Feature, Not Bug

Since Texas launched its school marshal program in 2013, just 84 school districts out of over 1,200 have armed school staff. Educators say the program’s lack of popularity shows that teachers don’t want to be the ones to defend schools from mass shootings. https://t.co/LVW7ChfKgx

— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) June 7, 2022

The legislation empowers school districts to identify employees with a license to carry a firearm to volunteer as school protectors. Those individuals would undergo an 80-hour training and psychological exam, granting them access to a gun on campus. It is otherwise against federal law to have a firearm in a school zone.

But since the bill’s passage into law in 2013, just 84 school districts have opted into the program, a sliver of the more than 1,200 school districts across the state. Of those districts, only 361 people have ever become a licensed school marshal across a state that has 9,000 campuses and more than 369,000 public school teachers.

Now, as Texas grapples with the Uvalde school shooting in which 19 children and two teachers were killed by an 18-year-old gunman wielding two assault rifles, state leaders are again pointing to the school marshal program as a way to improve school security.

Last week, Gov. Greg Abbott sent a letter to Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath urging him to find ways to encourage more school districts to increase the number of school marshals and other law enforcement officers on school grounds.

“In the wake of this devastating crime, we must redouble our efforts to ensure that our schools provide a safe and secure environment for the children of Texas,” Abbott wrote.

Translating that last sentence from the original weasel speak:  "We must redouble our efforts to find ways to blame the teachers!"

“If we have a school marshal program already and districts are not taking advantage of it, maybe it makes more sense to figure out why districts don’t want to do that rather than push another opportunity,” said Jayne Serna, a veteran Austin-area secondary school teacher who now teaches at Austin Community College.

Pre-kindergarten teacher Michelle Cardenas says safety is one reason she is not interested.

“I don’t want a gun around my students,” she said. “We already have to pay for our own professional development and our own school supplies. There’s no money, but yet they’re going to find money to train and arm teachers?”

But Villalba, who is no longer in the Legislature, blamed the low participation on the state’s decision not to allocate funding for the marshal program to help districts purchase the firearms or provide stipends to marshals. He also said the state did not properly educate districts that the option was available.

“I’m heartsick that we haven’t implemented this plan in a more robust fashion,” he told The Texas Tribune. “Unfortunately, it takes a catalyst like Uvalde and Santa Fe before action is taken. Hopefully this will be a moment when the state decides to mandate a program and provide necessary funding to pay for it.”

What?  Texas implements a program telling teachers what to do and then doesn't pay for it?  I've never heard of such a thing!  And who doesn't want a gun in a classroom full of kindergarteners?  What could go wrong?  (Imagine a teacher frantically trying to corral her children and protect them while also getting her gun out of the gun safe and removing the trigger lock and loading it so she can shoot somebody whose weapon fires through the cinderblock walls of her classroom at the rate of 30 bullets a second.  Yeah, that's a safe scenario!)

Or we can blame TCOLE!

TCOLE, the agency that both oversees the school marshal program and provides training for it, is legally prohibited from releasing the names of the districts that have school marshals. Only a parent can make a written request to their child’s school to find out if there is a marshal on campus.

Instead, the agency releases the number of school districts that have a marshal. When the program began, schools could have one marshal for every 200 students. Between 2013 and 2017, the state expanded the program to allow public junior colleges and private schools to utilize school marshals.

Yet at the start of the 2017 school year, only 21 school districts were employing a total of 32 marshals.

A few months later, 26 people were killed in a church in Sutherland Springs. Six months after that, eight students and two teachers were shot and killed in a high school in Santa Fe.

By the start of the 2018 school year, the number of school districts with at least one school marshal inched up slightly to 39.

No, wait, it gets better!

As lawmakers convened in Austin in 2019, Abbott included increasing the number of marshals among his recommendations to improve school security.

That same year, state lawmakers eliminated the cap on the number of marshals a school district could appoint at a single school.

By fall 2020, the number of districts had risen slightly to 58, yet the number of individual marshals had jumped 73% from 138 marshals to 239.

Zeph Capo, president of the Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, said the incremental increases make it clear that it has very limited appeal. 

So, 238 marshals over 58 districts, or roughly 4 per district.  Out of 1200 districts.  Clearly the problem doesn't lie with the solution!

“Nothing has changed,” he said. “As a matter of fact, it continues to become a solid position that educators don’t want to take responsibility for being police officers or take on responsibility to deal with the other 364 days that they have loaded weapons in a classroom with 30 children.”

Kathy Martinez-Prather, director of the Texas School Safety Center, said she often hears from districts that the 80-hour training and other required steps can be arduous for teachers to maintain on top of the myriad other responsibilities they have in and out of the classroom. School marshals must renew their license every two years. 

Nothing has changed:  people who have no clue what the classroom is like, want to add more stressors to the classroom, put more burdens on teachers, and don't understand why that doesn't work.  So they blame the teachers; or the school districts; anything but accept that these solutions arsn't solutions.  These are the same people perplexed that teachers are quitting at record rates, and new teachers aren't coming along in record numbers to replace them

The beatings will continue until morale improves!

And of course, there's the basic problem of identifying the bad guy with a gun, v. the good guy with a gun:

“When an officer shows up to the school and there’s a shooting, and you have a firearm, they’re not going to ask you if you’re a guardian,” Martinez-Prather said she tells school districts. “They’re there to neutralize the threat.”

Everybody on campus may know Mr. Hughes the history teacher, and that he's the guy packing heat in case of a shooter threat.  But do the cops responding know that? 

Aaron Phillips teaches first grade in the Amarillo Independent School District in the Texas Panhandle, which he called a more “firearm-friendly” area of Texas. It’s unclear if Amarillo ISD has a school marshal or guardian program, but board policy does allow teachers and staff to keep a firearm in their vehicles.

He said he thinks people’s positive opinions about programs like arming teachers are based on “feelings” rather than reality.

“I think it makes people feel like, ‘Oh, we’re safe because there’s a gun on campus,’ without any accounting of the fact that this actually happens,” he said. “If we’re going to be next, then there’s zero reaction time and the absolutely worst happens so quickly that you have no time to go unlock your gun and stop the number of lives from being lost.” 

Frankly, the shooter in Uvalde was locked into a classroom until Border Patrol breached it and shot him.  Yes, he killed (or tried to; there were survivors, no thanks to police response) everyone in the room, but he had the firepower to do that in about 10 seconds.  What teacher is going to retrieve their gun and stop the shooter in that space of time, especially if the shooter is already locked into a classroom? (and what teacher is dangerous and foolish enough to carry a rifle or a pistol on their hip all day?)

“Armed school personnel would have needed to be in the exact same spot in the school as the shooter to significantly reduce this level of trauma,” the researchers wrote. “Ten seconds is too fast to stop a school shooter with a semiautomatic firearm when the armed school guard is in another place in the school.” 

The problem is, everyone imagines it's an action movie, where the good guy's guns always prevail over the bad guy's guns, especially in the third act.  And we're always in the third act, right?

For Phillips, the broad calls from Texas Republicans to increase school security in the wake of the Uvalde shooting is a “cop out.”

“It allows politicians to say, ‘we’re doing something even though they’re really not doing anything and ignore all the real solutions in favor of just lip service,” he said.

Don't expect any more than that, or you'll be disappointed and frustrated.  Maybe even mad enough to shoot somebody.