Wednesday’s meeting is scheduled to start at 5:30 p.m. CT. The board is scheduled to hear public comment before going into a closed session to consult with the district’s attorney and hold a hearing on whether to fire Arredondo for good cause, an agenda for the meeting reads.
The board would then return to open session for “discussion and possible action,” the agenda reads.
Wednesday’s meeting comes after
heated school board sessions in which parents have demanded that Arredondo
and others in the school system be fired, and after several instances in which officials have criticized the police response to the shooting in
hearings and a
Texas House investigative report.
Report described ‘lackadaisical approach’ by law enforcement
In a hearing before the Texas Senate on June 21, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety called the police response an “
abject failure.” The director, Col. Steven McCraw, placed blame for the failure on Arredondo, who state authorities identified as the on-scene commander. The on-scene commander, McCraw
said, was “the only thing” stopping officers from entering the classrooms to engage the gunman.
But Arredondo
told a Texas House investigative committee that he did not consider himself the incident commander — echoing comments he made
to the Texas Tribune in June.
In a
preliminary report released July 17, the Texas House panel placed blame more broadly, outlining a series of failures by multiple law enforcement agencies.
The 77-page report described “an overall lackadaisical approach” by the 376 local, state and federal law enforcement officers who responded and were at the school.
“There is no one to whom we can attribute malice or ill motives,” the report says. “Instead, we found systemic failures and egregious poor decision making.”
The report also notes others could have assumed command. Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training “teaches that any law enforcement officer can assume command, that somebody must assume command, and that an incident commander can transfer responsibility as an incident develops,” it says.
“That did not happen at Robb Elementary, and the lack of effective incident command is a major factor that caused other vital measures to be left undone,” according to the report.
In that
report, Arredondo said his approach was “responding as a police officer,” and that he therefore “didn’t title myself.”
However, at least one of the responding officers expressed the belief that Arredondo was leading the law enforcement response inside the school, telling others that the “chief is in charge,” according to a
timeline from the Texas Department of Public Safety.
In the wake of sharp criticism, Uvalde school district Superintendent Hal Harrell placed Arredondo — who has been the school district police chief since March 2020 — on leave from his position as school police chief on June 22.
Separately, Arredondo resigned his position on the
Uvalde City Council in early July, and the council
accepted the resignation July 12.
‘Too little, too late’
At
a school board meeting July 18 — a day after the House report was released — an uncle of one of the slain children angrily asked why Arredondo still was employed.
“Why the hell does he still have a job with y’all?” Brett Cross, an uncle of
10-year-old Uziyah Garcia, asked the board, adding he wanted members to resign if Arredondo weren’t fired by the next day. “Because you all do not give a damn about our children or us. Stand with us or against us, because we ain’t going nowhere.”
Firing Arredondo now, Cross told CNN later that week, would be “too little, too late.” Cross, who had been raising
Uziyah as his son before the child was killed in the shooting, and some others in the community have been calling for
the superintendent, the board and the school police department to be replaced.
At a meeting Monday night, the school board met to review parents’ complaints calling for the superintendent’s removal. The board passed a motion that, in part, requires the superintendent to provide to the board names or organizations that could review the district’s administrative practices about accountability.
Some community members in attendance — including Cross —
expressed anger at the end of the meeting, with some saying that it took three hours to not accomplish anything.
“Come out Wednesday,” Cross said as he and others left Monday’s meeting. “I’m f**king tired of this bulls**t.”
CNN’s Eric Levenson, Rosa Flores, Matthew J. Friedman, Christina Maxouris, Shimon Prokupecz and Rebekah Riess contributed to this report.
