The Lege passed a big unfunded mandate in 2023 for schools to hire more security guards. They’re under some pressure to pay up for it this session, though there’s plenty of reason to think they’ll still cheap out.
Since Texas passed a law in 2023 requiring public school districts to have an armed officer at each campus, districts have repeatedly asked the state for more money to fulfill the requirement.
In this year’s legislative session, lawmakers have pledged to increase school safety funding. The 2023 law, House Bill 3, increased that annual safety allotment to $10 per student and $15,000 per school in a district.
The question legislators face this session: will they come close to increasing that allotment to the $100 per student that districts say is necessary to finally fill the funding gap?
HB 3 passed in response to the 2022 shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde that left 19 children and two teachers dead. But since its passage, more than half of Texas school districts do not meet the one armed officer per school requirement, according to a January Senate Education Committee report.
Many school district officials call HB 3 an unfunded mandate, saying the increases to the existing school safety allotment it created pay only a small part of the cost of adding full-time personnel to all schools.
A possible increase is part of the conversation this session. In his State of the State address this month, Gov. Greg Abbott asked the Legislature to invest an additional $500 million for school safety. Both the House and Senate’s proposed budgets for 2026 and 2027 would increase school safety funding by $400 million over the next two years.
Still, school leaders say the amount proposed may not be enough. On top of that, a law enforcement shortage nationwide and in Texas makes it more difficult to staff armed officers at all schools.
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Signed into law in June 2023, HB 3 increased how much districts receive for school safety each year to $10.00 per student from $9.72 per student, with an additional $15,000 for each campus in a school district. HB 3 also provided the Texas Education Agency a one-time figure of $1.1 billion to distribute to school districts for safety upgrades.
Under HB 3, an average-sized Texas elementary school — which has about 600 students — would receive about $21,000 per year from the school safety allotment. That figure comes well short of the at least $60,000 to $70,000 school officials say is necessary to pay an armed guard each year.
New funding for the armed guard requirement was in addition to several other new measures, like one mandating that certain school personnel must undergo a “mental health first-aid training program.” The law also gave the state more power to require active-shooter plans.
Though it received bipartisan support, HB 3 was not universally praised. Before and after the bill was signed into law, school district officials said the state wasn’t providing enough money for the new mandates.
During debate in early 2023, some lawmakers said that requiring an armed guard at each school could endanger students instead of making them more safe. A 2021 study by researchers at The Violence Project suggested that adding armed guards in schools doesn’t reduce gun-related injuries.
Efforts that session to tighten Texas’ gun laws were also a non-starter, with Uvalde parents left disappointed after a bill died that would have raised the minimum age for Texans purchasing semi-automatic rifles from 18 to 21.
With no school safety funding increases since HB 3 passed, many school districts have taken “good cause exceptions” from the armed guard requirement. Districts can take an exception if, for example, they have school marshals that act as security guards or safety-trained employees who carry handguns on school grounds.
See here for the background. The safe bet is always to take the under. The Lege and Greg Abbott always have higher priorities than public schools – remember how Abbott vetoed the bill to increase school funding because his precious voucher bill didn’t pass? – and even a nominal increase may well come with extra strings attached. I do think some funding increase will pass – Republicans don’t like spending money on schools, but they do like spending money on cops – and there are bipartisan bills to make it happen. It’s more a question of how much and what the catch is than will it or won’t it. But if the latest version of Abbott’s wet kiss to religious schools and the wealthy parents who send their kids to them somehow stumbles, then all bets are off.