Two years after the state passed a law requiring school districts to have an armed guard at every campus, Northside Independent School District still struggles to hire enough officers.
The district has gotten much closer to having a police officer at almost every one of its 127 campuses. This requirement was a state mandate passed by lawmakers in response to the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
As the largest school district in San Antonio, Northside ISD serves just under 98,500 students across 355 square miles. NISD has about 85 elementary schools, 26 middle schools and 21 middle schools.
NISD budgeted to pay for more than 120 school officers for the 2025-26 school year and currently has 31 vacancies in its police department.
Twenty of those empty positions were added by the school board after the school shooting in Uvalde and just before House Bill 3 — a big school safety bill passed by the state in 2023 — went into effect.
“We’re getting close… closer than we have been in quite a few years,” said Kelley Fryar, a police lieutenant for NISD who oversees the patrol and communication divisions, during a Sept. 2 interview.
Fryar, who’s been with the department for more than 30 years, says they’ve been able to hire more because of the “settling down” of the COVID-19 pandemic, the increased frequency of law enforcement academy trainings and hiring early career officers.
This year, the state allocated more funding for school safety under House Bill 2.
Under the multi-billion dollar public school funding bill, school districts get $33,540 per campus to fill security needs. It’s more than double what schools were getting under HB 3, the school safety bill passed in 2023.
HB 2 also increased the school safety allotment from $20 per student average daily attendance to $21.10.
Sergeant Mauricio Hernandez approaches his Northside ISD police vehicle at station headquarters in Leon Valley in 2024. Credit: Scott Ball / San Antonio Report
Fryar also said the NISD police department has been leaning more heavily on its own training program as it hires more officers who are new to law enforcement.
“We have a lot that we can learn to really build an officer the way we them to be for Northside ISD,” Kelley said.
Traditionally, the department tried to recruit officers from other agencies, but as most law enforcement groups feel the strain of understaffing, NISD’s focus shifted to training their own officers for school policing.
School policing is more akin to traditional community-based policing, said Fryar. While the NISD police department is a full-fledged law enforcement agency operating 24 /7 and equipped to deal with “anything short of murder,” school officers have more time and space to connect with students.
“Within school district policing, we’re different in that we take that extra step since obviously, we deal with a vast majority of juveniles,” he said.
School districts can also contract with school resource officers or commissioned peace officers from other agencies. There’s also allowances in HB 3 for hiring armed security guards or having armed teachers on campuses, but NISD opted not go that route.
“We feel that’s more problematic than problem-solving,” Charlie Carnes, NISD’S police chief, told the Report last year.
HB 3 requires all public schools to have some sort of armed guard on campus. Big school districts like Northside ISD who may not be able to recruit for every position due to lack of funding or qualified candidates, can fill out “good cause exemptions.”
As part of the exemptions, districts have to provide alternative security plans that still meets the state’s minimum standards.
Northside ISD has two officers on every high school campus and one officer assigned to every middle school. For elementary schools, the district uses a “geographic cluster model” that pairs an officer with a cluster of elementary schools, all located within proximity to one another, allowing the officer quick access to an assigned site.
Having a full-time school officer at all 85 elementary schools would be like having “almost a whole new police department,” Carnes said last year.
While school officer vacancies have steadily decreased at Northside — last year the district had about 40 vacancies — positions are still hard to fill, but it’s not for a lack of budget, said district spokesperson Barry Perez.
“It’s a shortage of candidates for these positions. As positions get filled, the budget is adjusted to accommodate the new hires,” Perez said.
Security and monitoring services currently account for 1.04% of the district’s operating budget or about $11.3 million. Last year’s security budget was about $10.9 million.
Even as the budget increases, NISD’s police officers are taking on duties outside of their job descriptions to make up for the vacancies, Fryar said.
Police supervisors, for example, usually work behind desks doing paperwork, but they have to take on more duties “out in the field” to increase the department’s physical presence within NISD.
“We’re still doing it, and it’s working, but it’s kind of asking 150% when 100% is your job,” he said. “It just literally puts physical strain on officers that are having to do more than they normally do.”