New safety measures are already being installed at the Mesquite school where a student brought a gun Monday.
Police officers were dispatched about 8:50 a.m. for a 16-year-old student reported to be holding a gun in the office of the Pioneer Technology and Arts Academy campus in Mesquite. Police said school administrators attempted to keep the student calm until police arrived. When police arrived and were negotiating with the student, three officers fired shots at him. He suffered a wound to his leg before he complied and was taken into custody.
Nineteen shots were fired by officers, police said Tuesday, and the teen holding the gun did not fire his weapon. No other students were injured.
Related:Officers fired 19 shots at student who brought gun to Mesquite school; student didn’t fire
The school announced Monday night in a news release that students would return to campus for a regular school day on Tuesday and that counselors would be on-site to speak with students for three days.
The release also stated several steps would be taken to “harden” the school and increase safety, including adding metal detectors and surveillance cameras, securing entry points, and providing additional training to staff. It is not clear what this additional training would entail. An additional news release clarified the metal detectors were being installed Tuesday.
District staff did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding how these strategies were chosen.
A news release mentioned the presence of an armed security guard on the campus, but it is not clear what role they played during the gun incident. A new Texas law that took effect in September requires schools to have some type of armed personnel on campus.
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Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said he would recommend the addition of a school resource officer. He said these officers have specific training and abilities that armed security guards do not, including potentially speeding up police response time and being specifically trained in de-escalation.
Canady also cautioned against adding metal detectors without a rigorous plan for their implementation. He said for the detectors to be effective, schools must identify one or two primary points of entry and secure all others. It also requires community education about the importance of not leaving doors propped open and designated personnel to maintain and operate the metal detectors all day long.
“You can very easily create a false sense of security,” he said. “Every solution has a bit of a problem to it that we have to overcome and think about.”
While some have previously questioned the absence of metal detectors in Dallas-Fort Worth area schools, including after a 2021 shooting at an Arlington high school, others have argued it’s not a viable option because of the layout of certain campuses and time involved in screening each student.
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Efforts to harden schools across the state increased following deadly shootings in Santa Fe in 2018 and Uvalde in 2022, among others. These pushes have come with some financial support from the state but have primarily placed the burden on local districts to make costly upgrades to campuses.
Despite instituting expensive new safety requirements for schools during the legislative session, lawmakers allocated just $10 per student for security measures, which is below what many districts asked for. Lawmakers set aside an additional $15,000 per campus and millions in grant funding.
School-hardening tactics also may not be effective, according to one study. Research published in 2019 by James H. Price and Jagdish Khubchandani did not find any empirical evidence that school hardening decreased gun violence. The strategies they reviewed included school resource officers, metal detectors and locker searches.
“School officials should not give in to political pressures to ‘do something’ when that ‘something’ is likely to be ineffective and wasteful of limited school resources,” they wrote.
Staff writer Talia Richman contributed to this report.