More guns are showing up in Texas schools. What can campus leaders do to keep kids safe?

On Halloween, before the school day began, a metal detector at Keller Compass Center went off as a student walked through it.

A staff member at the alternative school pulled the student aside, waved him down with a metal detector wand and determined the student’s belt had most likely set the machine off. But when she unzipped the student’s backpack to search it, she spotted something more alarming: Tucked in alongside books, a laptop and other school supplies was a small black and blue handgun. The staff member confronted the student, telling him she’d found a gun in his bag.

“You lying!” the student shouted back, snatching the bag from the employee’s hands. The staff member raised her hands above her head and backed slowly away from the student, who turned and sprinted down the hallway and out a side door, still carrying the bag with the pistol inside.

A short while later, police found a Browning 1911 .380-caliber pistol on the roof of a home blocks from the school, near where a passerby had seen the student running. The gun was loaded, police said. That afternoon, officers arrested Armando Jozel Lopez-Nevarez, 18, at his mother’s home in Keller.

The incident was part of an alarming trend: In the Fort Worth area, across Texas and nationwide, there’s been a sharp uptick in the number of weapons confiscated on public school campuses over the past five years.

Experts and school officials say the rise in the number of weapons being seized at school could be due at least in part to a growing willingness on the part of students to tell adults when they see something unsafe. But the trend also coincides with a broader increase in disruptive behaviors at school and school shootings across the country.

Across Texas, more students caught with guns at school

The number of students who were disciplined for bringing a gun to school across the state climbed from 222 incidents during the 2018-19 school year to 381 during the most recent school year, according to Texas Education Agency records — a 71% increase.

Kathy Martinez-Prather, director of the Texas School Safety Center at Texas State University, said she suspects some of that uptick is due to more awareness of the issue of school safety. Over the past two decades, states have stepped up the amount of training teachers and school staff members are required to go through about school safety, she said, and they’ve also emphasized to students and their parents that they need to report concerning behaviors when they see them at school. If the entire school community understands the importance of reporting anything dangerous, they’re more likely to do so, which means more students who bring weapons to school will be caught, she said.

If public awareness about school safety had already been growing, the 2022 massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde only heightened it further, Martinez-Prather said. Following the shooting, Gov. Greg Abbott directed the school safety center to conduct intruder audits at every campus across the state. The Texas Education Agency has since taken over that work.

Besides exposing potential vulnerabilities at schools across the state, Martinez-Prather said she thinks the intruder audits also made school officials more aware of the issue of campus security. By creating a situation where campus leaders knew they would be audited but didn’t know when, the requirement moved security to the top of building administrators’ priorities lists, where before it may have been one concern among many, she said.

While campus security is an important issue, it isn’t a simple one, Martinez-Prather said. Anytime a student brings a weapon to school, there needs to be a law enforcement response, she said. But school officials also need to look at the circumstances around how the incident happened, including how the student got the weapon, whether the student had been assessed for suicidal ideation and whether they had a plan to commit violence, she said. Often, she said, the answers to those questions will dictate how school districts handle those situations and what they do to prevent them going forward.

“These are the things that school districts are grappling with every single day and need to be addressing these things consistently, but still on an individual basis,” she said.

Fort Worth ISD gun seizures nearly doubled after pandemic

The number of weapons confiscated on Fort Worth ISD campuses nearly doubled between the 2018-19 school year and the 2022-23 school year, growing from 13 in 2018-19 to 24 last year, according to district records obtained by the Star-Telegram through an open records request. Those records don’t specify the types of weapons confiscated, so it’s unclear how many of those weapons were firearms and how many were other prohibited items like knives or brass knuckles. Most of those incidents were never reported publicly.

Last year, campus leaders confiscated weapons three separate times at Eastern Hills High School. They also found weapons three times last year at Southwest High school, including twice on the same day, district records show. Campus officials at Trimble Tech High School seized two weapons last year, one in November and the other in February.

Danny Garcia, executive director of safety and security for Fort Worth ISD, said he suspects one of the main factors driving the uptick in guns being confiscated at school is a lack of proper gun storage by parents. When the district seizes a gun from a student, in most cases the student got it at home, Garcia said. When parents have weapons in the home, they have a responsibility to store them in a way that kids don’t have access to them, he said.

Garcia said some of the uptick may also be a sign that school leaders are doing a better job of spotting weapons on their campuses. District officials have worked hard to promote a campus culture in which students feel comfortable telling an adult when something’s wrong, he said. In most cases, when campus administrators find weapons at school, it’s because a student spotted the weapon first and told a teacher, principal or school security staff member, he said.

Karen Molinar, Fort Worth ISD’s deputy superintendent, said district leaders began promoting the idea of safety as a shared responsibility last year, when state officials began conducting intruder audits in districts across Texas following the Uvalde school shooting. At the district level, teachers and other employees have gone through training about what their role in campus safety looks like and what their responsibilities are, she said.

At the campus level, school resource officers talk with students about what to do when they see something unsafe, she said. Not every student would feel comfortable reporting something directly to the principal, she said, so district leaders encourage them to tell any trusted adult, whether it’s a teacher, custodian or building administrator.

