BCSO Growing Presence at Two San Antonio High Schools; public safety forums will be held
The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office plans to increase its presence at Southwest and Brennan High Schools for the remainder of the school year in response to growing drug and gun threats at the two schools.
The BCSO announced its intention to have more deputies in schools Sunday in a Facebook post, saying the bureau would create a school safety task force starting March 20.
The task force will be concentrated in areas within the Northside and Southwest independent school districts and will “augment” the efforts of both districts’ police forces. According to the BCSO’s Facebook post, “deputies, support staff and resources” will be “reassigned” to form this new task force, with support from other units of the sheriff’s office, including the mental health/SMART unit , the unit for gangs, the unit for organized crime, SCORE, traffic and patrol.
“We recognized that both districts share common issues that we believe all three agencies can work together to address,” Sheriff Javier Salazar said in the Facebook post.
Salazar plans to meet with the superintendents of the Northside and Southwest ISDs this week to discuss the needs of their districts.
The BCSO has also created an anonymous report line to report criminal activity in or near both schools, to be submitted by email to [email protected].
On March 9, a former student of Brennan High School in Northside was arrested and the school went into short lockdown, after police found a weapon in the former student’s backpack just outside the school.
The BCSO will be holding public forums in both districts over the next few days. In Northside, the two-hour forum will be held at Bennie L. Cole Elementary on Thursday, March 23, starting at 6:00 p.m. The Southwest forum has yet to be announced.
