Eleven-year-old Jeanette Adams said students were rushed out of her sixth-grade class after they were told there had been a shooting. She wasn’t able to call her mother until later when she borrowed a friend’s cellphone.
Her mother, meanwhile, had been panicking as news spread about the attack.
“I was scared; I was crying; I was angry,” her mother, Jeanette Gordan, said. “But when I got that phone call that my daughter was all right, it was like having her again for the first time.”
North Park Elementary enrolls about 530 children, the majority of whom are Latino and three-quarters of whom are poor, according to data from the San Bernardino City Unified School District. Officials said the school will be closed for two days.
U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who has said it should be up to states and local governments whether guns should be banned from schools, issued a statement Monday condemning the recent shooting as a “horrible act.”
“As a mother and grandmother, today’s senseless violence is a tragedy no parent should ever have to face,” DeVos said. “I ask everyone to join me in keeping all the victims and those impacted in your prayers.”
In a news conference early in the day, San Bernardino Mayor R. Carey Davis somberly recalled the way San Bernardino residents united after the 2015 terrorist attack. In the wake of another violent tragedy, the community will again show that it is “resilient and can deal with tragedy, disaster, just as effectively as any other community in the United States,” he said.
There have been 220 school shootings in the United States since 2013, according to Everytown for Gun Safety. The group reported that, on an average day in the United States, seven children and teenagers ages 19 or under are killed with guns.
There were 48 school shootings in the United States in 2016, an average of just under one incident a week, according to statistics compiled by Everytown for Gun Safety. The shooting in San Bernardino is the 12th in 2017.
Peter Holley, Wesley Lowery and Alice Crites contributed to this report. William Dauber reported from San Bernardino, Calif.
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