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What happens to school buildings after mass shootings? · Apple News Today

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  Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Thursday, June 2nd. I'm Shumita Basu. This is "Apple News Today." Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news, and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
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  Another deadly mass shooting, this time in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Four people were killed by a gunman carrying a rifle and a handgun at a medical facility yesterday. The shooter is also dead, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot, according to Tulsa police.
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  In the days immediately after a mass shooting, we often have more questions than we do have answers. In Uvalde, Texas, one of those questions is what should happen to Robb Elementary School?
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  People in the community have different answers. One Democratic state senator representing Uvalde, Roland Gutierrez, has asked the federal government for funds to demolish the existing school and rebuild it. He told one local TV anchor that children are too afraid to walk back into the building.
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  Roland Gutierrez: I can't tell you how many little children that I've talked to that don't want to go back into that building.
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  News Anchor: Yes, of course.
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  Gutierrez: They're just traumatized. They're just destroyed.
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  [END KSAT ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  But there are others who think that Robb Elementary is an important symbol of the community's culture. The town is predominantly Mexican American. The school opened during a time where Mexican Americans were segregated from white residents. And we're not talking about that long ago. This was in the 1960s.
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  This isn't the first time a community has struggled with what should happen to a school building after a mass shooting.
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  In Parkland, Florida, where 17 students were killed in a 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, that school building is closed, but still standing. Classes currently take place in a new building, one that has enhanced safety features, that was allocated about $25 million from the state.
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  Then there's the Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, where a shooter killed 26 people, most of them kids, in 2012. The town wasn't sure what to do with the school building, so they put it to a vote. Ultimately, residents voted to tear down that building the following year.
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  And more than 20 years after the shooting at Columbine High School, that building still stands today. And kids go to school there. A few years ago, there was a proposal to tear it down and build a new school, but the town ultimately dropped those plans. For residents, that discussion was emotional and painful. Some survivors and their families said the building holds important memories. For them, it's a place they go to pay their respects to the lives that were lost.
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  One of Silicon Valley's most successful, and controversial, leaders is stepping down. Sheryl Sandberg announced she's leaving her role as Chief Operating Officer of Meta, Facebook's parent company. She'll continue to serve on the board.
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  "The Wall Street Journal," they describe Sandberg as the person who helped transform it from a company that started in Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room to one worth more than 500 billion dollars. She built its advertising business and shaped its internal operations. She was often referred to as the "adult in the room."
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  Sandberg is also the author of "Lean In," a book that she wrote nearly a decade ago about how to succeed as a woman business leader. That book launched a TED Talk, and really a whole movement.
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  Sheryl Sandberg: Don't leave before you leave. Stay in. Keep your foot on the gas pedal until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child, and then make your decisions.
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  [END TED ARCHIVAL CLIP]
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  "Lean In" also launched Sandberg to a new level of prominence.
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  But as Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have faced more scrutiny in recent years, so has Sandberg. The company has been under fire for allowing misinformation to run rampant, particularly in the lead-up to the 2016 election. Sandberg ran the company's policy division at the time, and she testified before Congress about election interference.
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  In 2018, "The Wall Street Journal" reported that Zuckerberg and Sandberg had a falling out of sorts over Cambridge Analytica. That's the political research firm that improperly got access to Facebook's user data. Facebook was ultimately fined in the U.K. for violating privacy law. Here is Sandberg speaking on "PBS NewsHour" in 2018.
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  Sheryl Sandberg: Well, we made big mistakes and we know that. And I think it really is that we were very focused on social experiences and pretty idealistic, that we believed in a world where people could share and experience things together. And we just weren't thinking enough about the bad use cases. And that's on us.
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  The "Journal" describes her role after 2018 as largely identifying and preventing future security blow-ups, a job that some called, "complex, expensive, and thankless." As for why Sandberg is leaving now, she's reportedly told people in private she's just burned out. She's tired of being blamed for Facebook's missteps. Publicly though, she says she's planning to focus on her foundation and women's issues.
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  Operation Fly Formula is what the White House is calling their recent efforts to solve the baby formula shortage. Yesterday, President Biden announced the United States would be flying in new shipments of formula from Europe. He's also invoked the Defense Production Act to speed up domestic production. And he met with formula manufactures to talk about how to get shelves stocked as soon as possible.
