HARLINGEN — The Harlingen school district regularly trains its school resource officers to handle active shooter situations.
However, it stands ready and eager to carry out any new training required by Gov. Greg Abbott, said Danny Castillo, director of emergency management and school safety for the Harlingen school district.
Castillo said the district has been in direct communication for several years with the Texas School Safety Center at Texas State University in San Marcos.
“Our district has been collaborating and ensuring that everything we implement here at the local level mirrors and adheres to those best practices that have emanated out of the Texas School Safety Center,” Castillo said.
The Texas School Safety Center is an official university-level research center at TSU, Castillo said.
Abbott has specifically tasked ALERRT – Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training – with providing the additional training this summer.
Castillo said ALERTT is a whole other subdivision at TSU that provides response training to law enforcement throughout Texas.
“They have been very good providers of various trainings, not only for law enforcement but also for the general public on how to respond to active shooter events,” Castillo said. “So it’s no different than that what the district has been doing prior to this horrible tragedy in Uvalde. We’ve been in constant contact with the safety center. When they provide training, we’ve been very quick of course to participate in that training.”
Castillo could not say what kind of additional training would be required to comply with Abbott’s mandate.
“It’s specifically school-based law enforcement so I don’t know at this point if the school safety center will be adding new caveats to any of their existing training,” Castillo said.
“That is still to be seen because we have to certainly wait until the safety center puts out whatever the interpretation of that training is.”
He expects to have the details of the training soon.
“We should be receiving some communication from the school safety center about any additional new training that they will provide for school districts to participate in,” he said.
The Harlingen school district contracts with the Harlingen Police Department for the provision of school resource officers, Castillo said. Those officers are assigned to the district throughout the year.
“Every year they do receive active shooter training from the Harlingen PD,” he said. “They put on their training which has been approved by TCOLE, the licensing agency for law enforcement. They will be having that training sometime this summer and they do every summer.”
TCOLE stands for Texas Commission on Law Enforcement.
He couldn’t say if teachers and administrators would be included in the new training. That remains to be seen once Harlingen and other school districts receive the new training program.
