DALLAS — It’s not just parents, students and districts scrambling to get ready for a new school year.
Texas security companies, like L & P Global Security in Dallas, are also ramping up ahead of a September 1 start date for a new state law that requires an armed person at every school campus.
“This has been a battle," said L&P Global’s Director of Operations Charlie Hollis on this week's episode of our Y'all-itics podcast. "It's like the war room, you know what I mean? There's eraser boards and papers and people running all over the place. And it's not that we can't fill it. We're very dedicated... it's hard because you end up rejecting when you need a body. But that body doesn't fit, and we end up rejecting it."
The firm has been contacted by multiple school districts looking for armed guards, even though the districts are only getting $15,000 of state funding for each campus.
Because the state money doesn’t cover the full cost, Hollis said there has been a flurry of negotiating lately.
"You got to go to the school board," he told the Jasons on this week's podcast. "They're talking about dollars and cents."
Hollis is aware that there are also a lot of dollars and cents at stake for companies like the one for which he works. He says that providing school guards for Texas campuses is "absolutely" becoming a booming industry unto itself.
Districts are already trying to figure out how they will cobble together the needed funds. Some will have to come up with millions more than their state allotment to pay for the mandated officers. And, even if they have the money, Hollis said it is still a challenge to hire enough guards to meet demand with the deadline approaching.
"There's an assumption that they can just say, 'OK, we're good, pack them in,'" Hollis said. "We have to vet them."
The requirements under the recently passed House Bill 3 are a response to the May 2022 massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas where a gunman entered the school and started shooting, and 19 young students and two teachers were killed as hundreds of law enforcement officers staged outside the affected classrooms, hesitating to go in and confront the shooter.
About an hour after the shooting began, law enforcement finally did enter the classroom, and they killed the mass shooter. But their response has been derided as a chaotic and disjointed abject failure.
Some parents and lawmakers are frustrated that post-Uvalde efforts to put in place gun restrictions didn’t succeed in the legislature. And some opponents of HB 3 worry that introducing more guns -- through an armed person on each campus -- makes schools less safe, not more.
But Hollis sees it like this: "I am a parent for a kid in elementary school. I want someone there with a gun on site. I don't want to have to wait for them to show up... There is a time frame between the call to dispatch, dispatch disseminating information to the troops and the troops getting there. So, you're talking about the time frame it takes to get a cop there and how much damage can be done in two or three minutes with someone with a semiautomatic weapon or an assault weapon."
Of course, that is assuming that the guard engages an armed intruder.
If that person is covering an entire campus, they would need to be in the right place at the right time to stop an assailant quick;y. And as was so glaringly evident in Uvalde, it isn’t a given that even a designated campus officer would take on a shooter.
Hollis acknowledged that the infamous delay by law enforcement in Uvalde was a response he never imagined: “I was disappointed in the police behavior. I think every cop was disappointed in the police behavior. I mean, not going in and addressing the shooter when you're there and there's still active shooting, no cop... can get their head wrapped around that."
In the aftermath of that day, though, Hollis said he hopes police departments have learned valuable lessons -- and that, if called upon, the guards he is now vetting and assigning to Texas campuses will be up to the task of preventing another Uvalde.