Abbott plans to ‘harden schools’: police, metal detectors, controlled entrances
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has announced new measures to improve safety at schools including boosting police presence, arming more school personnel, adding metal detectors, and monitoring social media for potential threats.
Speaking on Wednesday morning at the Dallas school district headquarters, Abbott revealed details of his new “School and Firearms Safety Action Plan,” a roughly 40-page document featuring some 40 policy actions.
Abbott’s directives include “adding schools to regular law enforcement patrols,” and starting a program to provide police with break rooms or office space at schools where they can fill out paperwork so that “if an active shooter situation arises there will be law enforcement personnel already there to respond.”
The state is providing matching grants of up to $10,000 per campus for this purpose, he said. Abbott also wants to add more “school marshals” — armed school personnel. Training and funding to support the practice will be offered by the state to local school districts, though the program will not be mandated: “We understand that some schools may choose not to adopt it.”
“My plan prioritizes the hiring of retired or off-duty law enforcement officers or military veterans who are already trained in the safe use of firearms.”
The governor’s policy announcement comes less than two weeks after a high school student in Santa Fe massacred eight fellow students and two teachers using two firearms legally owned by his father. Thirteen others were wounded in the school shooting near Houston. Abbott’s policy plan has been informed by three recent roundtables that he held with survivors of that shooting as well as last year’s mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs.
Other “school hardening strategies” in the Texas governor’s plan include metal detectors, reducing the number of entrances at schools, controlling exits, and installing “active shooter alarm systems,” which would work separately and differently from fire alarm systems.
“The confusion is dangerous,” Abbott stressed, noting that the fire alarm was a factor during the recent Santa Fe shooting.
‘The Twitter program’
The governor’s plan also includes support for mental health measures, such as a Texas Tech initiative known colloquially as ‘the Twitter program’ and used already at ten school districts. The program uses social media monitoring to identify students who may pose a threat to others.
“My recommendation includes that Texas provide $20 million dollars to expand this program even further eventually making it a statewide program.”
“It seems that after every one of these mass shootings there were warning signs that appeared on social media,” Abbott said. During a question-and-answer period with reporters the governor repeatedly stressed the ‘Twitter program’ as an immediately actionable element of his plan.
Along these same lines, the governor disclosed plans to develop a software application called iWatchTexas to enable students to anonymously report suspicious activity by other students, as well as an operation to monitor social media, which would be run by the state rather than local school districts.
Legislative proposals
Another Abbott recommendation is for the Texas legislature to pass a law laying out a method by which law enforcement can take away the firearms of someone deemed to be dangerous, albeit only after due process.
“I will never allow Second Amendment rights to be infringed,” Abbott stressed, before calling for some modest new gun control measures to help keep guns away from children and criminals.
One such measure is changing the definition of a child to include those who are aged 17, so that it will be harder for older high school students to access guns. Under current Texas law, safe storage requirements only apply to parents of children younger than 17.
This change would require legislative action. But Abbott said he would not support a plan for mandatory purchase of gunlocks but rather wanted to offer gunlocks to Texans free of charge.
An estimated $120 million of funding for Abbott’s plan initially will come from existing federal grants and Texas agency budgets for this year. But the governor said that in the longer term the Texas legislature and federal government need to step in to implement all of his recommendations.
Abbott wants elements of his plan in place before the start of the next school year, especially the deployment of more police in schools. Yet he did not describe his plan as final and definitive, saying it was a “starting point, not an ending place.”
Dallas School District Superintendent Michael Hinojosa spoke too, saying, “Schools should be safe. No parent should ever have to worry about sending their child to school to worry about what’s going to happen.”
Abbott challenger responds
Responding to Abbott’s proposals in a statement, Democratic governor candidate Lupe Valdez said, “the move by the Governor falls woefully short and includes ideas that will only make matters work… it is astounding how few of Governor Abbott’s proposals directly address gun violence.” She did not elaborate her criticisms more specifically, however, instead saying she would lay out her own plan in coming days.
Valdez did praise elements of the governor’s plan including boosting mental health counseling. On her campaign website, Valdez describes herself as a supporter of the Second Amendment but a believer in the need for more ‘common sense measures’ like universal background checks for gun buyers and closing a so-called boyfriend loophole.
