HARTFORD -- The shooting in Parkland, Florida is on the mind of Fran Rabinowitz, the Executive Director of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents.
"Superintendents and teachers are angry," said Rabinowitz. "We're going beyond the grieving piece now and we're saying, so what is it that America needs to do to change this?"
Rabinowitz said there are already several measures in place to keep schools safe, including classroom doors that lock but can be opened from the inside, and code words teachers can use to immediately communicate with office staff in an emergency. But she wants to see a ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons, better background checks, and an upgrade in mental health services.
She said teachers are well-trained in mental health, but there aren't enough of them.
"The thing is, in most school systems, there just aren't enough mental health professionals," said Rabinowitz.
Parents we spoke to were shaken by what happened, but confident that the schools were doing as much as possible to keep their children safe.
"It's definitely pretty scary," said West Hartford dad Harris Schwartz. "I mean, you send your kids to school thinking they're going to be safe, and you find out that that's not always the case."
"I saw a Facebook post about a teacher who's cleaning out her closet in her classroom, just in case," said West Hartford mom Elizabeth Hall. Hall's sixth-grade daughter said they practice lockdown drills monthly.
"I know the schools do as much as they possibly can," said Hall. "Somethings, you just can't protect against."