In most cases when students brought weapons to school, they did so to show off, not because they planned to hurt anyone, Molinar said.

“The level of threats have been very, very low,” she said.

Students in Fort Worth ISD don’t routinely have to walk through metal detectors when they arrive at school, Garcia said. The district’s safety guidelines recommend that students in middle schools and high schools go through metal detectors once every couple of weeks, he said, and school safety officers also have students pass through metal detectors if there’s a specific threat.

Molinar said district leaders have discussed the possibility of placing metal detectors at school entrances. But having students walk through them each day would create logistical headaches, she said, because many campuses, especially high schools, have several entrances that students can use. If the district started enforcing a daily metal detector requirement, it would mean either limiting every campus to one entrance or placing a metal detector and a school security officer at each exterior door, she said.

While the district never publicly reported most incidents in which weapons were found at school, Molinar said officials notified parents at affected campuses in every case. Anytime a school goes into lockdown or campus leaders bring out metal detectors or K-9 units to search for a weapon, parents get a notification, Molinar said. When that situation ends, either because the building is cleared or because school security officers found a weapon, campus leaders send out another notification, she said.

Officials in Fort Worth ISD came under heavy fire from parents last month after incidents at two of its campuses. On the morning of Oct. 10, parents at McLean Middle School received a notification from the school’s principal about a possible threat on campus after an Instagram user posted a message about plans to “shoot up” the school on certain dates, including Halloween. The user listed several specific targets, including P.E. teachers, counselors and “all of the weird kids,” and claimed a bomb had already been placed inside a locker.

The following day, school cafeteria worker Yolanda Gibbs was fatally shot in the parking lot at David K. Sellars Elementary School before the school day began. In both cases, parents said the notifications they got from school officials were vague, and left them without enough information to make a decision about whether to send their kids to school that day.

Two high schools in the Arlington Independent School District have been the sites of deadly shootings in the past two years. On April 24, a shooting at Bowie High School left 18-year-old Etavion Barnes dead. Police later arrested 17-year-old Julian Howard in connection with the killing. Both Barnes and Howard were students at Bowie, and investigators think they knew each other.

Barnes’ death comes a little more than a year after another deadly shooting at Arlington ISD’s Lamar High School. Student Ja’Shawn Poirier, 16, was shot and killed on the morning of March 20, 2023, when a 15-year-old student opened fire into a crowd outside the school building. The shooter, whom the Star-Telegram hasn’t named because he’s a juvenile, later pleaded guilty to capital murder and attempted capital murder charges. He received two 40-year sentences, to be served concurrently.

Guns in school, student mental health issues skyrocket nationwide

The uptick in weapons in schools in Texas mirrors national trends. The Washington Post reported last month that the number of guns seized in schools across the country soared beyond pre-pandemic levels last year after plummeting during school closures. Across 47 of the nation’s largest school districts, the Post tallied 470 gun seizures during the 2022-23 school year, an uptick of nearly 80 percent over the last year before the pandemic began.

That trend coincides with a broader nationwide rise in disruptive classroom behaviors and student mental health issues following the pandemic. In a report released in 2023 by the education consulting firm EAB, a growing number of teachers said they were the targets of disruptive behavior in their classes, and the number of teachers who said they saw physical violence between students more than doubled.

Fort Worth schools weren’t immune from that trend: The number of fights and student-on-student assaults in Fort Worth ISD more than tripled after the end of school shutdowns, climbing from 1,869 incidents during the 2018-19 school year to 6,591 incidents during the 2021-22 school year, according to district records.

In a separate survey of superintendents the company released in 2023, 81% of schools chiefs said behavioral issues are worse than they were before the pandemic, and 92% said student mental health crises are a greater concern than in pre-pandemic years.

Those two issues aren’t unrelated. Experts say students who act out in class are often dealing with underlying mental health issues, some of them related to lingering trauma associated with the pandemic.

2023 was on pace for most school shootings on record

In addition to mental health issues and disruptive behaviors, school shootings are on the rise across the country, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, which has been tracking gun violence in America’s schools since the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

There were a record 305 instances of gun violence in schools across the country in 2022, according to the tracker. And 2023 was on pace to break that record: If trends continued, American schools were expected to close out the year with 361 cases of gun violence. The database includes all instances in which a gun was fired or brandished in school or when a bullet hits school property, meaning it includes not only mass killings like those in Uvalde and Parkland, but also two shootings that took place outside Eastern Hills High School while students were on summer break.

Sonali Rajan, a professor of health education at Teachers College, Columbia University, said gun violence in schools can have a lasting impact on students long after those incidents are over. Speaking last month on a webinar with journalists, Rajan said traumatic incidents like school gun violence can affect the way students’ brains develop, making them more likely to engage in risky behavior like drug and alcohol abuse. If students don’t get proper support, those effects can follow them all the way into adulthood, she said.

“We know it does impact children,” she said. “It impacts their developing brain. We know it impacts their sense of stability and safety, which has numerous implications for health, for learning, for their ability to be and grow and develop in a healthy manner.”