Joshua Bodenback usually starts his evening patrol shifts by downing a bright pink guava strawberry energy drink. He says it’s the only way to get him through the long nights patrolling the school zones of San Antonio Independent School District.
Bodenback is a sergeant with SAISD’s police department overseeing a team of school patrol units. His job is supposed to be mostly administrative, but he’s often in the field, taking calls and running interference during the busy hours of school dismissals.
He has the 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. shift, but his work days often run much longer.
“We’re picking up a lot of end-of-day calls. We also get lots of missing kids around this time,” Bodenback said, steering a police vehicle through the district’s Southtown area.
The school day may be ending for SAISD students and staff, but the calls never slow down for Bodenback.
In the two hours the San Antonio Report rode with Bodenback on Sept. 11, he received calls about a 9/11 joke, a tip about a student with possible access to a gun, a fire alarm that went off and status updates on a secure campus lockdown, which means students aren’t allowed to leave classrooms or buildings while city police search for someone in the area.
“No day is the same,” he said.
A police department like any other
SAISD’s police department functions 24/7, and officers have almost as much jurisdiction as the San Antonio Police Department.
The district encompasses 79 square miles, stretching from San Antonio’s downtown core to the far South Side and East Side and serving more than 80 different schools and about 44,000 students.
The only types of calls district police pass over are domestic violence calls and DWIs, Bodenback said. However, school officers can pull drivers over, hand out traffic tickets and make arrests, especially if those incidents could potentially affect school safety.
During the 2024-25 school year, SAISD officers made about 200 arrests in cases ranging from incidents of assault to drugs and trespassing charges.
Bodenback, like other officers, sometimes act as a traffic cop, especially during the first weeks of school. Often, just parking his patrol vehicle near schools during dismissal is enough to encourage more compliance with school zone driving laws.
When does SAISD have jurisdiction?
Under SAISD protocol, school officers must respond to a number of incidents:
- off-campus calls when the immediate safety of a student or staff member is at risk
- incidents directly tied to school activities
- a pursuit or continuation of an on-campus incident
- “mutual aid requests” from local police agencies when an incident involves district students, staff or facilities.
These calls also have different levels of priority: immediate response, response as resources allow and those that are generally referred to other agencies.
Immediate responses include calls with threats or violence on campus, serious contraband, crimes against persons and active emergencies like shootings, fires and bomb threats.
Earlier this year, the department arrested a Rhodes Middle School student on terrorism charges for threatening to carry out a school shooting. SAISD police previously investigated the student’s online activity and were tipped off by a relative who found weapons in their home.
Officers acted immediately and arrested the student, who was wearing tactical gear and had ammunition in his possession at the time.
Sgt. Joshua Bodenbach walks through the halls of the Cooper Learning Center on Sept. 11, 2025. Credit: Diego Medel / San Antonio Report
“Whenever we hear a whiff of a weapon, or someone threatens to shoot someone else, we get involved and do threat assessments to figure out what’s going on,” Bodenback said.
Most threat assessments don’t turn anything up. Just the day before the ride-along with Bodenback, he conducted four threat assessments during a single shift.
School officers may also increase their presence in certain school areas or prioritize certain calls following incidents where students or staff were in danger.
Last month, a student at Hot Wells Middle School reported an attempted abduction near the campus while waiting for their ride after school. Bodenback was the responding officer.
In the days after, he said the district increased its patrol units around the school to find security gaps and act proactively.
“As a department, we try not to be so reactive,” Bodenback explained.
In the Hot Wells case, police found the attempted kidnapping happened at an intersection few students use to walk home or wait for their rides, marking it as a more vulnerable spot.
SAISD officers also take charge of the district’s bus crash reports, a task Bodenback said used to fall on the city’s police department. So far this school year, SAISD has documented 10 minor bus accidents.
Other agencies also take over when a case involves major crimes like homicide and robbery or specialized investigations like narcotics trafficking or gang activity.
Effects of new legislation
In his nine years on the job, Bodenback says the most important part of his role is knowing how to adapt, especially as new school safety laws go into effect almost every other year and the district deals with 29 vacancies.
After the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, the state passed a law requiring all school to have some sort of armed guard on campus, only giving schools $15,000 per campus and $20 per student to fund school safety.
This year, the state more than doubled its per campus safety allotment, which could help school districts get closer to meeting the 2022 mandate.
SAISD also closed 15 campuses last year due to declining enrollment, potentially reducing the number of armed guards the district needs to employ.
SAISD police Sgt. Joshua Bodenbach patrols in his vehicle on Sept. 11, 2025. Credit: Diego Medel / San Antonio Report
SAISD currently serves about 44,000 students across more than 80 campuses.
It’s important to note, however, that SAISD police “more steadily” patrol the neighborhoods where closed campuses are located since the public knows those buildings are vacant, potentially attracting criminal behaviors, Bodenback explained.
School districts who can’t meet the hiring requirements due to their size or budget can fill out “good cause exemptions,” which provide alternative security plans that still meet the state’s minimum school safety standards.
The district qualified for a two-year exemption in 2023 set to end this month. Since then, the district has hired eight new officers after implementing an “aggressive recruitment plan,” district spokesperson Laura Short told the Report last year.
Having police vacancies is also not for a lack of budget.
With current legislative funding, SAISD added 15 positions to the police department’s budget, taking its vacancy rate from 14 to 29 spots. The problem, experienced by most law enforcement agencies, is a lack of qualified candidates in the hiring pipeline.
Currently, the district has commitments from eight cadets who will be joining the department in the coming months and six police officer openings listed on its hiring website. The listing says applicants must have a Texas Commission on Law Enforcement License or be currently enrolled in a police academy.
Cadets who commit to three years with SAISD receive $4,000 in tuition reimbursement and a $3,000 signing bonus.
“Our participation in resource and career fairs, outreach to military veteran organizations, and social media marketing further our recruitment efforts,” Short said. “If we still are unable to recruit enough officers, we will use the legislative allocation for other safety and security initiatives.”
The vacancies have a physical effect on Bodenback, whose shifts often run longer than what he’s scheduled for. Recently, he worked 16 hours straight after getting several high-priority calls in one night. The shift before he spoke with the Report, he didn’t get off until almost midnight even though his shift was supposed to end two hours earlier.
Having more bodies in the department would give the district more coverage and give him more work-life balance, Bodenback admits, but he doesn’t think he could ever do another job. He joined the school police department because he wanted to help people.
“That’s why I love this place. That’s why I won’t go anywhere else,” he said.