Today: “The state of Texas is sending public school students home with DNA kits designed to help their parents identify their children “in case of an emergency.”
In 2021, the Texas state legislature passed Senate Bill No. 2158, a law requiring the Texas Education Agency to “provide identification kits to school districts and open-enrollment charter schools for distribution to the parent or legal custodian of certain students.”
The law passed after eight students and two teachers were shot and killed inside Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas, and almost a year before 19 fourth graders and two teachers were gunned down inside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
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The three-fold pamphlets allow caregivers to store their children’s DNA and fingerprints at home, which could then be turned over to law enforcement agencies in the event of an “emergency.” According to the legislation mandating the kits be provided to qualifying Texas families, the fingerprint and DNA verification kits were intended to “help locate and return a missing or trafficked child.”
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Many of the children gunned down inside Robb Elementary were not easily identifiable as a result of their catastrophic injuries. Some close family members provided DNA swabs in order to positively identify the children’s remains.
Tracy Walder, a former CIA and FBI agent and current college professor who taught high school history for 16 years, said she was “devastated” when she heard her second grade daughter would be sent home with a kit.
“You have to understand, I’m a former law enforcement officer,” Walder, who has lived in Texas for 14 years, told TODAY Parents. “I worry every single day when I send my kid to school. Now we’re giving parents DNA kits so that when their child is killed with the same weapon of war I had when I was in Afghanistan, parents can use them to identify them?””