The Headlines: May 24

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history in a school. There were 19 children dead and two teachers. In the last year, I've been staying in touch with the families of these horrible tragedies. And parents and the family members of the 21 victims still don't know really what happened. The families have been going to city hall meetings, school board meetings, demanding answers.

And at times, the meetings have been pretty contentious.

At a school board meeting earlier this month, there was an uncle of one of the victims, Jesse Rizzo. And his frustration really echoes what many people are saying in Dubaldi, especially the parents of the children. He told the school board, the family members still don't know what happened inside. They know that the police waited for more than an hour to breach the classrooms and confront the gunman. But they don't know how many kids could have been saved if the police went in sooner.

The school administrators really haven't responded to the family's concerns. They pretty much just sat in the school board meetings and tried to explain that there are several investigations that are ongoing, and therefore, they cannot give them any answers, which obviously frustrates the families even more. There are three concurring investigations being conducted in Dubaldi. The most prominent one, and the one that people are really looking to, is the one by the Dubaldi County district attorney. She will look into if any of the officers should be charged for the local police response.

There's an investigation by the Department of Justice into similar matters. And also, the city of Dubaldi has hired an investigator and is working closely with the district attorney. And all the investigators said that's just a time-consuming process.

I was in Dubaldi just a few days ago. And when you arrive to Dubaldi, I mean, you can't escape the history of the tragedy. There are murals of the victims downtown. There's 21 crosses at a plaza at the center of town. But when you talk to people, you start to realize that tensions kind of go beyond the school board meetings.

Some people are asking in hushed tones if the memorial should go away, the one that put the tragedy behind them. There's also incidents where people approach the officials quietly and whisper, you know, when? is it time for us to clean the memorials and kind of go back to our old identity? And the families, of course, they want to keep those memorials and murals there forever.

Here's what else we're covering. The U.S. Surgeon General issued an urgent warning Tuesday about the dangers of social media. In a 19-page report, Dr. Vivek Murthy said social media presents a profound risk of harm for children and teens.

He said the country is in the midst of a youth mental health crisis, and he's concerned social media could be an important driver of that crisis.

To actually enforce age minimums, for example, it would mean companies being really mindful of developing social media platforms that aren't, you know, promoting endless scrolling or the like button, or things that can be really developmentally tricky for tweens and teens. And in my conversation with him, he also really emphasized that the burden has fallen disproportionately on families to sort of navigate this on their own, and that that should not be the case anymore.

So we sifted through hundreds of pages of transcripts, listened to recordings of these calls, dug through meeting notes, and got an insight into how this new network of activist groups are looking to shape election law in the United States. And what we're seeing is efforts to change voting for the long haul, for things that will continue to impact elections for years to come. Some of the priorities that have been listed by this group include ending same-day voter registration or shortening early voting periods.

We obtained a recording of a recent conference call with activists in Michigan, where Cleta Mitchell, who is an attorney who has worked in the 2020 election to help President Trump try and overturn the results, she told the group, quote, I think you have to figure out what we have to do, where to fix the system that gives a Republican candidate a potential chance to win. So it's becoming increasingly clear that the Republican-led push to add new restrictive laws and change America's voting systems is going to persist. And, as numerous nonpartisan election groups have told us, these election laws are going to be law in time for next year's presidential election, and they're going to change how our elections are run.

Those are the headlines. I'm Annie Correale. We'll be back tomorrow.