A suspect fleeing an attempted armed robbery scaled the fence of a North East Independent School District elementary school Wednesday morning while fleeing from San Antonio Police Department officers, sending the school into a brief lockdown before being quickly arrested.
One of the district’s non-police security specialists spotted the intruder and flagged him down almost immediately, according to district superintendent Sean Maika, who recounted the episode before the Senate Public Education Committee hours after it happened.
“This person jumped our fence, came into our school grounds,” he said, adding that the specialist flagged down SAPD officers who were in pursuit and North East Police Department officers, who made an arrest before he “even got close to the school.”
The coordinated effort between the safety specialist and the two police departments was touted as a success by Maika, who said the program has been effective since the district put in place in response to House Bill 3.
That law requires every campus in the state to have an armed peace officer on campus – but a shortage of qualified officers and funding has led to 52% of school districts adopting “good cause exceptions” to the requirement, instead implementing alternative plans, according to a Texas Education Agency official who also testified Wednesday.
Those plans include hiring armed guards, arming teachers, or hiring trained school safety specialists like the ones in NEISD, who are armed and highly trained but are not commissioned peace officers and do not replicate the duties of the police department.
NEISD recruited 46 former military personnel and other qualified candidates for the safety specialist positions in addition to their already existing police department.
Despite the success, Maika told lawmakers that there have been obstacles complicating the training for specialists, which were added to bolster coverage at the district’s 70 schools.
A shortage of psychologists in the state of Texas, for example, made it difficult to ensure every candidate had an evaluation before being selected for the role.
“Part of what I explained to my board is we were not going to equip anyone with a gun in our schools without going through a psychological evaluation,” he said. “We actually had to contract with a psychologist out of Florida to do it.”
Specialists also went through Guardian training, which is to “train and evaluate educators to carry defensive handguns on school campuses.” The training requires a law enforcement officer to be trained first in order to give the training to others.
The process to get that initial training was lengthy before a TEA security official stepped in to help out, Maika said, and even after the initial training was done, the training for specialists was limited to six people at a time.
Maika asked lawmakers to look into streamlining the process, “because those types of requirements are slowing me down to getting somebody in every one of my schools … protecting our students and my staff.”
NEISD received around $1.6 million to implement the programs associated with HB3, and spent closer to $2.4, Maika said — underscoring the need for more funding as lawmakers return to Austin for another legislative session in January.
Wednesday’s incident and testimony come as false threats continue to disrupt schools across the region just one month into the new school year.
But while the threats facing schools are pressing, Maika told lawmakers that the specialists are there to provide a sense of security to students across the district at all times.
“One of these gentlemen is a former Marine, he is about 6’ 4 and looks like a lineman,” he said. “He is in an elementary school, and one day I was watching him walk a 6-year-old little baby girl down to the nurse’s station … and there is zero fear in that young lady.”
