It happened again last week. Another school shooting. Twenty-one people died after an 18-year-old gunman opened fire at an elementary school in in Uvalde, Texas.

We are not going to debate gun control in this space. Congress, as yet, has been unable to reach a compromise on the issue.

We will, however, talk about the poor response and lack of communication among law enforcement that potentially could have minimized the number of students and teachers gunned down at Robb Elementary School on May 24.

Armed officers waited in a hallway at the school for nearly an hour before confronting the shooter, who was locked in a classroom with terrified young students, some of whom were frantically calling 911 and their parents for help.

Why weren’t these calls relayed to police on scene? Whose decision was it to treat the incident as a barricaded gunmen and not as an active shooter as shots continued to be fired?

Local police would not let federal agents enter as parents continued to hear gunshots. A group of Border Patrol tactical officers would later ignore local officials, engage in a shootout with the gunman and kill him. The Washington Post reported an off-duty Border Patrol tactical agent had arrived outside the classroom where the school police officers had been waiting and “basically said let’s get this done” before storming in and killing the gunman.

“It was the wrong decision (to wait),” Steven McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said at a news conference Friday.

Then officials lied about the response, saying the school’s resource officer was the first person to confront the shooter. The officer wasn’t even on campus at the time.

Officials also said the school was secure, when it later was revealed that an exterior door was propped open by a teacher, even though school policy calls for all entryways to be locked at all times.

The decision by the district’s police chief, Pete Arredondo, to wait before confronting the gunman on the belief he was barricaded inside appears to contravene federal and state guidelines, developed over two decades, that prioritize police disabling a gunman.

Preparing for mass shootings is a small part of what school police officers do. In Butler County, many school districts have engaged in ALICE training, which is an anagram for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate.

The active-shooter training sessions, which educate teachers, administrators and staff in ALICE practices, usually are led by local police who have been trained as instructors.

ALICE training goes beyond theories of the past that a teacher's sole action in the event of an active shooter should be to lock the door and hide students.

School employees engage with police in active shooter drills during ALICE training.

The training includes methods to safely evacuate students and how best to confront or take down a shooter to decrease the number of casualties.

Conrad Pfeifer, now the executive director at Quality EMS in Adams Township, first held ALICE training at the Mars Area School District in 2014 as a Middlesex Township police officer.

The Justice Department announced Sunday that it will conduct a review of the law enforcement response to the shooting. But what will that accomplish?

Sadly, this won’t be the last time one of our schools is attacked. But we need to be better prepared and make intelligent decisions when it happens again.

The response by local law enforcement was inexcusable. Lying about it made it worse.

— JGG