Enrique Granados is thrilled that his son, 14-year-old Sebastian, was accepted into Dallas ISD’s Trini Garza Early College High School for the upcoming school year.

Granados knows firsthand what an opportunity this will be. His older son, also named Enrique, went to Trini Garza, with classes taking place at Mountain View Community College. He graduated this summer with both a high school diploma and an associate’s degree in hand, and will study biomedical sciences at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley in the fall.

Going from middle school to high school can be a big jump for any kid. But the early college model offers some unique challenges — Sebastian will jump straight into college classes and be treated, in many ways, like an adult.

He also faces the possibility of being around handguns at Mountain View. A change in the state’s campus carry law — which allows licensed gun owners to carry concealed handguns on public university campuses — went into effect at the state’s two-year public colleges Tuesday.

“Now, I know a child has no business having a gun or being around a gun,” Granados said. “But we took the chance in enrolling him — because we knew he was going to be with adults, taking classes. The pros and cons are there, but I think because of my oldest son, we see that the benefit is bigger" than the risk.

Kids on campus

There’s been a long-standing prohibition of firearms on K-12 campuses — not just in Texas, but across the U.S. — but this expansion of the law muddles things, since high school students are increasingly present on community college campuses.

According to the Texas Education Agency, 84,000 Texas high school students will participate in 198 early college programs in the upcoming school year. Early colleges allow students to be dually enrolled in high school and college classes.

Not all of those students will be affected by the change. Depending on the school district’s model, students could take some, all or none of their dual-credit classes on a local community college campus.

Dallas ISD will have nearly 1,000 students on Dallas County Community College District campuses for 2017-18. In three years, when DISD’s 23 early high schools grow to capacity, nearly 6,000 DISD students — mostly juniors and seniors — will be on community college campuses full time.

Cedar Hill, DeSoto and Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISDs have similar dual-credit partnerships with DCCCD. Austin ISD has close to 400 students on local community college campuses.

Other districts — such as Pharr-San Juan and Brownsville ISDs in the Rio Grande Valley, the second- and third-largest early college programs behind DISD — hold classes almost exclusively at school district buildings.

‘Congregation of minors’

When Senate Bill 11 was crafted in 2015, high school students weren’t directly addressed — despite the growing prevalence of early college high school programs.

“Yeah, you would have thought the Legislature would have taken that up,” said Lauretta Hill, DCCCD’s commissioner of public safety.

Instead, community colleges and early high school programs waited for clarification before crafting their policies. They found direction in a November 2016 opinion by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

While community and junior colleges could establish “reasonable rules” that account for the uniqueness of each campus — including areas where a “congregation of minors” is present — restrictions couldn’t serve as a blanket prohibition on concealed handguns, Paxton wrote.

According to research by Ethan Greenberg, a fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures, Georgia’s concealed carry law, passed in May, is the only one in the country to codify protections for early college high school students. The protections aren’t much different from Paxton’s opinion, however.

Have and have not

After two surveys, 40 meetings with students, faculty and staff, and consultation with school districts, DCCCD put together its plan.

It’s understandably piecemeal, given Paxton’s constraints. Certain classrooms may be designated gun-free zones, but only during classes exclusively attended by high-schoolers, Hill explained.

Such prohibitions wouldn’t exist in classes mixed with high school and college students, but DISD and the community college district rejected the idea of trying to isolate students.

“The whole point of having a college experience for high school kids is to indoctrinate them into a college environment,” Hill said. “So, to go back the opposite way because of the law, that would take back what we were trying to do with these colleges.”

Handguns might be excluded in some offices and common spaces but allowed in others, depending on whether the areas were exclusively used for high school students and ISD staff. Usamah Rodgers, DISD’s assistant superintendent of strategic initiatives and partnerships, said the number of gun-free spaces varied at each community college campus.

“Dallas County Community College District will develop signage for those locations that handguns are prohibited, much like our high school campuses,” Rodgers said.

1 / 2A sign along a wall of lockers at Wright L. Lassiter Jr. Early College High School at El Centro College in downtown Dallas says that handguns are prohibited.(Ron Baselice / Staff Photographer) 2 / 2Firearm prohibited sign posted in a hallway at Dr. Wright L. Lassiter Jr. Early College High School at El Centro College R Building in downtown Dallas, Texas photographed Tuesday July 25, 2017. (Ron Baselice/ The Dallas Morning News) (Ron Baselice / Staff Photographer)

Training for staff is underway. Parents have been notified by letter before the start of classes, and DCCCD held an informational session for students and parents last week.

The message they hope to express is simple.

“The policy is that it’s concealed — so it should not be visible at all,” Rodgers said.

Real world or safe haven?

For concealed carry proponents like Brian Bensimon, Southwest regional director for Students for Concealed Carry on Campus and a University of Texas student, restrictions like these are too invasive.

“High school students who take dual-credit college courses are in the presence of [licensed-to-carry] holders when they go to shopping malls, movie theaters, state museums, and a wide variety of areas open to the public,” he wrote. “This means when a teen is dropped off in a museum or a public library, they are entering the real world. The same is true for college campuses.”

There were 1.15 million active concealed handgun license holders at the end of 2016, Texas Department of Public Safety records show.

Opponents of campus carry, however, see the law as a threat to child safety.

"I feel for the parents whose high-schoolers are ready for the challenge of college-level classes but do not want to be faced with the threat of guns in their classrooms,” said Amanda Johnson, a Dallas-based volunteer for the Texas chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. “Schools should be safe havens, and classrooms should be places focused on just one thing: learning. Instead, our Legislature has sentenced us to this."

Over the past year, when concealed carry was legalized at four-year public universities, the new law showed little impact. A recent review of gun-related incidents on campuses by the Texas Tribune found "no sharp increase in violence or intimidation."

Hill said DCCCD will keep statistics and anecdotal information about any incidents and will revisit its policies within two years.

“If we have that type of hard and anecdotal information, that might be something that we can share with [future Legislatures], and say ‘OK, this has been our experience, dealing with our increased populations of high school students. Is this something you would look at to reconsider?’” Hill said.

Granados said he has confidence in both DISD and DCCCD to “do a good job.”

“I’m not concerned,” he said. “I feel safe with his school; I know they are going to do right. And I trust my son, too. I know he’ll do the right thing. I know they’re going to train him on what to do if something might happen.”