“I hate to relate the two together, but it’s kind of the same, because Texas steps up and does what it has to do,” Joe Giusti, a Galveston County commissioner who lives in Santa Fe, told me. A Houston Chronicle investigation found that nearly 20 percent of students in the Santa Fe Independent School District had been severely affected by Harvey, meaning they either had to relocate after the storm or lacked basic resources for a significant period of time afterward.įollowing the shooting, as with the storms, many residents felt that they only had one another to count on, that to expect help from afar was a pointless exercise. “You had people still with their houses flooded dealing with the shooting,” Tabor said. Many more continue to struggle with the effects of Harvey. Some people are waiting on those checks even now, 11 years later. For those whose homes had been destroyed by Ike, FEMA administrators had come down and promised them money to help rebuild. These storms had hardened the residents of Santa Fe and nearby towns. Many people I spoke with said the town’s attitude after the shooting reminded them of how people felt after Hurricane Harvey, the August 2017 storm that devastated Galveston County, and Hurricane Ike, which did much the same in 2008. “It’s, ‘Alright, this is the card we’ve been dealt … Let’s take care of our own and try to figure this out on our own.’” “It’s not a group to cry out, like, ‘Oh, why me, someone come,’” Shelby Webb, an education reporter at the Houston Chronicle who has covered the Santa Fe shooting and its aftermath throughout the past year, told me. People turned to prayer and reflection to think seriously about how to protect their community from another tragedy. The town preferred to take care of itself. After the shock wore off, the reporters mostly stayed away, even as they continued to focus on Parkland. The nation was prepared to amend its ever-expanding list of mass-shooting sites-Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland-but many in Santa Fe didn’t want to be known for that, and didn’t want the media attention. “How are they gonna help us heal? No one here wants that attention,” Tabor said when we spoke by phone earlier this month. Read: A world where school shootings feel inevitableīut where some activists in Parkland embraced the media attention and even seized on it to advocate for gun reform, Santa Fe wanted the journalists and camera crews gone. Just three months earlier, reporters had done much the same outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida. They set up outside the wooden crosses at the memorial on the school’s lawn to watch students and family members gather together and cry. Reporters from across the country made their way to the town of 13,000, which sits midway between downtown Houston and the beach in Galveston-“the perfect location,” according to Tabor. Santa Fe, of school-prayer fame, was now the recipient of a new, unwelcome kind of attention: the kind that follows a school shooting. But Tabor’s term began last May, six days after a 17-year-old student, armed with a revolver and a shotgun, entered the high school and shot 23 people. But “we fought for it,” Tabor told me, and this is how he wants to see Santa Fe remembered in history books some day.īeing the mayor of a small town like Santa Fe should, in most cases, be a relatively uneventful gig. When he attended Santa Fe High School, back in the late 1990s, the school district “took on the Supreme Court to keep prayer in school.” It lost. Jason Tabor, the mayor of Santa Fe, Texas, wants you to know that his town cares about school prayer.
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