Fort Worth parents demand better communication after shooting at school, bomb threat

A deadly shooting at David K. Sellars Elementary School early Wednesday morning marked the second time in as many days that Fort Worth Independent School District officials have had to notify parents of a possible threat on one of the district’s campuses.

In both cases, parents have said the district’s notifications left them without enough information to make an informed decision about whether to send their kids to school that day.

District officials say they try to give parents information as quickly as they can, but must also take care not to jeopardize police investigations. But a school safety expert said district and campus leaders across the country often lack the skills and training to communicate effectively with parents during crisis situations, leading to confusion and a breakdown of trust with parents.

“As superintendents and principals, you not only have to be strategic school crisis leaders… but you also have to be a strategic communicator about school safety,” said Ken Trump, a Cleveland-based school safety consultant.

FWISD employee dies following David K. Sellars shooting

About 6:50 a.m. Wednesday, Forest Hill police responded to the shooting at David K. Sellars, which is a Fort Worth ISD campus but located in the Forest Hill city limits. They found a woman suffering from gunshot wounds in the school’s back parking lot. The woman, who was reportedly a cafeteria worker at the school, was taken by ambulance to JPS Hospital, where she died.

Following the shooting, teachers sent messages through Class Dojo, the district’s parent communication platform, notifying parents that classes would be canceled that day. A short time later, parents received word that the decision to cancel classes had been overruled, and that the school would be open that day. Parents told the Star-Telegram the lack of a coherent message left them frustrated.

Messages from school officials also did not inform parents that the incident was a shooting. Emails sent from the district to families and the media referred to a school employee dying in “a tragic incident,” but did not say how she died. As rumors swirled, school officials referred questions about what happened to Forest Hill police, who did not release a statement until almost 11 hours after the shooting.

A day before the shooting, school officials at McLean Middle School notified parents of a threat made against the school. Parents received the notification at about 6 a.m. Tuesday, saying that police were investigating the threat and that school officials had stepped up security for the day.

In a Facebook group for McLean Middle School parents, users shared screenshots of posts that were made by an Instagram user that said, “There’s already a bomb planted in one of the lockers,” and that the poster was planning to “shoot up” the school on certain dates, including Halloween. The Instagram user listed specific targets, including P.E. teachers, counselors and “all of the weird kids.” The list also included several students by name.

District officials later confirmed to the Star-Telegram that the threats authorities were investigating were made on social media. But the notification McLean principal Barbara Ozuna sent to parents Tuesday morning included little specific information about the threat. The message encouraged students and parents to “remain vigilant and continue sharing concerns with a campus teacher, administrator, or counselor.”

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A parent anonymously told the Star-Telegram, “My issue is that the school and district provide little information to families, and this makes it impossible for parents to judge whether or not they feel it is safe to send their children to school (or not) in the event of a threat.”

The parent, whose child attends McLean Middle School, told Ozuna in an email, “We as a family feel that the information provided by the school via phone call and email was vague and provided inadequate information for families to make a well-informed decision on how to best handle the situation. Please do better in the future.”

The principal responded to the concerned parent via email, “I’m sorry. I send out what the communication team tells me to send.”

Ozuna and district officials later notified parents in an updated email that authorities concluded their investigation and that the campus is deemed safe.

“Safety remains the top priority on our campus,” the district said in the follow-up email. “Once again, we remind our community to stay vigilant and continue sharing concerns with a campus administrator, teacher, or counselor.”

The parent said that this wasn’t the first time that the principal and vice principals at McLean failed to notify parents about details of threats.

According to the parent, former McLean Middle School principal Karen Brown notified parents in an email sent May 5 that a student brought a “toy weapon” to the campus, injuring another student. Administrators later told the parent that the “toy weapon” was a BB gun, which one student used to shoot at another student in a classroom.

School leaders must find a balance when releasing information

Fort Worth ISD spokeswoman Jessica Becerra said district officials are in constant communication with the Fort Worth Police Department, as well as departments in surrounding cities, about possible threats to its campuses. When a crisis does arise, district leaders try to notify parents as quickly as possible through email, text messages and phone calls, she said, even if it means sending incomplete information before all the details are clear.

But district leaders always have to balance those efforts to keep parents informed with the need to avoid interfering with a police investigation, Becerra said. In both of this week’s incidents, police were investigating even as district officials sent out notifications to parents. In such cases, there may be information the district can’t share, she said.

Trump, the school safety consultant, said incidents on campuses leave school leaders with two crises to manage at the same time: the emergency itself, and the communications crisis. Managing the threat and keeping students, teachers and staff safe has to be their top priority, he said, but keeping families informed should be a close second

Trump, who recently completed a doctoral dissertation on crisis communications in school settings, said his research has shown him that school leaders are almost uniformly bad at communicating with parents in emergencies. Many told him during interviews that they didn’t know what to say or when to say it in volatile situations.

That lack of crisis communication skills is understandable, Trump said, because most school administrators never get any training in it. Principal certification programs teach new administrators things like how to manage teams of teachers, how to work with special education students and how to incorporate technology into the classroom. But they generally don’t include instruction on how to communicate with parents about a threat on their campuses, he said.

Some districts have tried to offer crisis communication training as a part of their professional development programs at the beginning of the school year, he said, but it’s generally offered along with a host of other training seminars states require them to hold. A thorough, high-quality crisis communications training session could last a day or more, he said, and that’s an amount of time school administrators can’t often find in their schedules.

“The only thing that school administrators have less of than money is time,” he said.

Managing information in crisis situations is especially important for school leaders, because parents are understandably anxious about school safety. If there’s an emergency at school, parents will go looking for any information they can, he said. Informal lines of communication like social media will almost always move faster than official sources, he said, but they aren’t always credible. So it’s important for school leaders to get reliable information out as quickly as they can, he said.

But even more important than speed is reliability, Trump said. If school leaders release inaccurate information, especially during a crisis, it can damage their relationships with parents and the broader community, he said.

“Once you lose the trust and confidence of your school community, particularly on safety, it’s hard for you to regain,” he said. “You can do it, but it takes a lot of work to regain that confidence.”