HARLINGEN — A sort of vertigo descends on a society in the aftermath of such monstrosities like that in Uvalde last month.
It’s unimaginable that someone could walk in and gun down little kids, but that unimaginable has become a macabre reality to which people will take some time to comprehend.
And in all that madness, people seek strength from the capable and the good. They look for tangible answers, things they can touch and see and hear that offer rhythm and coherence to the shattered glass around them, some way to heal the brokenness.
The Harlingen Consolidated Independent School District’s Facilities and Safety Committee meeting on June 7 revealed some of those answers. The meeting was attended by the Harlingen school board, school administrators, and representatives of the Harlingen Police Department.
Danny Castillo, director of emergency management and school safety for the Harlingen school district, emphasized as he has several times recently that real school safety must be composed of many parts, or “layers.”
One of the things he talked about was the “Standard Response Protocol.”
“This is something which I’m sure you’re familiar with at this point,” he said. “This is one of the key recommended best practices that has emanated from the Texas School Safety Center.”
The Texas School Safety Center describes it’s K-12 Standard Response Protocol as a toolkit that offers guidance and resources for incorporating the SRP into a school safety plan for critical incident response within individual schools in a school district.
That’s just one layer. There are many.
“The district has been and continues to evaluate and add camera surveillance systems at all of our campuses,” he said in a recent interview.
“One of the key things that we did across the district is we made sure to upgrade and retrofit all of our classroom doors to ensure they are all self-locking,” he explained.
Self-locking means just that. No one has to do anything more than just close the door and it locks itself.
“The locking mechanism itself, you can fit those so that they lock at the moment the door is closed,” Castillo said. “It sounds very simple, but that is one of the key things that was learned on a national scale as being one of the most important safety considerations that any district can incorporate.”
Also in place is the Visitor Management System from Raptor Technologies, which the district has had in place for several years.
“Every visitor who makes a visit to any of our campuses, they get screened through that visitor management system,” Castillo said. “It’s basically scanned against the DPS’s sex offender registry to make sure that everybody that we allow in is an appropriate visitor.”
Visitors approaching a campus will find locked gates and a control box with a button. They press that button, face a camera where someone inside can see their face, and they identify themselves and their purpose for being there.
“There has to be a more specific inspection of the identification that matches up to the visitor,” Castillo said. “Then that information is scanned through the Visitor Management System. On some of our campuses you’ll have the camera system on that control box that’s outside the secure area. They can hold up their ID to that camera and they can do it that way.”
There was a recent upgrade to the system so that now visitors don’t necessarily have to have their physical identification in order to conduct a scan, he said.
“They just need to have the identifiers for that individual that can be verified by visually inspecting that information, whether it be over the video system or if it’s done through a passenger window.”
Raptor will soon play a greater role in Harlingen school security. Castillo said the district has already implemented the Raptor Drill Management System, and this fall it will put in place the Raptor Alert System.
