Nearly 4 million students in Texas will take home DNA kits that are designed to help parents identify their children in case of an emergency, NBC News reports.
This comes after the Texas state legislature passed a law last year following the 2018 killing of eight students and two teachers at a Santa Fe High School.
The law requires the Texas Education Agency “provide identification kits to school districts and open-enrollment charter schools for distribution to the parent or legal custodian of certain students.”
Some 3.8 million K-6 students who are eligible will be provided with a kit for ink-free fingerprinting, a physical description and a saliva sample on a DNA identification card. Parents will be able to keep their child’s DNA and fingerprints at home to hand over to law enforcement agencies in case of an “emergency.”
Tracy Walder, a former CIA and FBI agent told NBC that the kits “sends two messages.”
“The first is that the government is not going to do anything to solve the problem. This is their way of telling us that,” Walder said. “The second is that us parents are now forced to have conversations with our kids that they may not be emotionally ready for. My daughter is 7. What do I tell her?”
The DNA kits were handed out five months after 19 students and two teachers were killed at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
Many of the children killed were not easily identified due to catastrophic injuries. In some cases families had to provide DNA swabs to positively ID the child’s remains, NBC news reported.
Democratic nominee for governor of Texas Beto O’Rourke, slammed current governor Greg Abbott (R) for sending DNA identification kits to parents instead of passing gun control legislation.
“This is Greg Abbott’s Texas. More school shootings than any other state on his watch but no action to prevent the next,” O’Rourke said. “We will not allow this to be our future. We will keep our kids safe.”
