After Arlington shooting, how can Texas schools prevent crime outside their buildings?

Following last year’s massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas lawmakers, state education officials and school district leaders have spent long hours talking about strategies for making school buildings safer.

But while those conversations have largely focused on making school buildings more difficult to access by intruders, there’s been comparatively little focus on how to prevent violence in outdoor areas of school campuses, like Monday morning’s shooting outside Lamar High School in Arlington that left one student dead.

A national school safety expert says school districts have a responsibility to keep their entire campuses safe, including outdoor areas like parking lots. Although tools for preventing crime outside school buildings are more limited, Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center, said school districts can use a combination of adult supervision and threat assessments to keep shootings from taking place.

“Generally, when it comes to school shootings, the shooter doesn’t just come on the campus and start pulling the trigger of the gun,” he said. “Somebody knows something.”

Arlington school shooting leaves one student dead

A student opened fire outside the school at 6:55 a.m. Monday, officials in the Arlington Independent School District reported. A male student was taken to a hospital by ambulance, where he later died, Arlington police said. A female student was lightly grazed on the cheek by shrapnel, and received treatment at a hospital. Police arrested a male suspect, who they said is a student in the district.

During a news conference Monday afternoon, Arlington Police Chief Al Jones said the shooting happened near a flight of stairs outside the school, and that the shooter never made it inside the building.

School resource officers arrive at the school at 7 a.m. each day, Jones said, meaning they weren’t yet on campus when the shooting took place. He said he was skeptical that it would be helpful for officers to arrive on campus earlier in the future.

“I don’t think that that would be necessary in this case,” he said. “But we’re always open for ideas and trying to do things better.”

Melody Fowler, president of the Arlington ISD school board, said the district recently installed more sensitive metal detectors at the school. Although those detectors would help keep someone from bringing a gun into the building, they do little to prevent crime in the parking lot. Fowler said she was unsure what steps the school board could take to prevent similar tragedies in the future.

“We beg our parents to keep their firearms locked up... not letting any of their children have access to any guns that may be in the home,” she said. “But, of course, we can’t monitor every home to make sure that that’s being done.”

School safety expert says adult supervision is key

Stephens, the school safety expert, said school districts have a responsibility to maintain a safe environment on their campuses — both inside school buildings and outdoors.

Stephens said a key factor in keeping campuses safe is providing appropriate adult supervision before, during and after school. Many school district handbooks say that supervision will be provided for the entire school day, plus 30 minutes before the school day begins and 30 minutes after it ends, he said. School leaders need to make sure that supervision extends not only to the school buildings themselves, but also to outdoor areas of campus, he said.

It’s also important that districts have threat assessment teams in place on each campus who can anticipate and prevent threats, Stephens said. Those teams generally consist of a school administrator who knows students and families, a mental health professional and a member of local law enforcement, he said. An important addition to those teams is someone who is social media savvy and can spot warning signs when they come up online, he said.

Over the past few decades, school districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area have generally been leaders in making plans for school safety, Stephens said. The Dallas Independent School District was an early leader in developing threat assessment protocols that allow schools to identify students who might pose a threat to others, and intervene before a violent incident happens, he said.

But no matter how many strategies school districts employ to head off violent incidents before they arise, they can never be certain that crime won’t take place on campus, Stephens said. In light of all those limitations, Stephens’ main piece of advice for school districts is succinct: “Do everything you can, knowing you can’t do everything.”

“Schools are not expected to prevent all crime,” he said. “But they are expected to take diligent steps to do what is reasonable and possible under the circumstances and to do that without delay.”