School districts across the state are being offered another line of defense in the event of an active shooter situation following the Uvalde school shooting that left 21 people dead.
The Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, TCOLE, is partnering up and offering an increased number of training courses to participating districts looking to add school marshals to their campuses.
TCOLE hosted a simulation for journalists in Round Rock on Monday morning.
It’s a simulation that has become all too real in Texas and across the nation:
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A gunman walks into a school library and opens fire on unsuspecting students. However, in this scenario, the first line of defense was already on campus. An armed school marshal is seen opening fire on the gunman before police arrive.
The Texas legislature allows public school districts, open-enrollment charter schools, public junior colleges, and private schools to appoint school marshals through TCOLE’s school marshal program.
School marshals are not school resources of sworn police officers, but rather they are employees of a school district who have been selected and agreed to train to become a school marshal.
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Requirements include being an employee of a school district, having a current license to carry, being approved by a governing body, passing a psychological exam (L3), completing the 80-hour school marshal course, submitting the school marshal appointment form and fee, and completing a 16-hour renewal course every two years, according to TCOLE.
School marshals are often staff members with a military or police background and/or someone is known for remaining calm during high-stress situations.
TCOLE oversees the program and says more schools have been showing interest since the massacre in Uvalde, the deadliest school shooting in Texas history. The police response during the mass shooting has been described as ‘an abject failure’ by the head of DPS.
TCOLE Deputy Chief Cullen Grissom said he wanted the simulation near Austin to highlight their program and ensure more districts know how it works.
Dr. Benny Soileau is the superintendent of Huffman ISD, a small district near Houston.
The district has its own police force, a police chief, and two officers but opted to add school marshals.
The superintendent himself chose to undergo the training and become a school marshal following the 2018 school shooting in nearby Santa Fe that left ten people dead.
“In the event we have something horrible like that happen, we feel we’ll be better prepared to respond,” he said.
Soileau would not comment as to how many school marshals his district has, he says, for security reasons.
For now, the massacre in May at Robb Elementary school has only led TCOLE to double the number of training offered to districts across the state to four, but the shooting and police response has not led to changes to the actual training.
“We still look at what’s come out of the Uvalde tragedy, what are the implications: was training the issue or was it the misapplication of training,” said Grissom.
TCOLE will only say there are 256 school marshals in 62 districts in the state for security reasons.
An additional 11 districts have staff signed up for classes this summer, according to the commission’s spokesperson.
The training takes about 60 days to complete and includes classroom instruction as well as hands-on training involving simulations like Mondays.
