(upbeat music) - [Lorraine] New masking recommendations for schools, but a new state law has one district leader saying his hands are tied.

- We're significantly compromise in our ability to abide by CDC, guidance or guidelines.

- [Lorraine] In the wrong place at the wrong time.

What Tucson police say you should do if you end up in a situation with an active shooter.

- You have three options, run, hide, or fight.

- [Lorraine] And the monsoon makes a memorable entrance dumping record rainfall on Southern Arizona.

- If you're working on trying to improve short term drought conditions.

This is exactly the way you'd do it.

(upbeat music continues) - Hello and welcome to "Arizona 360" I'm Lorraine Ribera.

Thanks so much for joining us.

New masking recommendations from the CDC resulted in mixed reactions from leaders in Arizona.

The CDC now advises that fully vaccinated people mask up indoors if they live in a place where transmission is substantial or high, that applies to most counties in the state.

But in a statement, governor Doug Ducey said Arizona will not change a new law barring mask mandates in schools.

He also criticized the new guidance calling it an example of the Biden administration's failure to contain the pandemic.

On the other hand, Tucson mayor Raheena Romero announced mass will be required at city facilities.

The CDC is also recommending everyone in K through 12 schools wear a mask regardless of their vaccinated or not.

Preventing an outbreak as the new school year approaches is at the top of the mind for Southern Arizona's largest school district.

More than 265 million federal dollars poured into the Tucson Unified School District this year, as it managed fallout from COVID-19.

The dollars went to everything from staff pay raises to Chromebooks, masks and new air filters.

Superintendent Gabriel Trujillo says the district felt confident bringing the 90 school sites up to health standards for its 42,000 students and 8,000 staff.

But he says Arizona's law that prohibits the district from requiring mask or vaccines presents a challenge.

The county health department will step in and declare things like the outbreaks and manage the quarantine conversations.

Does that take some of the pressure off of you and your school board members?

- That's going to be a tremendous assistance to school board members and to our administrators.

Not just here in the superintendent's office, but the administrators that are gonna be mostly on the, on the front end of this and at the tip of the spear are gonna be your principals and assistant principals.

They are the ones that are gonna be facing angry parents and upset members of the public and to have the county health departments step in and prescribe, if you will, how many days each student or employee needs to sit out, either in quarantine or isolation, depoliticizes it for us.

Especially when you start talking about quarantine and isolation requirements and how they may differ for vaccinated versus unvaccinated students or employees.

We just don't wanna be in the middle of that.

As this issue becomes more heavily politicized, as the days go by.

- Classrooms look differently than they have in the past.

Things like plexiglass, will cohorts be in the cafeteria so you don't have all of the mingling?

- We're significantly compromised in our ability to abide by CDC, guidance or guidelines.

We're gonna have students that are gonna be sitting a lot closer than six feet, even three feet.

We're gonna have students that are not gonna be wearing masks.

We have students that will be wearing masks.

I wanna pledge to all of our parents that ask their kids to wear masks, we will be to the best of our ability helping you by enforcing those students that you give us permission to through your parental authority, that you want them wearing masks.

We're gonna work with our teachers to make sure that the kids that have been identified as their parents wanting them to wear masks, that we are gonna be tracking them throughout the day to make sure that they keep those masks on.

So we're gonna do what is within the realm of our authority.

What's in the realm of reason to be able to support the parents that still want their kids wearing masks.

There's gonna be a number of our classrooms that will still be utilizing not necessarily plexiglass, but we've got some plastic dividers.

In some cases, we have small plexiglass dividers between students, but as your class sizes grow, your ability to use those devices is significantly compromised.

So I think we're gonna see less and less of that, but the good news is, is we're still gonna have air purification units inside every classroom, every common area, every office, and just about every place on all of our campuses and district buildings.

So that's good.

We're still going to have COVID-19 rapid antigen testing available onsite at all of our sites in our health services offices.

So that employees and students presenting with symptoms can get tested absolutely immediately, and they can be identified and called into the Pima County Health Department.

So it's not all doom and gloom, but we still have some very, very effective mitigation strategies that will be in play as we start school on August 5th.

- Pima County has what may seem like a low threshold when it comes to declaring an outbreak.

Two students who are somehow linked, and then it would have to declare an outbreak.

Do you have the staff to support if everybody has to go home or go into a quarantine space?

- We do.

That's something that we got really, really good at in 2020.

