In FW, the ISD reimburses the city for the majority of the SRO’s salaries and all of their vehicles. The system works great for all involved.

I like what you are proposing, but your numbers are way low. You are going to need a minimum of 2 officers at every small school to cover things like vacations, sick time, Dr's appt's, the training you expect them to have ... Large high schools and middle schools will need even more because the campus is larger and someone would need to cover the sporting events that occur after school (unless you are expecting the SRO's to work from 6AM to 9-10PM when after school activities end and also pretty much every Saturday). So in reality, you are probably talking about needing an amount of SRO's that's 4x the number of schools. You will then probably need another 25% on top of that number for admin/management staff to support all those new officers. Add to that the facilities that will need to be built to support all of this, transportation for all of this, extra guns/ammo that will be needed to cover training, normal breakage/wear-and-tear ... Some of those things may already exist, and maybe you can re-purpose the existing SRO staff, but a lot of it will be new. The last thing I would add is that 65K a year is only the SRO's salary. When you add in the benefits package, a 65K salaried employee is probably closer to 90K. Then you have to remember that this is not a 1 time cost. So at a minimum on the people side, you have now added a large re-occurring cost that will only go up every year as wages/benefits increase. Lastly, this would have to be state funded because you aren't going to get every single school district to pass the property tax increase to fund it. So to throw out some numbers, 9330 schools, 37K SRO's, 9K administration, 90K per person = 4.1B for salary/benefit costs. Then you will need to add all the training/equipment/facility/transportation costs and you are probably closer to 5.5-6B per year, every year.

Like I said, I like the idea, but it's not a small cost for the state of Texas to pick up (you won't get federal funds for this).

I think your numbers are probably more realistic, and it is a significant expenditure, but what is more important than keeping kids safe at school? Surely we could do some trimming in the $127B state budget to find the funds for this.

The people that commit these atrocities aren't well trained, they aren't even tacticool bad arses. I would think that even a weekend warrior that had little formal training would have no problem eliminating these sick F's as long as they could control their fear.

GREAT answers !!

I know it will freak students out to see men and women dressed in full battle armored uniforms with fully auto M6's, he77 maybe a S.A.W. (kinda heavy). But when these soldiers are nice and talk to the kids like they are just normal police, the kids AND teachers will feel much safer.

14 minutes, I guess that's not too bad, and they stopped the threat. Here's how I think about it. There are 9330 public schools in Texas. We can pay to have trained personnel at every school, some schools would need one, some would need 2, maybe 3. Most small schools would need one. On average, let's say there are double the amount trained personnel than schools, so 18,660 trained officers. Pay them about 65,000 a year, would be $1.2 Billion in funds. Provide them a quality AR-15 and optic, about $1500 each, and gear, of about another $500 or so. That's about $37 Million. Total, that's about $1.25 Billion for Texas to pay to have multiple armed and trained personnel on site at every Texas public school. You could cut down the response time and have a show of force already there. It turns a soft target location into hard target location and should decrease the attempts of school shootings. Why can't we push for something like this!!??

Being in the field, your numbers are way to low

Policing can't attract good help these days and it paying more than that. It's going to have to pay better to get good help

as Mike Tyson supposedly once said, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth".

I thought the lottery was supposed to support the schools in Texas.

I'm not in the field, but I would guess this would be sought after job for a police officer, no? No dealing with the normal degenerates that police have to, and a 99.99% chance you will never get shot at. Is that not the case?

I'm not in the field, but I would guess this would be sought after job for a police officer, no? No dealing with the normal degenerates that police have to, and a 99.99% chance you will never get shot at. Is that not the case?

No it’s not considered a highly sought after position.

It's probably 50/50 appealing. A little slow for most

Friend of mine is an SRO at a metroplex high school. He told me in 3 years, he's had more felony arrests than he did for 16 years on patrol.

He showed me his body cam video of a 17 year old that threatened someone with a knife, then ran through the school. He and the second SRO got the kid cornered and disarmed. Kid had a 6" kitchen knife.

And drugs abound as well.

Texas has a program
https://www.tcole.texas.gov/content/school-marshals

Not enough are using it
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/07/texas-school-marshal-program/

Been saying this for years. If I was one guarding the school, I'd work very hard to make sure staff and students were at ease, and glad I was there. Have fun with the kids, heckle them in the halls, make them laugh and smile every day.