El Paso schools scrambling to hire armed officers to boost safety

Jun 04, 2023

Over one year after 19 children and two adults were murdered at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas — America's third deadliest school shooting — Texas legislators passed House Bill 3, a state law aimed at improving school security by requiring armed guards on every public school campus and improving mental health measures for students.

HB 3, passed June 14, goes into effect Sept. 1, giving school districts time to expand their security measures or propose viable alternative safety plans.

The El Paso Times met with parents, teachers, administrators and school police officers to gauge their reactions, to better understand the law's nuances and to track compliance with HB 3 in El Paso County's three largest school districts — El Paso, Socorro and Ysleta — as the 2023-2024 school year begins.

El Paso Independent School District is the largest in West Texas, operating 76 campuses with roughly 50,000 students. EPISD also maintains its own police force with 44 officers.

To make up the difference between the 76 campuses and 44 officers, Chief of Police Manuel Chavira explained, the district's police department partners with the El Paso Police Department "to hire their off-duty officers to work at our campuses."

Before the Uvalde shooting in 2022, Chavira's department only stationed its officers at EPISD high schools and middle schools. Elementary schools did not consistently have an armed guard present, a gap in the district's safety protocols that the shooting at Robb Elementary School tragically brought to light.

For the entire 2022-2023 school year, off-duty city police were stationed in EPISD elementary schools throughout the school day. This practice will continue for the upcoming academic year, Chavira said, and El Paso ISD police will continue to serve in high and middle schools.

As Chavira put it, EPISD has effectively been compliant with the armed guard provisions of HB 3 even before the bill existed. "It looks like the legislators were thinking along the same lines," he added with a chuckle. "Now it's a mandate."

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Of the three largest school districts in El Paso County, only Socorro ISD maintains a police force of 72 officers, more than large enough to cover its 51 campuses. Unlike most other districts across the county, it does not need to compete to hire off-duty municipal police.

SISD "had the foresight to add to our police department over the last few years," Superintendent Nate Carman said, and has been preemptively compliant with the armed guard portion of HB 3 since last year.

As of August, Ysleta ISD is not compliant with the armed guard requirement of HB 3. The county's third-largest school district does not have its own police force and is struggling to hire off-duty city police.

Lynly Leeper, the chief financial and operational officer of the district, pointed out that YISD was seeking a "good cause exception," but she did not elaborate on the details of the alternative plan it would need to propose to the state.

Explaining the district's failure to comply with HB 3, Leeper cited a nationwide shortage of law enforcement officers. Public school districts, she explained, simply cannot compete with retail stores offering more money to off-duty city officers. Chavira noted similar concerns for EPISD, but claimed to have found a successful sales pitch: "Your kids are going to our schools, why don't you work your part-time gig at our place?"

In a July 2022 interview with CBS4, Ysleta ISD Superintendent Xavier De La Torre announced his desire to put a proposal to build a district police force before the school board "by September, October at the latest."

This move would have put YISD on equal footing with its peer districts in the county. Since then, however, De La Torre's administration "decided not to move forward in recommending this to the board," Leeper said, once again citing the shortage of eligible candidates for law enforcement positions and budgetary concerns.

While it is unclear if YISD will become compliant with HB 3 and what its alternative plan consists of, Leeper affirmed that "the safety of students and staff is our foremost priority."

School safety is not simply having an armed guard present, but also "providing a safe and secure environment" in terms of campus design and architecture, as Chavira put it. Directives from the state require districts to update older campuses to stricter safety standards, like funneling visitors to a single controlled entrance.

"The average age of our campuses is over 50 years old," Chavira noted. Grand, historic buildings like El Paso High School, established in 1916, were built in "more naïve times" and will need significant updates to face safety challenges that new campuses are already designed to handle.

In this age of school shootings, older campuses — with multiple entrances, outdated classroom doors and limited camera surveillance — require "rewiring, replumbing, changing the door strikers, the doorknobs," Chavira explained.

Even in newer schools, many of the campus upgrades are invisible. "You can't see a lot of the changes," said Carman. He spoke of "hardening" entrances and adding cameras and "bullet-resistant window film on some of our windows."

"Those type of things are very expensive" and time consuming. While House Bill 3 dedicates an extra $15,000 per campus for safety upgrades, Chavira added, "we need more."

Even with armed guards and hardened entrances, "it is terrifying to send my kids to school every day," admitted Myndi Luevanos, a mother of four students in El Paso. Her fear, born out of an unfathomable number of mass shootings in Texas and the United States, is shared by parents across the country.

"I tell them I love them, in case it's the last thing they hear from me," she admitted. "Every morning."

Although Luevanos is somewhat reassured by the presence of an armed guard in her children's schools, she is still "especially upset that Texas lawmakers aren't doing enough."

Luevanos — a founding member of the El Paso chapter of Moms Demand Action, a gun safety activist group — supports "common sense gun laws," such as raising the age to buy semi-automatic weapons from 18 to 21 in Texas.