We have the infrastructure now.

TUSD deployed just shy of 25,000 Chromebooks across the district.

We are effectively now, when you combine the devices that the district is able to provide to students and the 30 or 40% of our district that already has their own devices and families that through their own means have been able to provide iPads or Chromebooks to their kids.

When you combine those two segments of our student body, we're pretty much a one-to-one district at this point.

So that infrastructure now allows us to roll into remote learning at a moment's notice, if there is an outbreak, if we have to close a classroom, if we have to close a grade level, if we have to close a school, we're fully confident now that the infrastructure exists, that we'll be able to serve those hundreds of kids remotely for the 10 or 14 days that they may be in quarantine or isolation.

- To comply with the state law you have to be very careful about the language you use when vaccines or masks are even being discussed.

What sort of guidance will you offer your teachers when students are teasing each other about masks or vaccines or teachers want to offer their thoughts on science?

- We have existing governing board policy around espousing one's personal political, religious, or social beliefs, or using our positions inside of the district to espouse a particular partisan or religious belief.

And unfortunately now talking about science and talking about aspects of the pandemic that's supposed to keep everybody safe is now kind of in that category.

We're working really, really hard with our teachers and our principals right now, to practice grace and neutrality.

And to treat everybody the same.

We're gonna see some very extreme behaviors from the public on both sides as they come into our school offices.

We have folks on one side angry with us that we're not enforcing max masks for 100% of the student body, or for employees not thoroughly understanding that we can't.

And then we have folks equally angry with us that we're not banning masks and not going 100% maskless and wanting us to take Senate bill 28 98 and use it to say, not only should you not be masks optional, you should be masks banned.

Everybody needs to be maskless.

So unfortunately we're caught in the middle and the challenge is gonna have to be how we create an environment of mutual respect and tolerance around these two very, very diverse and extreme points of view around this issue.

- Yeah, interesting year ahead.

- It's gonna be very interesting.

- All right, Dr. Trujillo from Tucson Unified School District, thank you.

- Thank you, Lorraine.

Always good to be back.

- [Female] Anybody here for the COVID?

- [Lorraine] "Arizona 360" saw some of the district's efforts to vaccinate eligible students against COVID-19 at an immunization clinic at Catalina High School.

Students ages 12 and up could get the Pfizer vaccine if they wanted.

- We spent the last year, literally just stuck at home and he's been at home so much he's really tired of it.

And so I've been trying to get them vaccinated so he can get out again.

- I was nervous 'cause I'm scared of shots, but I was excited.

And I felt better knowing that I was able do this and go to school and feel safer.

- [Lorraine] The District's Family Resource Center has long hosted immunization clinics this time of year for other required shots.

(indistinct) has worked with the Pima County Health Department to also offer the COVID vaccine.

- Pre-COVID we were always doing these big events to help families.

I think right now, to me, there's a greater impact right now.

There might be some hesitancy from families from staff member, but I think if we can offer these kinds of events that kind of helps calm fears.

I think as students go back to school.

- As parents prepared to send their children back to school, we got guidance on how to encourage the best safety measures from Dr. Wassim Ballan, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Phoenix Children's.

- The message that we continue to exercise now is vaccination.

This is our most important tool at this point in the endemic.

What I can tell everybody is that the vaccine is working.

It's a very effective vaccine, no matter which one we're talking about, the main goal of the vaccine is to keep people out of the hospital.

And even if they get infected after the vaccine, to make sure that they're having a mild infection, not a severe infection.

And we've seen that happening now.

More than 99.5% of the hospitalizations recently have been in, on vaccinated people.

And we're seeing the best of teenagers too.

So that's where the emphasis should be in terms of how effective this vaccine.

The other thing that I also emphasize is the flip side of this, as people start talking about the adverse effects or the complications of the vaccine.

We've given more than 200 million doses of the vaccines in the US.

And obviously we haven't seen any significant adverse effects that would make us alarm that there should be any hesitation about taking this vaccine.

- And if you're not old enough to receive the vaccine, your recommendation is to wear masks?

- Correct.

And we're hoping that the age group that would be eligible for the vaccine is gonna change by the end of this year.

But obviously until then, and until we have the approval for the younger ages, we need to continue all of us, not just kids, continue to be the generic about the masking, hand-washing and physical distancing as possible.

- Now this is an airborne virus.

So when kids pull down their mask, when they're playing, or when they're eating, what sorts of things should they be mindful of when they do make that decision?

