This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The Texas school district where 10 people were killed in a mass shooting in May has accepted donations of weapons and safety equipment before the new term, including eight AR-15 rifles.

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Trustees of the Santa Fe independent school district (ISD) voted to receive tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts on Monday night, including the anonymous local donation of $20,000 worth of rifles, ammunition, optical sights and weapons training courses for full-time officers in the district’s police department.

The district, and others across Texas, have been examining ways of improving school safety since the massacre.

In preparation for the start of the new school year on 20 August, Santa Fe ISD is increasing the size of its police department to 14 full-time officers, 10 part-time officers and five campus security assistants to serve about 5,000 students in four schools.

Officials said that a 17-year-old student armed with a shotgun and revolver legally owned by his father opened fire on an art class, killing eight teenagers and two teachers early on the morning of 18 May at Santa Fe high school, which is in a semi-rural area about 30 miles from central Houston.

Another 13 people were injured, some seriously. The suspect was arrested and charged with capital murder but cannot face the death penalty because of his age.

The district has not yet decided whether to adopt a programme such as the Guardian Plan, which allows some Texas teachers – typically in rural areas where the police response might be slow – to carry weapons.

“On the first day of school, the armed personnel will be the police officers. We will not have a programme in place for any armed teachers,” the school board president, JR Norman, said, according to the Galveston County Daily News.

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Though it was not on the agenda, the idea of arming educators – popular among many conservatives but opposed by most teachers according to a March survey – drew heated comments.

“Teachers are not soldiers – and I was a soldier in the US army for three years. The weapons in question need to be donated to the police department. Santa Fe ISD needs to keep guns out the classroom,” Rhonda Hart, the mother of one of the murdered students, Kimberly Vaughan, said in the meeting.

An anonymous letter from a student in favor of the concept was read out: “Will you finally allow our teachers to be armed? Had my teacher been armed that day there’s a chance he may have stopped this person … I know other students feel the same way.”

In May, the US Department of Education awarded a $1m grant to the school district to aid the recovery process. The foundation of the Houston Astros baseball team has provided $75,000, some of which will go towards protective vests for the police department.

The school board is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on building modifications including locks and panic buttons for classrooms. It has also accepted donated metal detectors. Officials also plan to enhance mental health services to help students affected by the shooting and identify students who may pose a safety risk.

The mass shooting came three months after 17 students and staff were killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida, but calls for gun reform were more muted in a largely conservative community in a Republican-led state.

Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor, is a staunch gun rights advocate who said in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy that “too many entrances and too many exits”, as opposed to too many weapons, might be compromising campus safety.

Another leading Texas Republican, governor Greg Abbott, was a speaker at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Dallas two weeks before the shooting. “The problem is not guns, it’s hearts without God,” he told the audience. “The answer to gun violence is not to take guns away, the answer is to strengthen the second amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.”

Abbott held roundtable discussions on school safety after the shooting, which produced proposals including better active shooter response training and threat assessment, altering school designs, increasing funds for mental health services and more law enforcement personnel and armed school marshals on campuses.

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However, Texas politicians appear unlikely to pass any laws that would limit access to guns, even for mentally ill people who are feared to pose an imminent threat.

Patrick last week dismissed the possibility of a Texas “red flag” law that would allow the court-ordered seizure of guns from people deemed potentially dangerous.

Patrick has, though, said that at its next session in 2019 the Texas legislature will take up a proposal of financial support for schools that want to install metal detectors.

Information from the Associated Press was used in this report