San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Plans for armed teachers halted
A San Antonio school district that sparked loud and bitter debate last year over its consideration of arming teachers and staff as a security measure has shelved the idea for now, its superintendent said.
Trustees in East Central Independent School District had put off a vote on the Guardian Plan, one of the state’s options for school districts to set rules and training requirements for employees who volunteer to carry guns, until after the legislative session.
Having listened to the community opposition, board members decided not to renew the conversation “at this time,” Superintendent Roland Toscano said.
“The board’s position on that is there’s nothing off the table when it comes to considerations for enhancing student safety and staff safety,” Toscano said. “They’re not going to say that we’re never going to do it — we’re open to continuing the discussion — but they’re not interested in talking about it right now.”
The district will hold on to its research for implementing such a plan in case it comes up again, he said. District officials had studied the infrastructure, insurance, training and administrative requirements for implementing the Guardian Plan even before it first appeared on a board meeting agenda in November.
Word that the plan was on hold came too late for Gabe Barrientez and his wife, who live in East Central ISD and decided to enroll their daughter in kindergarten outside the district because of their opposition to the plan.
“Short term, this is a victory,” he said. “Hopefully it can stay this way.”
The backlash had been unlike anything Toscano had ever seen in East Central, where he went to school and later started his career as a teacher in 1997.
“Once upon a time, people felt unsafe if there were cameras, they felt unsafe if people had to show their ID to get in, they felt unsafe if there were police cars. Now people don’t feel safe if those things don’t exist,” he said. “I’m afraid that someday people will feel unsafe unless they believe there are people who can protect them who are secretly carrying firearms.”
Toscano has said arming teachers was only the last, and hopefully the least necessary, of a long list of security measures the district has put in place, including an emphasis on student mental health and a pioneering program called EC Cares to train all employees to recognize student trauma and stress and know how to get them help.
But the district had not communicated the gun idea effectively to parents, he admitted, vowing to be more upfront if the discussion renews.
Barrientez said the lack of communication partly fueled the decision to enroll his daughter at
Young Women’s Leadership Academy in San Antonio ISD.
“I feel like this got thrown on us. If the district was more open about it, it would’ve been a better process,” he said. “There definitely needs to be more involvement if this is recurring, like a town hall discussion. They need to get the information out there and invite parents to be more involved.”
The state’s Guardian Plan allows the district to decide the amount of training necessary for designated school employees to carry firearms. Another option is to accept a set of rigorous requirements for training employees as school marshals.
Most school districts that opt for either plan are in rural areas and do not have campus police. None are in Bexar County, and some local school boards have passed resolutions ruling it out.
“San Antonio ISD published a resolution saying that they were not going to arm teachers, and I would love to see all the other districts follow suit,” said Michelle Rodriguez, an East Central parent who helped start ECISD Families United in the wake of the gun debate. “It would be great for East Central to do the same.”
The group calls for more communication from the district regardless of where parents stand on arming employees, but Rodriguez said it will “continue to monitor and oppose teachers and staff being armed in our schools.” Rodriguez said she herself is now also active in the national gun violence prevention organization Moms Demand Action.
“There is no data proving that arming teachers saves lives, there’s only data that proves that introducing more guns in an environment increases gun violence,” she said.
Parents involved in last year’s debate became hesitant to voice their opinions publicly. Some said a clear majority favored the proposal but stayed silent to avoid being exposed to scorn in news or social media. Some opponents said they didn’t want their neighbors in a mostly conservative rural area to know about their aversion to guns in schools. Folk on both sides asked for anonymity in interviews.
“I feel that one of the benefits of East Central is that it is a small community and it’s a great thing that so many people know each other, but also because of it, sometimes people don’t want to talk about certain issues,” Rodriguez said. “That might be the reason it’s not so widely talked about, because so many people live and work and send their kids in the district. There’s some intertwining.”
Board President Steve Bryant said he didn’t know if or when the Guardian Plan might come up again but stressed the district’s other security efforts, including its work to harden school entrances and extend the hours of police officers at its campuses.
“Safety is extremely important in our community, and we’ll do whatever is best for our students,” Bryant said.
East Central ISD has had a police presence on campuses for more than 20 years. The officers are armed and present on every campus.
“We have very significantly reliable safety management structures in place, many of which are uncommon,” Toscano said. “That’s what we should be proud of in our community, that our students and our families are very comfortable to include our police department.”
The board’s willingness to explore the Guardian Plan, he said, stemmed from the realization that even a short lag in response time can cost lives and by the sheer size of the high school, which Toscano described as “humongous.”
When the board started talking about the Guardian Plan, it also discussed the importance of training staff to provide emergency first aid to keep wounded victims alive in the event of a mass shooting, he said.
The district held training last year called Stop the Bleed, a national campaign initiated by the U.S. Homeland Security Department.
This month’s Walmart shooting in El Paso has put a renewed focus on possible legislative responses, though Gov. Greg Abbott said lawmakers, prompted by the Santa Fe High School shooting in May 2018, this year considered “the best ways to keep students safe and to prevent incidents like that from happening again.”
New laws include Senate Bill 11, which allots money for school districts to make campuses safer, requires improved evaluation of students’ mental health and mandates more staff training, including making sure substitute teachers are prepared for emergencies.
Toscano said East Central expects to receive about $90,000 from the School Safety Allotment and plans to use it to fund police officers at every campus during school hours.
HB 1387 doubled the number of school marshals allowable per campus. Previously, schools were limited to one marshal per 200 students on campus. Now schools can assign one marshal per 100 students.
“We’re doing more than ever before to keep students safe at school,” Abbott said.