- So obviously we can't keep the mask on 24/7, there are gonna be situations where you need to pull down the mask.

The important things to do is to make sure that your hands are clean when you're moving the mask out of your face.

Do whatever you need to do.

If you wanna take a sip of water, pull it down and take a sip of water, put it back on and make sure that it's fitting appropriately.

And that means, it's covering both the mouth and the nose, and we want it to be fitting snugly, both sides of the face, especially now with this Delta variant, which seems to be more contagious, where there's more chance that someone was exposed to the virus for catching the virus, simply because it's a more abundant virus when it's released from the (indistinct).

- Okay.

So let's say you have a child in your office and you're trying to encourage them to wear a mask.

What do you say to them?

- So I usually use examples.

So in terms of look at us all, look how we're wearing a mask.

We were in the hospital, we work in a hospital, obviously a lot of the people who are working there, I kind of focused and they're used to those situations and we should lead by example, basically.

That's one of the important things to do because sometimes you're talking to the child, but you also see that at the same time, the parent is not completely following all the instructions about how they need to be dealing with their masks.

So that's another strategy that we also emphasize, not just to the kids, but also to the parents in terms of leading by example.

- All right, Dr. Wassim Ballan from Phoenix Children's thank you.

- Thank you very much.

(bright upbeat music) - Nationwide gun violence remains at the center of a heated debate.

One analysis from the Washington post on gunfire has killed more than 8,000 people so far this year.

In Tucson police say there has been a 63% increase in homicides over the last two years.

That includes the lives of two people in a mass shooting earlier this month, the gunman who was shot by police also died in the hospital.

This happened just weeks before Tucson police plan to resume its active killer preparedness trainings for the public.

An unfortunate coincidence that underscores the importance of those trainings.

Tony Paniagua, has more.

- [Tony Paniagua] On Sunday, July 18th two EMTs from American medical response we're parked at silver lake park in Tucson.

According to Tucson police, they were waiting to respond to a medical call when they were approached by a man who pointed to a nearby fire and then shot the EMTs.

One of them was 21 year old, Jacob Denninger, who was still fighting for his life.

Paramedic Damon Schilling as a spokesperson for the company.

- You know, he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time where something, somebody decided to take it upon themselves to do a heinous act upon some innocent people that are just here to help people within the community.

- [Tony Paniagua] Police later identified the shooter as 35-year-old, Leslie Scarlet.

He's also accused of killing or injuring several others.

- I would say in the recent years, we've seen an increase in first responder attacks throughout the country, but this is still something that's a tragedy.

It's not something that we expect is something that we definitely anticipate.

It's something that we talk about with only our employees, but it's taught in EMS schools or EMT classes across the country.

- [Tony Paniagua] The Tucson Police Department also wants residents to be prepared in the worst case scenario.

It offers a series of classes called active killer prepared as trainings.

The trainings were suspended last year due to the Coronavirus, but they are getting started once again.

And this one had been scheduled prior to the deadly attack on July 18th.

The class is mandatory for city employees with some availability for the public.

While we were not allowed to record the training.

Afterwards, we spoke to Sergeant Allen Smith who leads the class.

- We offer the Department of Homeland Security's sponsored, Run, Hide, Fight.

And that is a model of a system of techniques, if you will, to how to combat a violent encounter.

And depending on the situation that is presented to you, you have three options is run, hide, or fight.

And that's what we explained here to the folks.

- [Tony Paniagua] 30 Year old, Alex Rasmussen heard about the class on Facebook.

He spoke to his mother Rita and both agreed it was worth their time.

- I wanted to be more aware of my surroundings, where I go.

I go to a lot of music festivals.

And when the incident happened in Vegas, that was an eye opener for me.

What do we do in that situation?

And I wanna be able to get out of there alive, and I wanna be able to help others get out of their alive.

- [Tony Paniagua] One of the things they recommend as it, if you go into a store, look at all the possible exits, hiding places and so on.

Is that something you had thought about in the past?

- Not, not really.

I mean, you know, you walk in the door so you know where the door is, but do you know where a possible other door is?

And so that was, it was good to have that reminded that reminder of it.

- [Tony Paniagua] Sergeant Smith says it's a necessary conversation.

- I you don't plan ahead and if you don't think about these things, which might be admittedly uncomfortable for you at first, but if you don't think about these things ahead of time and build a plan, a personal safety plan for yourself, you could be a victim.

