Texas Governor Greg Abbott has called for the “weekly inspection of doors” to prevent school shootings, following the killing of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
He directed school security and education officials in the state to begin doing “in-person, unannounced, random intruder detection audits on school districts” to find weaknesses and how quickly they can get inside a school without being stopped.
Mr Abbott sent a letter to school security officials to make sure that emergency plans are in place and that school buildings are safe.
“The State must work beyond writing words on paper and ensuring that the laws are being followed; it must also ensure that a culture of constant vigilance is engrained in every campus and in every school district employee across the state,” he said in his letter to Texas School Safety Center director Kathy Martinez-Prather.
Both advocates and lawmakers pushed back on the suggestion that officials enter schools unannounced to see if they will be stopped.
Texas State Teachers Association spokesperson Clay Robison told The Texas Tribune that someone doing an unannounced drill could be seen as a real threat and be attacked.
“If it really does mean breaking into a school, it could be an accident waiting to happen,” he said.
Mr Robison said that Mr Abbott’s suggestions are “just another way to avoid addressing the issue of doing something about too many guns in the hands of the wrong people”.
Association of Texas Professional Educators executive director Shannon Holmes told the paper that “it’s a recipe for an accident if there is not some coordination between the local campus or ISD and whoever’s conducting the audit”.
Democratic State Representative Diego Bernal tweeted that “so you want grown men to show up to schools unannounced and try as hard as they can to find a way in? This is a terrible idea”.
“This is a new, enhanced level of audits,” Abbott spokesperson Renae Eze told The Tribune. “Until now, the [Texas School Safety Center] has been conducting reviews of school districts’ emergency operations plans, following the passage of SB 11 in 2019. This is an audit of the implementation of those plans, specifically targeted to access control procedures.”
A Texas School Safety Center toolkit for school districts to audit their own security plans and practices states that staff should be unaware when an assessment is taking place and that it should be unannounced.
“It is highly suggested that a member of the law enforcement jurisdiction and a district level administrator be notified of the assessment in the event someone calls in from the school, facility, district, or community in response to the intruder,” the toolkit says.
“I’m directing the Texas Education Agency to ensure schools are held to heightened safety standards following the tragedy in Uvalde,” Mr Abbott tweeted on Thursday.
He added that he “requested TEA to identify actions to make campuses more secure, conduct weekly inspections of doors” and increase the presence of “trained officers”.
