As national attention focuses on school shootings, the Tucson Unified School District governing board approved the hiring of eight employees for its school safety team, with those in favor saying it will strengthen security but skeptics concerned about the effectiveness of adding more armed staff on campuses.
The measure allocates more than $415,000 per year for the new hires, which will increase the district’s school safety team to 42 members. Six of the eight new employees will be armed.
The board approved the plan on a 3-2 vote Tuesday, with members Ravi Shah and Leila Counts rejecting the measure.
“I’m actually surprised that there were not that many school safety officers that specifically work for security. We have a lot of schools, and there’s a lot of people to protect, so I’m comfortable” supporting the plan, board member Sadie Shaw said.
TUSD serves more than 46,000 students across 89 campuses and has more than 8,000 employees.
Joseph Hallums, the district’s school safety and security director, said part of his team currently includes five school safety supervisors who typically work school-hour shifts during the week to respond to calls at individual schools.
Those employees, he said, are responsible for investigating more serious incidents such as disturbances at school and missing students who didn’t show up to school or back home.
Additionally, a total of eight uniformed security officers work the “off hours” during the week and provide 24-hour coverage during the weekends to conduct site checks on campuses.
TUSD’s safety team includes five dispatchers to connect people to the appropriate officers during calls.
Hallums proposed that the district hire five additional school safety supervisors and two more dispatchers and create a position of field lieutenant in time for next school year. The two dispatchers will not be armed.
During the 2021-2022 school year, there were a total of 21 armed safety employees throughout the district, Hallums said in a media briefing Wednesday.
The new hires will bring the number up to a total of 27 armed employees for the 2022-2023 school year, he said.
He said the idea is to assign one school safety supervisor for every high school to oversee safety practices on their campuses, as well as oversee and build relationships with feeder schools, as a way for them to become part of the school communities and neighborhoods.
The field lieutenant, he said, will be in charge of providing leadership and guidance across the district to ensure that all campuses are receiving the same resources.
This employee would take charge in emergencies, with the authority to pull personnel from some schools and redirect them where they are most needed in the moment.
Hallums added that the school safety officers assigned to each high school would also allow the opportunity to build stronger relationships with Tucson Police Department officers assigned to the same neighborhoods, and ensure a stronger response in case of an emergency.
“The increased call volume that we’ve dealt with in the last school year has really put us in the position where we can’t provide that resource that we’re really wanting for schools,” Hallums said.
“The increase in calls this year were mostly due to having more students back on the campuses,” district spokeswoman Karla Escamilla said. “Numerous calls for service involved parents reporting social media threats that were shared among students, which were investigated by police and school safety and found to be transient threats (no sustained intent to harm), and school safety also received other non-emergency incidents.”
Hallums’ current team also includes managers overseeing different operations, as well as employees who handle traffic safety and key control, among other tasks.
More ‘comprehensive look’ sought
Superintendent Gabriel Trujillo said the measure is about investing in training and professional development by having a designated person in the schools to teach emergency response behaviors.
But Shah was not convinced, saying he hadn’t found any research showing that the presence of school safety officers, or armed staff, was tied to any reduction in severity of school shootings.
“I think we need a more comprehensive look later on this summer and in the fall to really come up with some solutions that are really evidence-based and not just gut reactions to this issue, and then I can get behind those,” Shah said.
Board member Adelita Grijalva said she was also hesitant about having more armed staff on campuses.
“A lot of these situations that I’ve seen nationally, there were people that were armed that were there, and the incident still occurred,” Grijalva said, in reference to armed staff on campuses.
“I want to see what we’re going to do to keep people off of our campuses … without creating a jail environment, and that’s going to be a very thin weave,” she said.
Grijalva noted that making physical changes to school campuses is crucial for improving safety. She said some school administrators were already taking individual action on their campuses, including adding reflective tint on windows to prevent outsiders from looking inside, and making sure to lock certain doors.
However, she said students and staff in some schools seem to be more at risk given that the campus structure gives intruders open access to different areas of the property.
“Those are things that I know our schools, our parents, our students and our staff want to know is going to be consistently applied,” Grijalva said, referring to the daily, physical barriers blocking intruders.
Hallums said the safety team follows strict locked-door protocols during lockdowns, situations in which the school faces an active threat or there’s a hostile intruder on campus.
Part of the school safety supervisors’ responsibilities will be to assess vulnerabilities at the schools they are assigned to, he said.
Ultimately, the measure was approved by board members Shaw, Grijalva and Natalie Luna Rose.
“Why I am so in favor of school safety officers is because they’re under our control,” Shaw said, noting that the district instructs them on how they respond to emergencies and interact with the community.
“I’m happy for them to be here because how are you going to combat an active shooter without someone who is armed?” she said.
The Pima County Sheriff's Department and other local law enforcement provided active shooter trainings to Tucson-area educators this week. Teachers, school officials and student volunteers participated in a series of scenarios conducted at Desert View High School aimed at providing realistic examples of active shooter situations.
