SECURITY: Area schools on edge after new threats

Campuses across Greater Houston opened on heightened alert Monday following last week’s shooting at Santa Fe High School, with several local districts dispatching additional police officers to schools and seven districts reporting gun-related incidents or threats of violence involving students.

In public statements and letters to parents, education leaders pledged extra vigilance in the final weeks of the school year and emphasized their intentions to conduct longterm reviews of their campus safety plans, seeking to avoid a recurrence of

massacres that have marred the 2017-18 school year. In at least four small school districts, including a neighbor to Santa Fe ISD, officials announced plans to crack down on backpacks and dress codes in an effort to reduce hiding places for weapons.

Students detained

Meanwhile, safety officials in two districts, Clear Creek and Huffman ISDs, detained students who brought guns to school Monday, though neither student caused injuries or threatened violence. In addition, a student at Eastside Elementary in Cleveland ISD showed classmates a realistic plastic replica of a Beretta 9mm semi-automatic pistol, complete with an operational “red dot” laser beneath the barrel. Officials at YES Prep West in Sharpstown, Crosby High School, La Marque High School in Texas City ISD and Friendswood Jr. High reported threats were made to their campuses, as well.

The events illustrate how districts remain on edge after eight students and two adults were gunned down Friday at Santa Fe High School, about 30 miles southeast of downtown Houston, in the nation’s deadliest oncampus shooting since February. Several district leaders said Monday that the Santa Fe shooting again has spotlighted the need for enhanced security to deter, minimize and stop mass casualty events.

“Any time there’s a new event, it always causes a pause to look at the layers you have in place: Are they appropriate? Can they be better? Are they working or are they not working?” said Joel Hannemann, executive director of safety and security in 6,000-student Friendswood ISD, which added a second police officer and designated a campus monitor at its two secondary campuses Monday.

Officials in the seven districts that experienced gun-related threats Monday each put their security protocols into action.

In Clear Creek, which borders Santa Fe ISD, administrators reported that a student was taken into custody after he brought an unloaded gun with him to League City Intermediate. In Huffman, located about 30 miles northeast of Houston, district leaders said a Hargrave High School student possessed a weapon in his backpack that he intended to use to hurt himself.

“There’s no indication at this time that he intended to harm anyone else,” Huffman ISD spokeswoman Shirley Dupree said.

Across the region, education officials unveiled short-term measures designed to reduce threats of violence.

Several districts pledged extra police and school resource officers, including Alief, Katy, Pasadena and Pearland ISDs. At Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, the region’s secondlargest district, Superintendent Mark Henry issued a ban on “trench coats or other heavy clothing that could potentially conceal weapons.” In Dickinson ISD, an 11,000student district that borders Santa Fe ISD’s eastern edge, administrators ordered students to leave backpacks at home for the remainder of the week.

At the same time, districts continued to re-evaluate their security plans and emphasized their ongoing reviews of facility safety measures.

Since the shooting, several high-profile elected officials, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, have called for metal detectors to be installed in local schools.

Two local school districts, Aldine and Spring ISDs, have been using metal detectors in some of their schools for years. Spring ISD began checking high schoolers’ backpacks and using scanners and hand wands after a student brought a knife to Spring High School in 2013, killing one classmate and stabbing three others.

Aldine ISD Assistant Superintendent for Administration Ken Knippel said the northern Houston district installed metal detectors at Nimitz High School’s ninth grade campus after several students brought weapons to school in 2005, including guns. Detectors came to all Aldine ISD high school campuses in the 20052006 school year, and now are in entrances at all intermediate, junior high and high schools.

Knippel said the little resistance he encountered after the metal detectors were first installed has been replaced with requests for more scanning.

“In this day and time, I get no feedback about ‘why do we have metal detectors, we don’t want them,’” Knippel said. “It’s parents saying ‘make sure you’re using them.’”

Beefing up checkpoints

Campus building designs also have been a focus of districts’ security plans following recent mass shootings. Houston ISD officials have said they want to add new security checkpoints, similar to ATM vestibules, at about 250 of the district’s 284 schools. Aldine ISD did the same to its campuses, and Humble ISD is in the process of outfitting most of its campuses with the safety stop points.

Humble ISD Superintendent Elizabeth Fagen has made school security a priority after two students in her former Colorado school district were arrested for planning a mass shooting in 2015. Their plans were thwarted after a text message was sent to the state’s anonymous tip line, established after the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School.

“It was shocking, and scary, but at the same time I was very glad that the strategies we had in place allowed us to disrupt that threat. That’s the right outcome,” Fagen said. “As time has gone on, we’ve learned from every single incident, and we try to turn around and put as much as we can to work as quickly as possible.”

After Fagen’s arrival in Humble in 2016, the district unveiled iHELP, a phone application that allows students to report concerns and threats anonymously. They added security to Kingwood High School’s entrance while renovating the flooded campus after Hurricane Harvey. Part of the district’s recently approved $575 million bond will be spent expanding the district’s police station, buying security cameras, adding security measures to school entrances and updating its crisis communications system, Fagen said.

Fagen also discussed “hardening” school campuses by designing them to be more difficult for outsiders to access.

“The idea is you want to create the most difficult time for an intruder to get to where your students are and create most time for first responders to arrive,” Fagen said.

Architecture reviews

Joe McKenna, associate director of research and education for the Texas School Safety Center, said districts often focus on responding to active shooters, primarily through drills with staff, but campus architecture has become a common point of discussion. In Friendswood, for example, district leaders have hired an architecture firm to review safety at their six campuses, which range in age from eight to 50 years old.

“It’s a tough question because every community, every building is going to be different, but at least these conversations are happening,” McKenna said. “Access control is certainly something they should be considering, ensuring our campuses allow in only the people who should be.”

Law enforcement authorities have not disclosed many details about Friday’s massacre, leaving it unclear whether additional security measures could have preempted the attack. Investigators said the accused shooter, 17year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis, brought a shotgun and revolver into Santa Fe High School while wearing a trench coat and opened fire. It took police officers four minutes to engage Pagourtzis from the moment he started shooting, Galveston County Sheriff Henry Trochesset said Monday.