As a deadly knife fight Wednesday at a Houston-area high school raised new concerns about student safety, officials said a package of laws that just took effect should soon help thwart such acts of violence.
Armed "school marshals" could begin patrolling campuses in 2014 after they complete a specialized training course -- in what officials say they believe will the first program of its kind in the United States.
Two other new laws will provide special training for school employees who are licensed to carry concealed handguns and will establish a state task force to bolster school safety measures.
"We're trying to cover schools that don't now have an officer on site or perhaps don't have enough in case something occurs," said state Rep. Jason Villalba, R-Dallas, who authored legislation creating the school marshal program. "We tried to craft a safe program so someone can be there at a school and respond immediately, rather than wait the six to eight minutes that it might take law enforcement to arrive."
House Bill 1009, the Protection of Texas Children Act, was among more than a dozen school-safety bills proposed when the Legislature convened in January.
Under the act, school employees who wish to become marshals would have to be licensed to carry a concealed weapon in Texas and would receive 80 hours of training through one of the state's 106 state-certified law enforcement training academies. School campuses could have one marshal for every 400 students.
Officials said the training, still being developed, would include a mental health evaluation, active shooter and emergency-situation training, as well as firearms proficiency.
The marshals, who would be known only to the school principal and local law enforcement, would be authorized to respond to an active shooter or other immediate life-threatening situations on school property. The program would be optional for school districts.
"Our goal is to design the best school marshal program in the United States," said Kim Vickers, executive director of the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education, the state agency that is developing the training standards and will license the new marshals.
"The biggest challenge is if you're going to put a person in a crowded school hallway with a gun, you're almost thrusting them into the same type of role as a law enforcement officer -- except when law enforcement responds to an 'active shooter,' the propensity for them to get shot will be very high," Vickers said.
That same issue was raised in an August study by the Minnesota-based Center for Homicide Research of teachers who fired guns at school from 1980 and 2012. The report suggested that the opposite was a concern, as well: "The potential for both accidental and intentional shootings in which teachers can cause lethal damage to innocent actors is apparent," the report states.
That conclusion contrasts with separate recommendations from the National Rifle Association that teachers should be properly trained and armed, as a way to have a responder at the school if gunfire broke out, rather than waiting several minutes for police to arrive.
Villalba said "middle-sized districts are taking a much more active role" than large districts in wanting marshals as soon as the program launches. And some of the larger districts, initially wary of the marshal concept, are now considering them at elementary schools. Elementaries aren't continually staffed by school police, as most larger high schools and middle schools are.
Officials in Austin and other Central Texas districts said they are waiting to see the rules before they know whether marshals would be appropriate for them.
Two other bills that became law Sunday are also designed to bolster school safety. Senate Bill 1857 by state Sen. Craig Estes, R-Wichita Falls, will allow concealed-handgun licensees to be specially trained on how to protect students, how to properly interact with police who arrive on the scene of a school shooting, tactics for denying an armed intruder entry into a classroom or school, and methods for increasing the license-holder's shooting accuracy while under stress.
Estes said earlier that the legislation was designed to increase safety in situations other than those where school marshals are present. Under current Texas law, a school district can permit employees with concealed-handgun licenses to carry weapons in schools -- a statute that has mainly been used without incident by schools in rural areas that are long distances from first responders.
Texas considered a variety of measures earlier this year to guard against a bloody attack like the one in December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., that left 20 students and six teachers dead.
While the new laws were aimed mostly at stopping shooting rampages in schools, it's unclear whether Texas' school marshal law would have had an effect on Wednesday's knife attack at Spring High School, officials there said. One student was fatally stabbed and three others were injured when a hallway confrontation escalated into a fight near the cafeteria about 7:10 a.m., authorities said.
State Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, whose district includes the high school, said the new legislation is designed to make students safer.
"Even with a marshal or a (concealed handgun license) holder or school police present at the school, you're not going to have someone right there every time something terrible happens," Patrick said. "But they can hopefully prevent it from spreading."
Copyright 2013 - Austin American-Statesman
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
