Texas school shootings are rare, but experts worry about an uptick during pandemic

Gun violence on Texas school campuses, like the shooting at Mansfield Timberview High School in Arlington, is rare but not unheard of.

But school safety experts are concerned that the frequency of such incidents might increase as students — already stressed from the COVID-19 pandemic — return to in-person instruction.

“There’s been a lot of stressors going on for students, spending all last year being in isolation,” said Kathy Martinez-Prather, director of the Texas School Safety Center. “Those are the things that could cause an uptick.”

Data from Everytown — a gun safety advocacy group — show at least 101 incidents of gunfire on school grounds across the country this year, resulting in 21 deaths and 56 injuries.

When focused just on the start of the 2021-22 school year, from Aug. 1 to Sept. 15, Everytown recorded 30 cases of gunfire and five deaths at schools.

“That is the most instances and people shot in that back-to-school period since Everytown started tracking gunfire on school grounds in 2013,” the group noted in a press release Wednesday.

In June, an analysis from The Washington Post found that the 14 school shootings from March 2021 to June marked the highest total over that period for any year since 1999.

Kenneth Trump, a Cleveland-based school security consultant, told education-focused website The74Million in March that as more students returned to school, on-campus confrontations and fights would “kick right back in as if they haven’t missed a beat,” and schools might be caught flat-footed, given their focus on health measures during the pandemic.

“There’s a greater probability, given the mental health implications of COVID-19, to see some of that manifest itself behaviorally once everybody is back,” he said.

Texas has reported 104 incidents at campuses where some type of gun was brandished, was fired or hit school property during the school day, according to data dating back to 1970 from The Center for Homeland Defense & Security.

Prior to Wednesday’s shooting in Arlington, four cases in Texas had been recorded this year in that database. Two of those involved handguns (the other cases involved a BB gun and a hydroball gun):

• A shooting in Houston on Oct. 1, where a 25-year-old former student of YES Prep Southwest High School walked into the building and started shooting, wounding the school’s principal.
• A shooting in Houston on June 6, when a student was shot after graduation rehearsal at North Forest High School.

Three shootings took place on school grounds in 2021 on Fort Worth ISD campuses, according to the database, two of them at Eastern Hills High School in June. But all three shootings occurred in the evening or night.

Over the past few years, there have been sporadic incidents at Mansfield schools. In 2019, a student was arrested after bringing a gun to a fifth- and sixth-grade campus “to show a friend.”

Last month, the district increased security at Timberview after an image of a weapon was posted on social media referencing the high school. The threat, school officials said at the time, could not be substantiated by police.

“All safety concerns are taken very seriously, and the appropriate consequences will be given to anyone and everyone involved,” Timberview principal Derrell Douglas wrote in a letter to parents at the time.

The most significant school shooting in Texas history — and the incident that prompted the most change in school district operations across the state — was the 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting, which left 10 dead and 13 wounded.

After that shooting, Gov. Greg Abbott set out a sweeping 40-page school safety plan, unveiled at Dallas ISD headquarters, which set out nearly three dozen strategies that could be put in place. The Legislature followed in 2019 with Senate Bill 11, creating a raft of new regulations and requirements for school districts, while setting aside a $10-per-student “school safety allotment.”

Among those new regulations included:

• Requiring districts to adopt a multi-hazard emergency operations plan that would be included in a safety and security audit to be submitted to the Texas School Safety Center, headquartered at Texas State University in San Marcos.
• Mandating that school districts create “threat assessment teams” for each of their campuses, tasked with identifying students who might make threats of violence and providing possible interventions for them.
• Creating the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium, a group of mental health professionals from the state’s medical and health science schools to improve access to mental health care for children.
• Requiring training for all school resource officers, regardless of school size.
• Adding emergency training for all district employees, including substitute teachers.
• Creating a new curriculum covering the concept of “digital citizenship” — including informing students of the potentially criminal consequences of cyberbullying.

Other bills passed during that legislative session eliminated a cap on the number of school marshals allowed in each district, and mandated that schools create “bleeding control stations” — essentially battlefield tourniquet kits — for campus use.

At the time, Abbott said the bills would “do more than Texas has ever done to make schools safer places for our students, for our educators, for our parents and families.”

Martinez-Prather, from the Texas School Safety Center, said that over the past five years, school safety in the state has gone “from the backseat to the front seat.”

“Texas has been very forward thinking in passing very critical legislation rooted in best practices,” she said. “This is just a part of the educational experience now.”

Without knowing the details of the Timberview shooting, Martinez-Prather added that in cases of planned mass shooter events, there’s often a “contagion effect,” where other threats and rumors about school violence come out.

Police said Wednesday that officers were diverted from responding to the Timberview shooting because of social media threats posted about other schools. Later that afternoon, police arrested a South Grand Prairie High School student after videos circulated with apparent threats against that campus.

“The challenges is how to manage all of that right now, amid all the other anxieties that staff and students are dealing with right now because of COVID,” Martinez-Prather said. “Students will be successful academically if we take care of foundational things — one of which is a safe and healthy climate. Embedding that into the educational agenda, making a safe and healthy school and creating a culture of preparedness, that’s going to be critical.”