Today we’d like to introduce you to Michelle Radice.
Hi Michelle, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
It wasn’t one moment. It was a string of them, and each one took away a place I’d assumed my kids were safe.
Robb Elementary in Uvalde broke something open. On May 24, 2022, those parents dropped their kids off that morning and never got them back. It was in Texas, close to home, and I had a two-year-old and a baby only a few months old. Matthew McConaughey, a man from Uvalde who this state loves, lobbied lawmakers to no avail. If someone with his profile couldn’t make an impact, who could? After the usual posts of “thoughts and prayers” stopped and the story was out of the news cycle, like most people, I went back to my life.
Then there was the shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, March 27, 2023. My husband and I had actually been talking about private school, because in my head, these big shootings were happening at public schools. Now, at a private school, a shooter fired through the glass front doors with a rifle and walked in the second they shattered. The assumption that there was still a safe option for my kids to go to school was gone.
In early 2024 I started taking meetings around Lago Vista: the superintendent, the police chief, the mayor, the school board president, the PTO president at LV Elementary, principals. I’d been laid off, saw kindergarten approaching for my oldest, and I didn’t know what else to do with what I was feeling. I wanted to understand how the money worked: who controls it, where it goes, where the gaps are. What I found was discouraging. The districts are tapped out, and under Texas’s Robin Hood system a share of our own property taxes leaves to fund other districts. The money to make our schools safer mostly isn’t there.
On August 14, 2025, my oldest started kindergarten. I walked him under the “Welcome to Kindergarten” sign and in through those doors, and it felt like I’d left a piece of myself inside. Then the math hit me. Thirteen years of worrying about whether or not he’d come home from school. And he’s the first of my three boys. I can’t spend that long just hoping and praying my kids come home. What a miserable way to live.
Two weeks later, August 27, a shooter opened fire on children during morning Mass at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis. I went to Catholic school from kindergarten through sixth grade and sat in those same pews every week. That could have been me. Any of my classmates. On September 10 there was another one, Evergreen High School in Colorado.
As these atrocities piled up and the government continued to sit on its hands, that’s when “someone has to do something” turned into “I have to do something.” I stopped waiting for a roadmap and decided I’d figure it out as I went. A few weeks later I had my EIN, September 17, 2025. Safe American Schools was real.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Nothing about it has been smooth. I built this while I was laid off, with three little boys at home and no idea how a nonprofit actually works. Nobody hands you a roadmap. You figure it out or you don’t.
The first stretch was all meetings and homework — sitting down with the superintendent, the police chief, the mayor, the principals, the PTO, just to learn how school funding works before I tried to change any of it. The answer was discouraging: the districts are at capacity, and the money to harden a school mostly isn’t there.
So we started with what we could do. Then came the first thing I could point to. I sat down with the principal at Lago Vista Elementary and asked what the school still needed, and the gap was camera coverage. The PTO had funds set aside, so I made the case to put about $16,000 of it toward the cameras that were missing, and got them tied into the Lago Vista Police Department’s dispatch feed, so dispatch can watch the campus in real time. In November of 2025, we had our first fundraiser at the Lucky Rabbit in Jonestown; we raffled off items and the Lucky Rabbit gave us a percentage of everything sold that day. We’re in the midst of planning our next fundraiser in the fall, with the aim of making it 10x bigger.
We’re still early. Right now, we’re getting loud enough for the right people to find us.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Safe American Schools is a parent-founded, Texas-based 501(c)(3) with one job: make schools hard targets so all of our kids come home safe.
You can’t carry a gun into an airport or a stadium, but we let people walk them into our kids’ schools. The technology to stop that already exists. We’re just not using it to protect our children.
We don’t lobby. We leave the politics to the politicians (who aren’t doing anything about the problem anyway) and go straight to the school districts. We help concerned parents and school administrators identify the physical security gaps, determine the costs, and help acquire funding. We don’t leave until the school is safer than we found it.
We’re a team of working parents who got tired of waiting: teachers, mental health advocates, and moms who want better for their kids. I don’t have a nonprofit background or a playbook. I’m a Project Manager and a mom in Lago Vista who kept watching the news and decided that waiting for someone else to figure this out wasn’t an option.
Two things I want every parent to hear. First, the technology to keep your kids safe at school already exists. This is solvable right now. Second, nobody is going to fix it for you. So if you’re done waiting, partner with Safe American Schools, and we’ll take care of it together.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.safeamericanschools.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/safeamericanschools/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61584814403207
