State Rep. Don McLaughlin, R-Uvalde, introduced House Bill 33, deemed the “Uvalde Strong Act,” during a March 19 hearing, nearly three years after 19 children and two teachers were killed at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School in May 2022. McLaughlin served as the city’s mayor from 2014-2023, when he stepped down to run for the Texas House.
Under HB 33, school districts would be required to meet annually with state and local law enforcement to plan their response to active shooter situations and other emergencies.
“Passing HB 33 will ensure our law enforcement is prepared, our schools are protected, and failures like those we saw at Robb Elementary never happen again,” McLaughlin said during the March 19 hearing. “No more excuses, no more passing the buck, no more officers standing around waiting for orders while kids are bleeding in a classroom.”
A timeline released by the Texas Department of Public Safety showed that during the May 24, 2022, mass shooting, law enforcement officers spent one hour and 14 minutes inside Robb Elementary School before neutralizing the shooter, Community Impact previously reported.
HB 33 was left pending March 19 in the House Committee on Homeland Security, Public Safety and Veterans' Affairs. The proposal has bipartisan support in the House, with 76 lawmakers listed as co-authors.
The overview
McLaughlin’s bill would also require law enforcement agencies to convene annually for active shooter training exercises. Individual law enforcement officers are required to prepare for active shooter situations through Texas’ Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training center, but state law does not mandate this for entire agencies.
HB 33 would also provide grants to help police officers to train for active shooter scenarios.
McLaughlin said HB 33 would “open the lines of communication” and ensure first responders know how to work together in an emergency.
“Law enforcement agencies don't always coordinate, and at Robb Elementary, that outright failed. ... The safety of our children shouldn't be a question of who's in charge. It should be about how we all step up together,” he said during the hearing.
Law enforcement officers who testified before the committee said the most important thing to do in an active shooter situation is “stop the killing and stop the dying.”
“Whether you're the first officer on the scene or the third officer, the training is the same: you’ve got to run towards the gunfire, you’ve got to stop the killing, and you can no longer continue waiting for a tactical team,” DPS director Col. Freeman Martin said. “Uvalde was just an anomaly. ... You can see the officers were asking, ‘What are we doing?’ A lot of them had the training, but they were getting conflicting information.”
Zooming in
In the wake of the Uvalde shooting, state legislators passed laws in 2023 requiring silent panic alert devices in all public school classrooms and armed security officers on all campuses.
Chambers County Sheriff Brian Hawthorne said law enforcement agencies are still working to comply with changes from House Bill 3, which overhauled school safety protocols.
“We still have not even completed the training that [HB 3] established, working out the sheriff's duties with schools and police chiefs and fire departments, so we're kind of putting things on top of each other when we haven't finished what we started,” Hawthorne said March 19.
He said smaller sheriff’s offices do not have the resources to send officers to annual active shooter trainings or hold multi-agency meetings.
“I still have murders and rapes and child abuse and all these other cases that I’ve got to keep working on,” Hawthorne said. “We don't have that ability to drop what we do to spend weeks preparing for this. We have to figure out how to prepare for this catastrophic event in small increments of training, and ALERRT allows us to do that.”
McLaughlin said he was working on a version of the bill, known as the committee substitute, that would “not change the concept of the bill, but will allow agencies to work together in a more effective way.” The committee could vote on the substitute during a future hearing.
Put in perspective
During the hearing, Nim Kidd, who leads the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said he thought HB 33 would help improve communication between first responders.
Kidd said he previously worked as a firefighter and did not learn how to work with other agencies until he arrived on the scene of an emergency.
“Nothing in my initial training as a firefighter told me what I was supposed to expect from law enforcement,” Kidd said. “I think what the representative is trying to do is bring those organizations together before, during and after the event to provide a safer response for Texans.”
McLaughlin said he wanted to create strong accountability measures and ensure agencies plan ahead for emergencies under HB 33.
“If these policies had been in place three years ago, maybe, just maybe, those kids would be alive today,” he said. “We don't know that—we can't fix the past. But we sure can fix the future.”
Rep. A.J. Louderback, R-Victoria, thanked McLaughlin for introducing the bill and said “bringing... everyone to the table on a timely basis or regular continuation is actually part of the goal.” Louderback is the former Jackson County Sheriff.
Also of note
Lawmakers also approved millions of dollars in school safety funding during the 2023 session, although some school districts have said it is not enough.
This March, the Texas Senate passed a bill that would more than double the annual school safety funding districts receive. The measure was sent to the House.
