HB 33

"What You Need to Know About HB 33 – The “Uvalde Strong Act”

After the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas lawmakers passed HB 33—meant to improve how we prepare for and respond to school shootings. The idea sounds good: harden our schools, improve training, and prevent another failure. As a veteran, I understand what it means to defend soft targets. Our kids should never be vulnerable.

But when you look closer at this bill, it becomes clear: HB 33 is not just about protecting students—it’s also about protecting institutions from accountability, and giving politicians and law enforcement agencies more money and more power without oversight.

Here’s what the bill does:

✅ Requires every Texas school to have a breaching tool and ballistic shield on campus
✅ Mandates yearly emergency response meetings between schools and first responders
✅ Tells police and EMS to file reports after a school shooting
✅ Creates a new statewide training program at Texas State University
✅ Offers $25,000 grants to police departments that get accredited by approved third parties

Sounds good, right? But here’s what they didn’t put in the headlines:

🚫 The public is no longer allowed to see what went wrong.
Reports about how police responded in a school shooting? Now exempt from public records laws. Meetings to review those failures? No longer subject to the Open Meetings Act.

🚫 The money flows through the Governor’s Office—no scoring, no independent review.
Police departments get accreditation grants directly from the Governor’s Criminal Justice Division. There’s no guarantee the best departments get funding—just those that check the right boxes or have the right connections.

🚫 There’s no guaranteed funding for schools.
Schools are forced to buy new equipment, but the state doesn’t promise to pay for it. That means local taxpayers or education budgets will cover the difference.

🚫 There’s no independent oversight.
The Legislative Budget Board and State Auditor aren’t required to review where the money goes or how well the program works. This creates an opaque funding pipeline that’s invisible to the public.

🚫 The same agencies that failed in Uvalde now define the rules.
DPS and TDEM—the very organizations whose coordination was questioned after Uvalde—get even more control under this bill. They define what counts as an “active shooter” and decide how reports are structured.

So who really benefits?
✅ Law enforcement agencies get access to new state grant money
✅ Accreditation companies and consultants get paid to “verify” police agencies
✅ Training vendors and equipment suppliers get guaranteed business
✅ The Governor’s Office gets to control millions in funding—without legislative review

And who loses?

❌ Schools with tight budgets
❌ Parents and families who want transparency
❌ Taxpayers who expect oversight and results

Bottom line: HB 33 looks like a school safety bill. But it’s also a political tool—a way to shift power upward, avoid public scrutiny, and spend millions without the checks and balances Texans deserve. It strengthens institutions—not necessarily the students those institutions are supposed to protect.

If we’re going to make schools safer, we need real transparency, local control, and public oversight. Anything less is just politics dressed up as protection."