During its July 25 meeting, the board unanimously approved both a $4.4 million contract for security fencing around all elementary schools across the district as well as a $125,000 contract for portable metal detector systems.
According to a July 25 agenda report, the need for security fencing comes after recent events like the May 24 school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, which took the lives of 19 students and two teachers.
“This is more security for our kids and our campuses,” FBISD board President Kristen Davison Malone said during the meeting. “Again, we did hear from folks regarding security at some elementary campuses. ... Having fencing at 100 percent of our schools is pretty incredible. Safety is a priority; safety comes first, then learning, which we’ve mentioned.”
No exact timeline was provided in the agenda report for the installation of the fencing, though district staff will coordinate the work so that elementary campus operations will not be impacted.
As the district beefs up security around its elementary schools, so, too, will it float a pilot program for portable metal detector systems, slated to begin during the fall 2022 semester, FBISD Police Chief David Rider said during the meeting.
Metal detectors have long been a point of discussion since the district formed its Safety Advisory Committee in 2018 ahead of the 2018 bond effort, Rider said during the meeting. That committee, composed of over 40 individuals representing students, staff, parents, security experts and community members, recommended and evaluated additional security measures that could potentially be added to the district’s safety and security master plan.
“Those were the traditional metal detectors,” Rider said. “We looked at those as a committee and realized that it takes 6-10 seconds to get one person through them. You would have to have personnel on either side to take all the metal objects out of somebody’s pocket, move it around the metal detector and then somebody on the other side would need to use a wand on them and then hand them back their belongings.”
However, with the new metal detectors, fewer personnel is needed because there is a transmitter on one side and a receiver on another, allowing people to walk through it and not have to take anything out of their pockets, Rider said. The detector is able to spot a gun, parts of a gun, or a knife in a person’s possession, Rider added.
“The benefit is that people can just continuously walk through it and it’s only going to alert on the hard metal objects, not keys, not a cellphone, those kinds of things,” he said.
In its pilot program, FBISD will utilize eight of the detectors beginning in the fall semester at the point of entry for football games at Mercer Stadium and other athletic events.