Despite calls from the families of victims in the Uvalde shooting for similar gun control measures — and despite the fact that the Uvalde murderer purchased his weapons just days after turning 18 — Texas Republicans are resistant to make changes to state gun policy.

Just one day after the Uvalde shooting, Gov. Greg Abbott claimed that gun restrictions were "not a real solution" to mass shootings, instead pushing the armed guard and mental health provisions that would eventually become HB 3.

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In the year between Abbott's comments after the Uvalde shooting and the passage of the HB 3 , Texas politicians from both parties worked earnestly on solidifying new school security measures into law.

In a statement sent to the El Paso Times, state Sen. César Blanco, D-El Paso, noted his support for HB 3, which he sponsored.

The law, Blanco wrote, "does not take a cookie-cutter approach, and instead gives local districts the flexibility to determine what type of security personnel they will have, if any."

Blanco added, however, that HB 3 was "only one step in the right direction."

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School administrators in El Paso tend to agree. Representatives from all three large school districts brought up the minuscule increase in safety funding per student that came with HB 3, from $9.72 to $10. Only 28 more cents, as Carman put it, "doesn't go very far."

Blanco's statement added that "the Legislature has failed to adequately address the easy access to guns," citing the issues with Texas firearm policy that concern activists and parents like Luevanos and that state Republicans are loath to reform.

In spite of political resistance, Blanco promised to "advocate for universal background checks, red-flag laws, raising the age and curbing access to war-like assault rifles."

"Gun safety is school safety," he added.

Although school security policy is decided in Austin, this tense political discourse from lawmakers, activists and administrators often obscures the actual role that armed officers play in schools in communities like El Paso.

To better understand how HB 3 works in El Paso schools, the El Paso Times spent a morning with two SISD police officers, Rebecca Calvillo and Rigo Aguilar, as they went about their duties at Montwood High School.

The work of a school police officer is psychologically demanding. As Aguilar put it, "it's a calling" to serve in schools, where the threat of shootings is a daily reality officers can never ignore.

But with large portions of their day spent filling out paperwork in an office without air conditioning behind the school's gym, much of the officers' day-to-day work is — thankfully — less dramatic than the debates around school shootings and HB 3 suggest.

During passing time between classes, Calvillo and Aguilar coordinated with school security officers — who are not armed and do not have the same authority as police — to keep hallways clear of clumps of students. The officers and guards were friendly with students, offering fist bumps and politely reminding lingerers to head to class.

"I like your haircut," Calvillo said to a young student walking with a security guard. The high schooler beamed back at her and was escorted off to his in-school suspension. "We're not out to get them," Calvillo explained.

While duty may be mundane and even friendly at times, Aguilar is quick to dispel the "misconception" that school police officers "just do school stuff" and are not real police. Both he and Calvillo attended police academy as any other officer would and share jurisdiction with city and county departments.

Often, Calvillo and Aguilar collaborate with other police departments in surrounding neighborhoods to deal with traffic stops or robberies, just as officers from other departments would be called in to help at schools in the event of an emergency.

Although SISD has set a goal of having two police officers and four security guards on every high school campus, the officers' duties can still be overwhelming. Just three days after the officers showed the El Paso Times around the school, Montwood was evacuated because of a bomb threat.

"God no," Calvillo quickly answered when asked if two officers and four security guards was sufficient. With a matter as sensitive and volatile as school security, there is always more to be done.

The political pressure and abject trauma of school shootings rests heavily on educators, too.

Jennifer Galindo, an award-winning educator in El Paso public schools, remembered going through a campus lockdown when one student stabbed another at a nearby high school in SISD.

Her students "started crying, like something hysterical," she recalled. "I just felt that fear off them, and at that point, I knew, if something were to happen ... I had to be willing to put my life on the line for those kids."

"It's a selfless feeling," Galindo added. "Scary and selfless."

HB 3 is in part designed to alleviate this fear and burden from teachers — and "it's actually working out," said Ross Moore, president of EPISD's American Federation of Teachers, a union which represents school employees.

With an armed guard in the building, teachers, who are already responsible for passive security measures such as making sure classroom doors are closed and locked throughout the day, can focus on instructing students.

If a district is not compliant with the armed guard requirements of HB 3, however, Texas legislators allow for districts to seek a "good cause exception" and develop an alternative safety plan. One alternative that the new law sketches out is arming teachers themselves.

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Moore, a veteran who speaks about security matters with the authority of his experience, is fundamentally opposed to weapons in the classroom. "Arming teachers is a no-go," he asserted.

"What happens when the first responders walk in and see a grown-up with a gun in his hand or her hand?" he asked. "The instinct is, shoot first, figure it out later."

So far, no district in El Paso has agreed to arm teachers. To a large degree, Moore explained, decisions like these come down to "the politics of the district." For districts in more rural and conservative parts of the state — especially those with less access to off-duty police officers — arming staff is now a sanctioned option under state law.

In El Paso, the consensus is that police and teachers each have their own demanding duties that require time, focus and specialized training.

"We want teachers concentrating on students and the success of students, and we don't want them to have to also carry a gun and try to perform those duties as well," Chavira said. "We have a police department that will do that."