The San Marcos Consolidated Independent School District Board of Trustees voted to approve the language for the upcoming school marshal program, six to one, with Trustee at Large Dr. Mari Salmi casting the dissenting vote. The board also received an operations update from the SMCISD Director of School Safety Doug Wozniak at last week's regularly scheduled meeting.
“This is notice that an Intruder Detection Audit was conducted by The Texas School Safety Center, and a corrective action was put into place due to the findings. There will be more details given in closed session, but the plan and timeline of how these findings will be corrected are as follows: We will set forth a district directive that no employee shall unlock a door and disengage a lock ever. Each campus shall audit staff keys and determine if anyone has an unauthorized key that fits into an exterior door. Three, any staff member wishing to have a door unlocked after hours must make a written request to campus admin and lead custodian to make arrangements. Four, maintenance will change out any exterior door core that allows the teachers room key to allow access to the exterior door.
Five, a daily perimeter door check will be performed at every campus, every day before the first bell by the lead custodian designee,” Wozniak said.
SMCISD Chief of Communications Andrew Fernandez said that the school marshal job listing is currently active, and they are looking for qualified applicants.
“We are not putting a weapon in the hands of someone who does not have experience with it. They have to go through extensive training through the school marshal program. A lot of school marshals that we looked through and vetted are retired police officers,” Fernandez said.
He added that there were legislative decisions regarding school marshals as well.
“There’s new bills that have been passed–one bill that talks about having an armed individual on every single campus. We have worked with San Marcos PD, Hays County and our school board to see what is the best approach. With the help of our police chief and our director of safety, we felt the school marshal program was a step in the right direction,” Fernandez said.
When voting on meeting minutes, Salmi said she wanted to make a correction from the meeting in which the school marshal program was approved for development. “When I made a motion to have a school safety program that looked in every way like the school marshal program but excluded concealed weapons, a statement was made that the TCOLE training could not be … taken by someone who was not a school marshal. That was an incorrect statement. People who are not school marshals and who do not intend to be school marshals can, in fact, take that TCOLE training,” Salmi said.
Wozniak said the language of the school marshal program is the same as is used in other programs across the state.
During discussion of this item Salmi requested clarification on part of the language in the document. “Number two allows for a school marshal to carry a concealed weapon on any school premises at SMCISD and at any school function,” Salmi said. “That is, in my opinion, in opposition to the plan that we first presented to the public in which we would have school marshals at elementary schools.”
Wozniak said that putting language referencing the school marshals at elementary schools only would be limiting. “The reason you don’t want to specify a specific campus is because a marshal very well could respond at another campus, and you would not want to put that in writing that they could not carry a weapon. Let’s say, for instance, at Bonham [Pre-Kindergarten School] that marshal had to respond to Goodnight [Middle School] as a backup or even to DeZavala [Elementary School], you’ve now limited their scope of power,” Wozniak said.
Salmi said she still wanted to change the language to say elementary schools only as was presented previously. “And I am very opposed to having people with concealed weapons at sporting events,” Salmi said.
SMCISD Trustee at Large Anne Halsey said that she approved of the language as written but she did agree with Salmi in some ways. “I would like us to be as focused as possible in the assignment of duties to the marshals. I really expected … that 99% of their time will be on the campuses that they are assigned to,” Halsey said. “I want to make sure that not only do all of our local law enforcement officers, chief, etc.,ww know who those marshals are, but also that our campus officials know who those marshals are.”