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  To understand just how dire the crisis is, "The Dallas Morning News" recently followed one mother around for a day as she searched for formula. Sarah Brooke is a retired and disabled Army veteran. She's also a new mom to a six-month-old. On this particular day, she spent seven hours going store to store, searching across 122 miles.
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  Sarah Brooke: I'm stressed. [SNIFFLES] My formula's not even the hardest one to find, so I feel bad for other moms.
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  In a lot of the stores she walked into, it's the same story: empty shelves.
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  Sarah Brooke: Two weeks ago, I went to 15 different stores and I got four bottles. And one bottle will last him a day to a day and a half.
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  Part of what makes Brooke's situation so challenging is that her newborn son has dietary issues.
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  Sarah Brooke: And we found out he had a dairy protein allergy, so we switched formulas. We had to switch to Nutramigen, which was working great. And then the formula shortage happened and we can't find it anywhere, so I switched him onto a soy-based one. So he had a horrible reaction to that and went to the hospital again, spent three days admitted, and then we just got home last week.
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  Another complication: Brooke is enrolled in a federal aid program to cover the cost of formula, so she's limited to a handful of formula brands. But these days, if she finds a close-enough formula, she's willing to pay out-of-pocket.
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  "The Dallas Morning News" described Brooke's journey as just grueling. Finally, at her tenth stop, she finds something that her son can eat on the bottom shelf of a grocery store.
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  Sarah Brooke: So at least he's good now for a week. [CHUCKLES]
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  Tens of thousands of parents are in similar situations, driving from store to store, seriously worrying about how to feed their child their next meal. Some are rationing formula. Others are trying to make it at home, something that doctors and experts do not recommend. The national formula supply is expected to normalize sometime in the next few months.
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  The NBA finals get underway tonight. It's a faceoff between basketball legends from the Golden State Warriors and some of the league's youngest and most promising superstars on the Boston Celtics.
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  Apple News editor Erik Malinowski is a longtime basketball reporter. His book "Betaball" chronicled the transformation of the Golden State Warriors from a punchline into an NBA powerhouse. He told us the fact that the Warriors have even made it this far may be a surprise to some fans.
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  Erik Malinowski: Most people watching the NBA thought that perhaps this dynasty was over. The Warriors had a couple of really bad seasons. They had the worst record in the NBA two years ago. They've had a lot of injuries to their major superstars, like Steph Curry and Klay Thompson.
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  But this year, they've turned all of that around. Klay Thompson came back mid-season. Steph Curry seems like he's in his prime. The team is now headed to the NBA Finals for the sixth time in eight seasons. The last team to do that was the Chicago Bulls back in the '90s with Michael Jordan on their roster.
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  Malinowski: This is a team that knows how to get to the mountain top. It has been, yes, a few years since they've been able to do it, but this is a team that is certainly peaking at the right time.
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  On the other side, you have the Boston Celtics. They've got some of the league's best young talent.
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  Malinowski: They have Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown. They have Robert Williams, memorably nicknamed "Time Lord." They have guys like Derrick White and Payton Pritchard and Al Horford. This is a team that has played some really, really tough playoff matchups. They just took the Miami Heat, who were the number one seed in the Eastern Conference. They just took them to seven games, played a game seven in Miami, and won that game. So this is a team that is coming in battle tested.
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  If the Celtics win, it would be the 18th championship in the team's history, making them the most decorated franchise in the history of the sport. Now, Malinowski didn't want to give any predictions, but he said he wouldn't be surprised if the finals go the distance.
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  Malinowski: These are two teams that are gonna be pretty much going at max strength and, you know, whether the Warriors experience or the Celtics youth movement wins out, hopefully for NBA fans, it's going to be a long and interesting ride these next couple weeks.
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  If you want to read more before tonight's tip-off, our sports editors recommend a piece from "The Ringer" that answers three big questions ahead of the finals, like: could this be the first time Steph Curry wins Finals MVP?
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  You can find that, and all the stories that we talked about today, on the Apple News app. And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News+ partners. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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