Families see changes after Georgia school shooting, but wonder are they enough?

They were seated 2.5 miles from the site of the deadliest school shooting in Georgia’s history, where their kids go to school. They’re part of a group called Change for Chee — parents and community members that came together to advocate for school safety measures after the September shooting at Apalachee High, where two students and two teachers were killed. A group of about 10 has been meeting like this for months, trying to figure out the best way to do some good.

The shooting changed things for many of them. Sean Shultz, one of the leaders, was the type of parent to bake cupcakes for class parties and chaperone field trips — not someone who addressed the school board. He did it though, despite having low expectations.

“This sounds terrible for me to say this but I’ll just be completely honest: I hoped that other people would be (leading) and I could just support.”

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

But that’s not what happened. Suddenly he was spending 50, 60, 70 hours a week with other members of the group pouring over district policies. It brought him into the bureaucracy of public education, exposed him to lobbying state lawmakers, to managing public opinion.

Collectively, they’ve asked for enhanced physical security and mental health supports. They were eager to see state lawmakers pass a bill that would set up a way for school systems to share information about threats. And as the school year comes to a close, the group is taking stock of what seven months of pushing for change can get you in 2025. Weapons detectors in schools. Required identification for students. New state laws about school safety.

Is it enough? It depends on who you ask.

Sept. 4, 2024

Layla Renee Contreras wonders sometimes what force was at work to keep her home on Sept. 4. The 23-year-old was dressed and ready to make the trek to her Atlanta office, but couldn’t find her wallet anywhere. She gave up looking and turned on the oven to make something to eat. Then she got the first text from her younger sister.

“Layla it’s real it’s a shooting it’s me sasha I love you.”

Her wallet didn’t matter anymore. She got in her car and drove.

Those few hours look almost the same for the Change for Chee members: Getting the call or the text. The fear, like the blood in their veins, turned to ice. Flooring their cars down the roads around the school to a phalanx of police vehicles with blaring sirens. Ditching their cars anywhere they could. Running. They were all fueled by the same primal need to confirm with their own eyes that their kids and loved ones were unharmed.

Credit: Photo provided by Layla Renee Contreras

Credit: Photo provided by Layla Renee Contreras

Most of them were able to do that. The families of Christian Angulo, Richard “Ricky” Aspinwall, Cristina Irimie and Mason Schermerhorn were not.

Contreras hugged Sasha, a junior, and looked around at the field where families were reuniting. It was “apocalyptic,” she said — cars everywhere, people crying, standing out in the sun for hours waiting to be allowed to leave. She took out her phone and started recording.

“This is going to be important,” she thought.

Unlike a lot of the groups’ members, Contreras has a background in organizing. She advocated for women’s rights and voting rights, and worked against climate change as a student at the University of Georgia. She’s more interested in gun safety and statewide action than other members of the group.

She went home that night and made the Change for Chee logo.

The debate

Despite having two kids in Barrow County Schools and despite being an active participant in Change for Chee’s efforts to increase safety measures, the shooting didn’t change Philp’s opinion on guns.

“Not at all,” he said. “Even if it was my kids. That does not change the way I view the right of people to be able to protect themselves.”

Brown, also a gun carrier, doesn’t understand that: “The way that the people are reacting, the way that the government is now trying to make it so kids can get access to guns at 18 instead of 21 — like, excuse my French but that s--- baffles my mind.”

The group is diverse, to say the least. Contreras and Shultz, the group’s leaders, would probably never have met if they weren’t speaking at the same October school board meeting. Sasha Contreras founded the movement with her sister, but said her own involvement sets her apart from some of her peers at school. Dina Valladares, who grew up in Miami, started a support group for moms after the Apalachee High shooting who didn’t know what to do.

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

The group stays in touch with the families and uses their input to guide them. Ismael Angulo, Jr. whose 14-year-old brother Christian was killed in the shooting, has addressed the board and lawmakers about the shooting.

They’re friends at this point. Almost like family — one that’s had this conversation before. They know gun safety is a controversial issue and it’s not one of their main goals as a group. They just wish people in Barrow County would believe that.

People in the growing county northeast of Atlanta, where 70% of residents voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, think the group is trying to take their guns. They say so online. Philp spends a lot of his time arguing in Facebook groups, he said — even though that’s exactly what he thought about the group when he first heard of them.

“Right off the bat I thought, ‘Oh here we go, they’re going to be the ones out there marching to ban AR-15s, and magazine bans and all that stuff,” he said. “That pisses me off, that whole David Hogg type thing.”

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

He’s referencing one of the survivors of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, who became a gun control activist. The students there are one of the most effective examples on record of how activism flourishes after school shootings. They almost immediately called out lawmakers and leveraged media coverage to push for stricter gun laws in the U.S. They led the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C. — the largest youth-led demonstration since the Vietnam War. And it worked, to an extent. Florida lawmakers passed stricter gun control laws, including raising the age to buy an assault rifle to 21. But this year, they voted to lower the age back to 18.

