time, the Santa Fe shooting has not received the same level of national attention or publicity as Uvalde, Sandy Hook, Stoneman Douglas, and Columbine. One reason: Any discussion of gun control or firearm restrictions, a constant refrain in communities where other school shootings have occurred, is a non-starter in this close-knit, conservative town.
“This community did not immediately start screaming about gun control, and that dried up the national media real quick,” Norman said. “Early on, people were upset and making false claims about what we did, and in many cases I chose to keep my mouth shut and not go out there and spread things that might be problematic. When you don’t come up with anything of substance to back up those claims, the media loses interest very quickly.”
Norman knows the district always will be under something of a microscope because of its tragic place in history. “Any incident of any magnitude whatsoever gets blown out of proportion,” he said. “You can have a bomb threat in one of our neighboring school districts and hear nothing about it; if it happens here, it’s national news.
“People are learning how to trust the district again, but when something like Uvalde happens, it all comes back up,” he said. “People want to reassess. and they start asking, ‘Are you doing everything you can do?’ And we have to reassure them that we are. We are as transparent as possible about what’s going on and what we can tell parents and our community, but we won’t communicate dreams and false information.”
As the school board president, Norman has been contacted by administrators and board members in other districts that have been affected by school shootings and catastrophic events. The common question: What do you do when something like this happens?
“There’s no playbook when someone has a mass tragedy,” he said. “I always tell people that you have to look at your policies and procedures and make sure they are airtight. Have you talked to your law enforcement and emergency management about how they will respond if something like this happens? Has everyone been trained on what they should do in this type of emergency?”
His overriding message is a hard hit: Don’t think this can’t happen in your district.
“If you don’t live it, if you don’t review it, if you don’t train for it, you will not be prepared,” he said. “Our situation was different than what happened in Parkland, Fla., and it was different than what happened in Uvalde. People think things like this will always happen somewhere else. I would have told you that myself prior to May 18, yet it happened here. We had a high level of confidence that we had good policies and practices in place and good personnel and evil still managed to do evil.”
‘A Work in Progress’
Since May 18, 2018, Norman said the district’s staff and students have shown they are “amazingly resilient” and have “absolutely refused to be defined by that act of terror that day.” Thanks to that resilience, he noted the district has shown steady growth on state tests over the past five years. Norman also pointed to the fact that he and two other board members were running for office unopposed as evidence of support by most in the community.
In the four and a half years since the shooting, Santa Fe has dealt with financial losses due to decreased student attendance, the basis on which the state determines per-pupil funding. The loss of attendance, first attributed to the shooting and then to the after effects of COVID, has cost the district millions as it tries to prepare for “inevitable growth” due to the encroaching sprawl of Houston.
Norman is thankful the district has not had to cut staff despite the financial shortfall, but admits he is frustrated the community has failed to pass two bond referendums over the past year.
“For us, at this moment, the focus is on how we prepare for growth and maintain what we already have with the limited resources we have right now,” Norman said. “At the same time, the community is learning how to trust the district again, but some don’t understand what this growth means or what we will need in the next five to 10 to 15 years. We’re trying to stay ahead of the ballgame.”
Still, despite some setbacks and criticism, Norman said the simple passage of time “has been kind to us.”
“Most of the people in this community know we are committed to safety and security. They know we are committed to their children,” he said. “We will never forget what happened on May 18. We can’t forget it. But we can’t dwell on it anymore. We have to continue to move forward.”
Coming Next: The Principal.