BISD town hall addresses school security

Brownsville Independent School District held a town hall meeting last Thursday with multiple law enforcement agencies present to discuss safety, security in schools and an overview of the emergency operation plan in case of a shooter, followed by a Q and A session from the community.

“There is a lot of learning that is happening with the incident in Uvalde … but I’m so glad we’re having this town hall meeting … we are looking at what happened there so we can learn from that incident and how we can make our schools better and safer,” BISD Superintendent René Gutiérrez said.

With the BISD Police Department, Brownsville Police Department, the Brownsville Fire Department, U.S Border Patrol, and U.S Customs and Border Protection officers present at the meeting, Gutiérrez said the intent for it was to show the community the importance of all of the agencies working together and communicating together in case of an emergency.

“I want our students in the Brownsville Independent School District to feel safe coming to our schools,” he said. “I want our parents to also know we are investing as much as we can to make our schools as safe as possible.”

With BISD student enrollment approximately at 38,500 across 54 campuses according to the superintendent, the town hall discussed the ways the district is preparing and preventing an incident from occurring.

From having real time footage from its closed circuit television video monitoring system (CCTV) on school campuses, two-way radio communications to communicate between campus administrators, BISD P.D. and the Brownsville P.D., a mass notification system, “School Messenger” to communicate with parents via voice, text, email web and push notifications.

BISD P.D. police commander Patrick Gabbert made an emphasis to the audience to report any threat to the school or students.

Gabbert also went over how the response to a possible threat should be planned out by providing a swift response to the possible threat, coordinating resources accordingly, and keeping the superintendent informed so they can communicate with the community.

“What we learned from all of this, starting from Columbine all the way to Uvalde, is that communication is key,” Gabbert said. “We need to work together as a community to protect our most precious commodity, which is our children.”

With town hall attendees writing questions on note cards for officials to answer, Patricia Rodriguez, a BISD administrator and parent, told the Brownsville Herald the town hall meeting was informative, answered many questions that the community had and hopes the district will have future meetings on the topic.

Her husband, Miguel Rodriguez, a software engineer, agreed and said it is very important to have town hall meetings regarding this ongoing issue of school shootings.

“As a parent, I was heartbroken,” Miguel said. “You know, it’s hard to believe that, once again, something like this happens. And it’s far too frequent of an occurrence and it just breaks your heart.”

One question asked was, “why should parents not rush into children’s schools in the event of an active shooter to rescue them like Ms. [Angeli Rose] Gomez did in Uvalde.”

“The parent could put themselves in danger by entering the school,” Gabbert answered. “He or she might be seen as the aggressor and it is best if law enforcement, that have received training, go in and neutralize the threat.”

A question that caused an uproar and made many in attendance to shake their hands in disapproval was if teachers should get training on how to use firearms and have a weapon box in the classroom in case of an active shooter.

Gutiérrez answered by saying most statistics show teachers do not want a gun in the classroom. “What we need to do is work on preventive measures to keep our schools safe,” he said. “Teachers went to college to learn how to teach our kids, not to be carrying weapons in the classroom.”

A survey conducted by the Texas American Federation of Teachers found that 76 percent of nearly 4,000 K-12 surveyed do not want to be armed or expected to intercept a gunman.

Michael Moreno, principal at Perez Elementary in BISD, told the Brownsville Herald he thinks arming teachers would not work and would be very risky.

“There’s a lot of variables, a lot of things can go wrong with something like that in place,” Moreno said. “I think the preventive measures would be best … there has to be a lot of awareness, a lot of focus on mental health. I can’t tell you how many times we had to do these assessments, crisis intervention with kids and, you know, these kinds of preventives, you know, drills, protocols would work better for teachers.”

An issue Moreno brought up was when he found out what had happened in Uvalde, he said he immediately started to process, “what if it would have been Perez Elementary?”

Moreno pointed out that Perez Elementary, being an older, outdoor campus, is exposed to intruders.

“You can jump the fence so easily and get to a room super easy,” Moreno said. “We do make it a point; we only have one point of access, but we have a pretty large perimeter and whoever can jump from behind the back and then approach a classroom instantly just with the mere fact that we’re an outdoor campus with outdoor corridors.”

Asked how BISD will look to improve schools based on different layouts, Gutiérrez said, “So we’re going to have to be looking at each of the schools and their layout and see where are areas that we can improve in our security and around the perimeters of the campus. Each campus is unique and we’re going to have to look at every campus individually to see what we can do to improve each of those schools based on the design, where they’re located, and we’ve already done a lot, but we’re going to have to continue to see where we can secure even more of our campuses so that it will be difficult for any intruder to just to go in.”