But Change for Chee doesn’t have the will, or the support, to do something like that. One of the few things they all agreed on was the need to harden the school against potential threats with things like weapons detectors.

“When it happened here, the first thing I thought of was I don’t want my kids back in that school, unless they can’t let a gun in there,” Philp said.

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

The second gun

Shultz was carrying groceries into his Winder home months later when he got the email about the second gun.

His son, a junior at the school, hadn’t even heard yet that a 14-year-old had been arrested for having a firearm at Apalachee High School. This was January, just four months after the shooting. The school district had yet to announce its newest safety initiatives.

“I got all the groceries in, had the kids put them away, and went straight to the (Barrow County) Board of Education,” he said.

He remembers this as a turning point. About 30 students and parents met that night to rally outside the school. The next day, there were about 100 people rallying outside the district office. It was a reckoning, and an unburdening, for the people who had been waiting for something to happen.

The board of education met behind closed doors, then came out to deliver the news Shultz had been hoping for: They’d be installing weapons detectors at Barrow schools, starting with Apalachee High.

“A lot of times my son would look at me like, ‘Dad, they’re not going to change anything. I don’t know why you’re still doing that,’” Shultz said. The hard thing was, he agreed with his son. “It really did not feel like we were going to get anything done.”

Superintendent Dallas LeDuff said the weapons detectors had already been in the works before the January incident. That’s why they were able to vote on a Thursday, and get them in the school by the following Monday.

The school system has also bought decals to identify students, hired more school resource officers, started a list of mental health initiatives and hired a recovery coordinator to make it all happen. They’re currently testing out a new app that would allow school officials to report potential safety issues they observe around campus.

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC

“We’re always going to be looking toward the next thing to keep our children safe,” LeDuff said in an interview. “There’s nothing more important than making that happen.”

LeDuff has met with members of Change for Chee, as well as other community groups and concerned parents, he said. “One thing that’s so wonderful is everybody in our community means well and everybody is wanting to do everything we possibly can to keep our community safe.”

Members of Change for Chee just aren’t sure it’s enough, fast enough. Some of them are still uncomfortable with the idea of sending their kids to school, allowing them to stay home when they feel anxious. They’re questioning whether the district is making the most of more than $1 million in donated money from the Barrow Community Crisis Fund. Sasha and her friends get anxious when they notice doors propped open at the school, rather than closed and locked. There’s a big question about what’s going to happen to the walled-off portion of the school where the shooting took place, whether money is going to remain for some of the safety initiatives for future years.

Sasha felt like there was a lack of urgency after the shooting: “That’s why I decided to speak out.”

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

What’s next?

Contreras stood on the steps in the Georgia Capitol just a few weeks ago, wondering what to do next.

During the 2025 legislative session, state lawmakers passed a law that strengthens school safety and mental health requirements, but cut the requirement to establish a statewide database of school threats. They changed a bill meant to incentivize safe storage of firearms to give discounts on firearm and ammo purchases. And they banned cellphone use during the school day for students in grades K-8.

This was not how Contreras pictured using the momentum in the first legislative session after the shooting. She was hoping that tax credits for safe storage, at least, wouldn’t be controversial. That lawmakers could agree on a better way to share information about school threats.

As the school year comes to a close, Brown is wondering if she should move with her daughter, send her to school somewhere else. “It shouldn’t take something tragic to happen for them to implement something,” she said.

Every member of the group is haunted by the same idea: that it will happen again. Just this week, a 17-year-old is accused of shooting and injuring five people at a Dallas high school, after entering through an unsecured door. On Thursday, two people were killed in a shooting near Florida State University’s student union.

“Everybody goes, ‘Oh my God, how did this happen?’ ... Like me, we all sent our kids to school and didn’t demand any security,” Philp said. He’s pleased Barrow County has taken some steps. Now he wants the schools to be “bulletproof.”

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

Schultz may be done with Change for Chee after this year. They got the metal detectors, the ID badges. His fight isn’t with the state, he said.

“I wish things would change and I hope that one day things will change. But I also try to be logical and reasonable enough to know and understand I’m in a very red state and they’re talking about gun control,” he said. “That just seems kind of fruitless to me.”

Contreras knows that it seems bleak right now to some, but views the fight as a way to honor the people her community lost.

“If that means going to the Capitol last year and talking to legislators over the next year until we get a law or a bill that truly reflects the needs of students and teachers in terms of gun safety and just protecting our schools, I will put in that time and that effort and I will do that,” she said. “And I’m not going to stop.”

“What else are we going to do?”