- [Tony Paniagua] But these attacks can surprise anyone, even professionals with the proper training, Rita Rasmussen says she was very upset by the incident on July 18th.

- Oh, it's terrible.

You know, people have forgotten that the person next to them is their neighbor, their friend, family to someone, and it's full of hate.

And it's very upsetting to me.

It's heartbreaking every day to see what's going on.

- [Officer] (indistinct) five shots fired, suspect down.

- [Tony Paniagua] The suspect, Leslie Scarlet was shot by a police officer and died three days later from his injuries.

He had a criminal history and mental health issues according to investigators.

Meanwhile, all types of emergency calls keep coming in on a daily basis.

And people like Jake Dendinger, continue to put their lives on the line.

Paramedic Damon Schilling says this case has resonated throughout the region.

- And that's one of these reasons why this is so devastating for us because it is our first experience where we've experienced this with one of our own.

We know across the country, it's been an experience for people in the ed.

So from an industry perspective, we've suffered along with our brothers and sisters across the country, but obviously this happening to us for the first time here in Tucson, or even in Arizona, it resonates a little differently.

And we really appreciate all of the love and support that comes from the community because in a time like this, that it does matter.

- That was Tony Paniagua reporting.

We'll link to fundraisers for the shooting victims and share information about the trainings with this story on azpm.org.

As for the motive on July 18th, that still isn't entirely clear, but Arizona daily star reporter Caitlin Schmidt, looked into recent events leading up to it that offer clues about the gunman's mental health, as well as an earlier encounter.

He had with Tucson police.

She joined us to discuss what she loves.

- I mean, this is really tragic turn of events all around.

We know that Leslie Scarlet had a criminal history.

He did six years in prison for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon when he was younger.

He got out in 2013, seemed to stay out of trouble, had a misdemeanor, domestic violence related conviction in 2017.

And then for all intents and purposes kind of went on with his life until January.

In January, there was a house fire across the street from where Leslie was living with his girlfriend.

And it was the house of his mother and her boyfriend, his stepfather.

We learned that that night of the fire, Leslie Scarlet came running out of his house and went running into the burning house and carried both his mother and stepfather out.

They both subsequently died.

He spent about a month in the hospital.

He was burned pretty badly, about 80% of his body.

And then things started to go down hill from there it seems like.

In March, late March, police were called to his neighborhood for reports of a man walking into front yards, yelling, fire, fire.

When they arrived, he didn't respond to officers 'cause he didn't seem to recognize that they were there.

So they attempted to detain him.

There was a brief struggle.

They got him in handcuffs and the girlfriend came out and said that he had been struggling since the death of his parents.

She believed he had some PTSD and he was taken for a mental health evaluation.

- Criminal history and mental health and then one of your recent stories featured crisis response.

So he was on somebody's radar, so to speak, but who, how closely does law enforcement work with crisis response to say, "Hey, you've got the same name, we've got a name over here et's divide and conquer some of our information."

- So not closely enough, so the police chief tells me.

And it seems that that was the problem here.

So police recognized, when they went to his house in March, they could certainly arrest him if they wanted to.

But clearly this was a man in mental health crisis.

So they took him to our local crisis response center, which is a 24 7 facility that law enforcement can drop people off for evaluations for their mental health.

But they don't know what happened to him from there because there really isn't a great communication system in place.

Police only really learn about somebody if they flag some triggers in their systems.

So if he became violent, if there were more calls for service, if they needed to call and respond to criminal activity, or if he was court ordered for treatment and refused it, which did not happen in this case.

So because Leslie Scarlet was no longer a criminal nuisance police don't really know what happened to him.

- There's a lot of your reporting that doesn't make it into the story or the headline.

Moving forward what sorts of conversations are all these agencies having to say, "We can't let this happen again."

- So there has been some discussion in the past and we're looking into it again of co-locating the crisis line, which is where people can call for welfare checks, evaluations, that sort of thing into the public safety communications department.

So that when a call comes in either to 911 or the crisis line, they can share information.

And that way the crisis line will know if they should perhaps have an officer come out and be on standby, a block away, or officers will know if they're responding to a call that actually should have a mental health specialist with them at that call perhaps instead of law enforcement.

So that's something that police chief Magnus has stressed that he really wants to move forward with.

It's the city so, you know, government moves slowly, but I open communication.

I know is something that they're hoping for.

