ALLEN, Texas — School districts in Texas must put someone armed with a gun on every campus this year, per new state law.
Allen ISD board members voted Monday to comply with the requirement by hiring a private security firm, L&P Global.
“This protocol, this program, has to be built, because it’s the first,” Brent Benningfield, Allen ISD’s assistant superintendent of operations, said at Monday’s meeting.
Benningfield told board members there’s already an armed police officer, or school resource officer, at secondary schools in the district. But there aren’t enough police officers, he said, to put one on the remaining seventeen elementary and early childhood campuses.
To comply with new state law, he proposed hiring L&P and said those armed guards will cost the district close to $700,000. Grant money from the state, he said, will cover about half of that.
So, the district staff will have to try to get permission to reallocate state or even federal funds to make up the rest.
“If there’s not a possibility, there’s also the possibility of a budget amendment,” he said.
Each guard, he said, will patrol just a single school for the year to avoid rotation.
Benningfield also said the guards, while well trained, will not have the same authority a police officer would.
"As a matter of fact, that’s why we want to talk to principals as soon as possible," Benningfield said.
"To help distinguish for them the difference and what things you still would need to call police or PD for, versus what things are strictly security matters," he added.