They blew it, then they blew it again.
When a Texas House committee released its report into the school shooting in Uvalde, it said getting accurate information to the community was a systemic failure that had “a very real impact on residents. of Uvalde”.
“We’ve been told many times, that the back and forth, or the out of context, or the falsehoods or the half-truths were harmful in and of themselves,” said State Rep. Joe Moody, vice-president. chairman of the House Investigative Committee, when the report was released on Sunday. He said the community and policy makers cannot move forward without “a stabilizing force of facts”.
The officials had failed.
Then they provided those facts, in a report written in English, to a community that is over 80% Hispanic or Latino, where half of residents aged 5 or older speak a language other than English at home. Only Spanish speakers were left out.
They failed again.
Former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman went on to say that the report will be translated into Spanish in the coming weeks.
A woman in the audience shouted, “Isn’t this a normal practice?
Another person followed, “oppressed and suppressed”.
Publication of the video:Why the USA TODAY Network chose to post a video from inside Robb Elementary
It was not the first time that officials investigating the shooting ignored Spanish speakers. The same week as the shooting, when DPS chief Steven McCraw held a press conference to reveal that police had made the “wrong decision” in their response, Spanish-language media urged him to answer the questions in Spanish. Instead, he walked away.
Outrageous, said Manny Garcia, editor of the Austin American-Statesman, which is part of the USA TODAY Network.
Reporters from the Statesman and USA TODAY would translate and edit the entire report, all 77 pages, into Spanish and publish it in a special edition of the Statesman.
That’s exactly what we did and 10,000 items were delivered to Uvalde on Thursday afternoon. The report is also available online here.
“These families haven’t gotten the information they need and the way they need it,” Garcia said. “The Select Committee operated mostly behind closed doors. Families therefore depend on the information provided to them.
We reported the truth:Police accounts kept changing on Uvalde. Girl’s rape story was branded a lie
“What better way to empower families than the full report that you can view and read in Spanish. This is one of the greatest public service efforts I have been involved in.”
We created an immersive timeline from the report using video and graphics to show what happened during those 77 minutes when the police were on the scene, waiting. And of course we also offer this in English and Spanish.
“We tried to combine new information and security footage into an interactive visual to help our readers understand the tragedy minute by minute,” said USA TODAY Network Graphics Editor Javier Zarracina. “We realized we had an opportunity to make this information more accessible to a portion of our audience who feel more comfortable reading in their own language.”
As Moody said on Sunday, the community cannot move forward without a stabilizing force of facts.
Now the entire the community has it.
Read the Uvalde report in Spanish below.
Read Uvalde’s report in Spanish here.
Nicole Carroll is the managing editor of USA TODAY and president of Gannett’s news division. The Backstory offers a look at our biggest stories of the week. If you want The Backstory delivered to your inbox every week, sign up here.
Contact Carroll at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter: @nicole_carroll. Thank you for supporting our journalism. Subscribe here.