- And are there enough people, I mean, you talk about resources and why didn't you create these intervention programs, but is there staff?

- Yeah, that's the other problem.

You know, TPD would love to be able to put social workers in patrol cars, but they don't have the funding to hire those social workers.

It's not in the city budget.

So we're really quite limited and it needs to trickle down, not just from, you know, the county or the city.

We need this to happen at the state level, we put millions of dollars into justice services, not just, not just prisons and jails, but the court system, but that funding for mental and behavioral health is just not there.

It's the same, there's not enough money to go around, same thing with education, but we're at a really critical time where I think people are starting to understand that mental health and substance use disorder is not criminal it is a public health issue and we need the funding to treat it as such.

- Okay, Caitlin Schmidt from the Arizona Daily Star, thank you for your reporting.

- Thanks.

(bright upbeat music) - The monsoon arrived in full force, making July one of the wettest and Tucson history.

Recent storms dumped more than seven inches of rain on the city.

It's a welcome surprise for experts like University of Arizona, climatologists Mike Crimmins.

We got his assessment on rain totals so far in his prediction on what's to come.

- So when we look at events like we saw last week, it's not unprecedented, they're rare.

We see them every five, 10 years.

And it usually happens right around the end of July.

So once we move into August, we're usually kind of in that humidity and we'll start to see those daily rounds of thunderstorms.

And then by the end of the month, we're starting to see the monsoon pattern really start to retreat back to the south and we get into more fall weather.

- What caused it to fall at the levels that it did here in Arizona and even New Mexico?

- Yeah, the first thing was the first ingredient was moisture, lots and lots of moisture coming up from the Gulf of California that was in place.

And then we had this upper level, low pressure system that actually moved in from the east towards the west.

That's unusual.

We usually see that in the winter time, those loads moved from west to east.

Like given where our high pressure system was, this one snuck in from the east towards the west.

That's gonna destabilize the atmosphere.

It's gonna lift a lot of moisture all at once and that rain is gonna fall out in large widespread areas.

- All right, every time you're on the show I ask, if this rainfall is going to make a dent in the drought, what do you say this time?

- This this event in particular was you couldn't have designed a better drought Buster.

I mean, and I should back up, it didn't bust the drought, but if you're working on trying to improve short-term drought conditions, this is exactly the way you do it.

It was long duration, widespread and moderate rainfall.

So it ended up putting down lots and lots of water in the soil.

So that's really gonna improve short-term drought conditions, but we really are in both short-term drought and long-term drought.

So this is just the beginning of solving that long-term drought problem.

We're gonna need to do this, a couple more, not that particular event, but just getting some rain through the rest of the season at average levels would be great.

Then we're already looking forward to the next winter.

We really need to see that kind of wintertime precipitation, snow pack of the upper elevations.

Start to work on the longer-term drop conditions across the region.

- All right.

It's time to break out that Homer's bucket and try to harvest some of the water.

Now, last time you were on the show, you were talking about wildfires.

This rainfall doesn't do anything for the Southwest when it comes to the wildfire risks that we know so well here in the desert.

- Yeah.

It pretty much shut it down.

And you know, this is what we rely on.

Wildfire management in the Southwest is the arrival of monsoon moisture.

And then the precipitation to really shut down those wildfire conditions.

And it did it, it did it early again, it did it on time and that was, that allowed a lot of resources being tied up in the Southwest to be released, to move to other parts of the west.

So they could fight fires that are erupting all across the west.

- All right.

We have a few more press releases coming from the weather service here in Tucson saying the rain is coming, won't be similar to what we have seen, but what do you predict about the coming weeks?

- Again, I'm not a climatologist.

So, we're kind of right at the peak of the monsoon activity through the first week of August, we usually get a couple more rounds of events.

There'll be some dry periods in there as well.

That's fairly normal.

And then once you get into the beginning of September, we start to the Northern hemisphere, starts to remember that fall is coming.

And so the monsoon starts to retreat.

So I'm really hopeful that we can at least get through August with a couple more good rain events, keep those rainfall totals up, and then we'll get to the end of the season with hopefully above average rainfall.

- All right.

Every drop certainly helps.

All right, Dr. Mike Crimmins from the University of Arizona, thank you.

- Thank you.

- And that's all for now.

Thanks so much for joining us.

To get in touch, visit us on social media or send an email to Arizona 360 at azpm.org and let us know what you think.

We'll see you next week.

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