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Longview ISD is well on its way to opening its own police department, and district leaders hope it is operational by the start of the 2026-27 school year.

Benjamin Kemper, the district’s chief of safety and a Longview High School graduate, said the department will provide additional protection for students.

“Keeping our kids safe is a top priority,” Kemper said. “It’s becoming kind of a new, popular thing for ISDs to create their own safety and security and police departments, just to make sure that they’ve got all the pieces in place to make sure their kids are safe.”

Longview trustees voted to create the department in May 2025. In October, Kemper, a former Longview Police Department assistant police chief, was hired as the chief of safety and has been working to organize the department. It will be the first school police department in the county.

The Gregg County Commissioners Court on Tuesday approved a memorandum of understanding between the district police department and the Gregg County Sheriff’s Office. The agreement establishes communication guidelines between agencies and a partnership among agencies, Kemper said.

School police departments are required to have agreements in place with local law enforcement agencies, Kemper said. Once those agreements are in place, he can ask the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement to begin a formal review process that allows the department to become a licensed police department. Kemper said he hopes to have that process complete by summer.

Across the nation, school violence has been on the rise in the past two decades, and school districts have been establishing their own police departments to prevent and combat it. School police departments allow on-site officers to respond to incidents quickly, Kemper said.

Longview ISD’s police force will include sworn law enforcement officers and school marshals. Sworn officers are traditionally trained and certified police officers. In Texas, school marshals are district employees who undergo 80 hours of training that allows them to carry a firearm on campus. They are similar to armed security guards.

School marshals’ responsibilities “are primarily to keep campuses safe, but their authorities pretty much lie in stopping things that could result in serious bodily injury or death,” Kemper said.

Sworn officers have the power to arrest, while school marshals do not.

Each LISD campus will have a school marshal, and sworn officers will be on the middle and high school campuses, Kemper said. He said he hopes to hire sworn officers during the summer. He’s already hiring school marshals because Texas law has permitted them to be district employees for more than a decade.

The district’s sworn officers have full law enforcement powers. Their jurisdiction – the area in which they can exercise those powers – matches the school district’s boundaries. That means they can make traffic stops in school zones and while driving between campuses, Kemper said.

“Our agency, at least, will have marked police units, and officers will be able to make traffic stops within those jurisdictional boundaries,” he said.

Kemper said he is working on the police department’s budget and did not say what officers would be paid.

“Regardless of what our budget is, we’re gonna hire the right people to put on the right campuses,” Kemper said. “Our primary focus is to provide a safe educational environment for our students to go to school and learn and not be in fear of something happening.”

Longview ISD Superintendent Dr. Marla Sheppard asked for Kemper’s guidance as she sought to establish the department, and she encouraged him to apply for the position as the district’s chief of safety, he said.

Kemper said the district is close to the finish line in terms of establishing the agency, and he hopes the department is ready to operate on the first day of the next school year.

“I’m excited about being here and building this police department from the ground up and creating a level of safety for our students and our staff on LISD campuses,” he said.