Texas-Sized Uproar: Abbott Proposes ‘In-Person’ Intruder ‘Audits’ of Schools to Check Procedures

Texas’s Greg Abbott wants to show the country how to drill for intruders, Texas-style.

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How many parents out there near burst into tears upon hearing our first-grader, our baby, talk about the “intruder drills” in school, where they practice locking doors, turning off the lights, pulling the window shade, hiding in closets, and hiding behind desks piled up? How many of us, despite our fear of an actual shooter, also feared the mental trauma endured every time our child “practiced” hiding in a closet with a teacher? Many of us adults remember being afraid of “fire drills” as kindergarten or first graders. This is beyond…

Gov. Greg Abbott wants to take the “drills” next level and make them “audits,” meaning the state wants to send a real intruder (One working for the state) into schools, randomly, to “audit the response.”

What could possibly go wrong?

From the Texas Tribune:

Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday instructed state school security and education officials to start conducting “in-person, unannounced, random intruder detection audits on school districts” to find weak access points and see how quickly staff can enter a school building without being stopped.

Education advocates and lawmakers swiftly condemned the idea of unannounced, fake intruders.

Clay Robison, a spokesperson for the Texas State Teachers Association, raised concerns about whether a person conducting unannounced drills puts themselves at risk to be attacked by someone on campus who sees them as a real threat.

Everything is big in Texas, including ideas that will do nothing but make school an even more unnerving, never-ending, “game” in which kids run from bad guys. How many months would go by before a state “auditor” is shot by a coach who brings his Glock to school in a well-intentioned, poorly judged, routine to protect kids? But an even bigger problem arises when school administrators, teachers, and students, upon knowing that the state likes to “audit” these things, tend to at least want to believe that if they first confront an intruder, it is all a drill even if the intruder is real.

It is great that Abbott is thinking outside the box. Now he should come out into the daylight and propose banning assault rifles so that the school’s police resource officer isn’t outgunned the moment a real intruder steps on campus. Given that all self-respecting intruders use the AR-15 type assault rifle nowadays, and given that we’ve seen the last two school resource officer “good guys with guns” steer clear of the powerful weapon, it would seem to be a Texas-sized good idea to start with an assault weapons ban so that at least it’s a fair fight if the intruder reaches the school.

Jason Miciak

@JasonMiciak believes a day without learning is a day not lived. He is a political writer, features writer, author, and attorney. He is a Canadian-born dual citizen who spent his teen and college years in the Pacific Northwest and has since lived in seven states. He now enjoys life as a single dad of a young girl, writing from the beaches of the Gulf Coast. He loves crafting his flower pots, cooking, and currently studies philosophy of science, religion, and non-math principles behind quantum mechanics and cosmology. Please feel free to contact with any concerns.