According to the district, the commitment to have a school resource officer, or SRO, on each campus was made by the Comal ISD board of trustees after their meeting April 27.
“Throughout the previous year, we heard from parents and staff about their desire to have armed personnel dedicated to each of our elementary campuses,” Comal ISD Board President Russ Garner said. “In April, we asked [Comal ISD Superintendent John Chapman] to bring to us in closed-session options for accomplishing that goal. It was during that April meeting that we made the commitment as a board to have an SRO at all our campuses to provide the level of security that our community desires to have in our schools.”
The Texas Legislature passed a bill that requires all school districts to have armed guards at each campus in May. According to the board, they were already committed to having an SRO at each campus before the bill was passed.
In May, the Texas Legislature passed a bill that mandates all school districts to have armed guards at every campus. The board had already pledged to assign an SRO to each campus prior to the bill's passage, according to the district.
“While we applaud the Legislature for their work on school safety, as a board we were committed to this concept of having armed personnel in all our schools regardless of whether the Legislature mandated it or not,” Garner said.
According to the district, they have been working with local law enforcement partners including the Comal County Sheriff’s Office, Guadalupe County Sheriff’s Office, Bexar County Sheriff’s Office and Bulvarde Police Department since April to secure properly trained and licensed law enforcement personnel to provide security at each out their elementary schools.
The district said they anticipate having a full-time law enforcement presence at every elementary school by the end of the upcoming school year.
“The biggest challenge to accomplishing our goal of having an SRO at every elementary school is securing properly trained and qualified individuals,” said Mario De La Rosa, Comal ISD executive director of safety and security. “Our law enforcement partners are aggressively recruiting, hiring and training reserve deputies to fill these crucial roles. In the meantime, we will be rotating the SROs we do have at the elementary campuses until we secured enough to have one at each school every day.”
