"Texas lawmakers quietly passed a sweeping mandate for school safety measures, including a requirement to post an armed security officer at every school and provide mental health training for certain district employees."
This is not a perfect solution. Not that there is one. But since no one wants to solve the mental health problem, this is better than hoping that no crazy person goes on a rampage.
My wife taught at a charter school until recently and it was gratifying to have a former Marine, former deputy sheriff as campus security. We talked guns a bit one evening and I felt good having her there to protect my wife and grandkids.
Texas has over 1000 independent school districts. It has been legal for at least a couple decades for the school board to authorize staff (or anyone else for that matter) who has a carry license to be armed on campus.
ReplyDeleteWell over 30% of the ISD’s have done so, with Harrold ISD being the grandaddy of them all. They almost all use what’s called the “guardian program”, which is a grassroots-designed program to train staff to respond to an active shooter type situation.
Uvalde was not one of these schools.
Pretty much all of the schools in this category are smaller rural independent school districts. The left-wing Industrial Education Complex does a lot of pearl clutching about this, but Big Ed also has control of the large schools with large budgets in the large cities that can afford actual police departments on campus or can pay for full time officers from the city police departments.
According to the article you linked having an armed security officer on campus can be fulfilled by a regular staff member being armed, so I guess the 300+ smaller ISDs can keep their programs. Given that the state is going to provide only $15,000 of an estimated $80,000 annual bill for a paid armed security officer, I’m guessing that most of them will stick with the current plan.