Texas was supposed to make schools safer to stop another shooting like Uvalde

Texas supposedly was better prepared to stop something like Uvalde.

A raft of laws created in the wake of the May 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting asked schools to be more proactive in identifying potential threats and in providing mental health resources. State leaders gave districts more money for security and demanded better planning and training if someone did arrive on a campus with a weapon.

Upon their signing, Gov. Greg Abbott said that the bills addressed “not only the tragedy that took place at Santa Fe but will do more than Texas has ever done to make schools safer places for our students, for our educators, for our parents and families.”

At first light, those laws appear to have made little impact at Robb Elementary, now the site of the deadliest school shooting in state history. On Tuesday, two days before the end of Uvalde’s school year, an 18-year-old gained access to the campus and killed at least 19 students and two adults.

“A person who is willing to die for their cause, it’s hard to do anything but attempt to diminish how much damage they can cause,” said Craig Miller, a school safety consultant and former Dallas ISD chief of police.

While the changes to school security were many in the aftermath of Santa Fe, there was one area where state lawmakers were silent: gun laws.

In a country awash with guns and a powerful gun lobby, Texas’ leaders have long touted their fealty to the Second Amendment. And Tuesday’s shooting — much like four other mass shootings in the state in the past five years — did little to sway them from that devotion.

“We already have laws against killing people, and this guy apparently didn’t care what the law was,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said on Newsmax. “Having a gun law that told him not to have gun, I don’t think would’ve stopped any of this.”

School safety improvements

Following the Uvalde tragedy, local officials tried to reassure families, sending out letters detailing safety measures.

Richardson ISD administrators stressed that they have campus-specific security plans and train for different scenarios. In Arlington ISD, each elementary school has a secured entrance, administrators have partnerships with police and students can report safety concerns anonymously through an app.

“We know that preparing for emergencies is a job that will never be finished,” wrote AISD Superintendent Marcelo Cavazos in a districtwide email.

Some districts, including Plano and Keller, will have an increased police presence throughout the rest of the week. School officials ask parents to alert campus counselors or other professionals of any changes in their children’s behavior that may seem extreme.

Many campuses stepped up security efforts following a 2019 overhaul of school safety by Texas lawmakers.

Dallas ISD trustee Edwin Flores said that nearly every school system in Texas currently has approved emergency operation plans on the books. Flores was appointed by Abbott to the 17-member board of directors for the Texas School Safety Center, which is tasked with reviewing such plans and helping schools identify best practices.

“Safety and security of kids is paramount,” Flores said. “To the best of our abilities, we should provide the resources and training to ensure the safety of students to the greatest extent possible.”

A few weeks after the Santa Fe shooting — where a 17-year-old junior opened fire on his classmates in the Houston suburb, killing 10 and injuring 13 more — Abbott set off on a roundtable tour to talk with families and educators about school safety.

His staff drafted a 40-page list of recommendations, “distilling those strategies into solutions, solutions that will make our schools and our state a safer place,” Abbott said as he unveiled his plans at a May 2018 press conference at Dallas ISD headquarters.

Many of the recommendations eventually made their way into policy through Senate Bill 11.

Texas now gives an annual per-student allotment for school safety, designed to help districts fund the purchases of new equipment, training and other programs around safety and security. Districts must adopt a multihazard emergency operations plan, which would be included in a safety and security audit that would be submitted to the Texas School Safety Center for review.

The commissioner of education was tasked with establishing building standards to “provide a secure and safe environment” — while a separate piece of legislation gave $100 million in grants for schools to harden campuses.

Emergency training is required of all district employees, including substitute teachers.

And, perhaps most significantly, school systems had to create threat assessment teams for each of their campuses, tasked with identifying students who make threats of violence and providing guidance on possible interventions for those students.

It’s unclear at this point whether the attacker in Uvalde had been identified by the school district as someone who was a potential threat.

The school district, which has 4,100 students, spends about $435,000 a year on security and monitoring services. It received $69,141 in grant funding for hardening facilities and spent 70% of those funds as of May 2022, according to a report from the Texas Education Agency.

Other bills added mental health training as a mandatory part of teacher continuing education, required districts to provide “bleeding control stations” — essentially battlefield tourniquets — in accessible locations on campuses and removed the cap on the maximum number of school employees who could participate in the “school marshals” program.

Gun safety and red flags

Abbott’s initial list of recommendations was relatively thin in dealing with gun safety. The draft included five items that peripherally addressed the issue, including:

• Requiring mandatory reporting for lost or stolen guns;
• Asking Senate and House leaders to issue an interim charge “to consider the merits of adopting a red flag law allowing law enforcement, a family member, school employee, or a district attorney to file a petition seeking the removal of firearms from a potentially dangerous person, only after legal due process is provided”;
• Modify the existing firearm storage law, requiring parents to secure firearms for those younger than 18;
• And creating a 48-hour timeline for protective orders and information from mental health adjudications to be available to the federal firearms reporting database, shortening the existing 30-day process.

But many of those recommendations were discarded. A bill requiring that gun owners report lost or stolen weapons was left pending in committee. And as for red flag legislation, Abbott said at the end of the session that he didn’t believe such a change would be necessary “right now” in the state.

“We think the best approach is what we passed in the combination of these bills,” he said at the time.

Two years later, the Legislature aggressively targeted several gun safety protections, most notably removing background check and training requirements to allow for permitless carry of handguns in public.

“You could say that I signed into law today some laws that protect gun rights, but today, I signed documents that instill freedom in the Lone Star State,” Abbott said last year at a signing of seven of those bills.

Tuesday’s response from Republican leaders — including U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Paxton — did not signal a shift in direction.

State Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-Dallas, coauthored unsuccessful red flag law bills in 2019 and 2021.

He said it was “a sickening irony” that the Legislature dialed back training and background check requirements while failing to enact other safety measures, such as red flag laws.

“I don’t expect aggressive gun safety laws,” Johnson said. “But I would expect legislators to send a cultural message other than fear and violence and a warped sense of what freedom means. I would expect them — my colleagues — to recognize that no amount of school fortification and arming citizens will obviate the need to prevent, when and where we can, acts of violence before they happen.”

A catalyst for change?

Miller, the school safety consultant, said the Uvalde shooting could be yet another catalyst for change, much like other landmark school shootings such as Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland and Santa Fe.

“We will find out what happened, and what we can do better,” he said.

Before Sandy Hook, for example, DISD had only eight elementary schools that had buzzer systems for school entry, Miller said. The district subsequently received millions in funding to make improvements.

“It really spearheaded us to make improvements that we needed to make, but it took a horrific incident to take place,” Miller said.

Even so, there’s a limit to what schools can feasibly do, he added.

After Parkland, Florida lawmakers passed legislation requiring sworn law enforcement officers to be stationed in every school in the state — something that would be “practically impossible” in Texas, Miller said.

He pointed to Florida’s struggles as proof. For example, Palm Beach County School District had a shortage of 70 officers as of March. And even if each school had an officer, end-of-the-year activities would likely pull them away to help at secondary and middle campuses, Miller said.

As Texas officials reflect on what safety measures were and were not in place, many educators are expressing frustration and the desire for stronger action to keep children safe.

“Yesterday’s horrific news has shattered us all,” Fort Worth schools superintendent Kent Scribner wrote on Facebook. “First there is the grief. But it’s quickly followed by anger and outrage. When will we have the courage to take necessary action to prevent another senseless tragedy?”

Staff writers Valeria Olivares and Allie Morris contributed to this report.

The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.

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