Twenty-seven girls and counselors died at Camp Mystic on July 4, 2025. One eight-year-old girl's body has never been recovered. Her name was Cile Steward. Her parents are in a courtroom right now fighting to preserve the physical evidence of what happened to her before the camp rebuilds and destroys it.

And Camp Mystic is planning to reopen this summer.

In two days of testimony, the camp's directors described a failure at every level of preparation and response. The camp director was asleep when a National Weather Service flood warning was sent and did not see the text. He said he believed the alert should have been louder. His wife, the camp director in charge of nursing, testified that she knew the property, knew the flood lines, and knew the access points, and acknowledged under oath that she abandoned the first-year campers who needed her help. The camp's evacuation plan, required by state law, could not be produced. One attorney told the court that the command given to campers was to stay in their cabins, and that command killed 27 children.

The deaths were not reported to Texas health regulators within the mandated 24 hours, as required by state code. Mary Liz Eastland said she did not think of the requirement in the moments after the flood. Texas law requires it regardless.

These are not ambiguous failures. They are documented, admitted, and legally significant. They are also the reason Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has written to the Department of State Health Services asking it to deny any camp license to Camp Mystic or any operation run by the same operators until all criminal, legislative, and regulatory investigations are complete and necessary corrective actions have been taken. That is the right call. Texas regulators must follow it.

But this cannot end with one camp. The gaps that Camp Mystic's disaster exposed exist across Texas summer camps statewide. Emergency alerts that come as regular texts while camp directors sleep are not sufficient warning systems for facilities responsible for hundreds of children. Evacuation plans that cannot be produced in a courtroom are not real evacuation plans. Death reporting requirements that go unfollowed without consequence are not real requirements.

Every parent who sends a child to a Texas summer camp this summer deserves to know that the facility has a documented, tested evacuation plan, a mandatory emergency alert protocol that cannot be slept through, and a legal obligation to report any death within 24 hours that carries real penalties for non-compliance. Right now, the Camp Mystic disaster has shown that none of those guarantees exist in any meaningful way.

Sign this petition to demand Texas regulators deny any operating license to Camp Mystic or its operators until all investigations are complete, require all Texas summer camps to maintain documented and tested evacuation plans with mandatory emergency alert systems, and enforce strict penalties for failure to report camper deaths within the legally required timeframe.