In recent years reports of violent shootings in schools have made national headlines with disturbing frequency. Specifically, the shooting at Sandy Hook in Dec. 2012, in which a shooter fatally shot twenty children and six adult staff members, including the elementary school’s principal, elicited a divisive national outcry for more extensive restrictions on weapons and greater prevalence of arms and security forces on school campuses.
“It inspired a great deal of what’s been put in place at Argyle,” Dr. Wright said. “After Sandy Hook, I believe that most school districts evaluated the safety and security measures that they had in place and started looking at what could be done, and that really was the impetus for examining policy and making change here.”
In fact, much of the national debate about guns following Sandy Hook centered around how the situation might have differed with armed teachers.
“We don’t really know whether it would have made a difference if that principal had had a weapon, but we know that without one she had absolutely had no chance, and it might have lessened the carnage if she had had a weapon,” Dr. Wright said. “He shot his way into that school. He wasn’t in there as a student, like you’ve seen at some other high school shootings. If he had known the staff was armed there, he might have stayed away from that school.”
Responding to concerns about the safety of Argyle students, the school board moved to act.
“On the 24th of April, 2013, there was a big public forum held in the auditorium,” Dr. Wright said. “We had speakers there from Kraft International, so they came in and spoke. Greg Coker spoke, and I spoke. Toward the end of the meeting, we let people ask every question they wanted to ask, community members, parents. And so from that, we put this pilot project in place where armed staff would have to go through an interview, a psychological assessment, and training in actually shooting and also training in specific scenarios that could occur.”
In addition to arming teachers, the AISD board also hired Chief Ralph Price to roam the district campuses and keep students safe. Though the shooting at Sandy Hook was cited as influencing this decision, Dr. Wright also noted that the policy had been a long time in coming.
“Back in 2003, there was a lot of interest in having a student resource officer (SRO),” Dr. Wright said. “There was collaboration between the town and the school district to try and get that, but all these years we haven’t had an SRO. And if you start looking at other districts and our UIL district, they have SROs, and Aubrey has their own police department, and Prosper has one.”
The board had to decide which route was the best to take to ensure the safety of the students.
“One option was to have a school resource officer through Denton County Sheriff’s office,” Dr. Wright said. “The second option was to have an SRO with the town of Argyle. And the third option was to have our own AISD police department. And there was a lot of comparing of how much each would cost, and a lot of meeting with the sheriff’s department and meeting with the town, which meant meeting with Chief Tackett and with the town manager, Charles West. So this way, with the ISD police department, the officer is an employee of the school district.”
And though the reactions to the policy changes have been mixed, the board heavily considered the opinions of the Argyle community through the public forum before acting.
“When we had the public forum in the spring, at the time we didn’t have school messenger, so we used Wingspan,” Dr. Wright said. “Now we would use school messenger texts and school messenger emails, Twitter, FaceBook, put it on the website or in the newspapers.”
With the new policies firmly set in place, all eyes are on AISD and how it adapts for the security of the students.
Pictured below, Chief Ralph Price addresses students at an assembly and discusses expectations and future speed zones in the parking lots. Photo by Matt Garnett
