A Texas school superintendent who left a gun in a school bathroom has resigned, according to the district’s board of trustees.
Former Rising Star Independent School District Superintendent Robby Stuteville’s handgun was found by a third grader after he accidentally left it in a restroom stall, a mistake he didn't discover for 15 minutes.
By then, the student had already notified his teacher.
Stuteville’s resignation comes over a month after the January incident at Rising Star Elementary School and following a backlash from parents of students at the school, both over the misplaced firearm and how the situation was handled.
When the student told his teacher about the dangerous discovery, the teacher sent another student to go back into the restroom with him to “go and be sure that’s what he found.” When the gun was determined to be real, “they went straight to the superintendent’s office,” interim superintendent Monty Jones told NBC News.
Jones added that at no point did the students ever touch the gun, and that the teacher who sent the children back into the bathroom, who has not been identified, has been “talked to” by a campus administrator, but parents are still understandably upset.
“So the teacher asked another kid, my son… ‘Can you go see if it’s a real gun?’ Why would you send a kid? Why not send someone else?” Giovanni Mata told KRBC. “If this was your kid in that situation, I’m sure you would act completely different… You can’t say that was a mistake to leave a gun there. You can’t mistake a life.”
As for his predecessor, Jones said Stuteville “took a lot of pride in his job, and it was an accident that happened and he felt extremely bad about it.”
“He just didn’t feel like it was a situation to where he could carry on without further distractions,” Jones added. “No one to my knowledge called for his resignation. And the board certainly did not. We were very supportive, and we were trying to work through it.”
Stuteville had previously lauded the students for handling the situation correctly.
“This is one of those examples of guns in schools,” Stuteville told KTAB when the incident originally came to light. “Regardless of who takes responsibility, they are a considerable danger, and one should school their child to be on the lookout for any unusual placement of a weapon or anything out of place.”
Both Stuteville and Jones began openly carrying guns on school grounds as a response to recent school shootings after undergoing a week’s worth of training that included proper gun usage an “how to de-escalate a situation,” Jones told NBC News, adding that parents and staff were aware that both were armed on campus.
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