Uvalde School Board to hold termination hearing for school police chief Pete Arredondo on Wednesday

UVALDE, Texas - The Uvalde CISD school board will hold a termination hearing for school police chief Pete Arrendondo.

A notice from the school board says the meeting at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday will be open to the public.

The hearing has been put off twice at the request of Arrendondo's lawyers.

He is currently on unpaid leave from the district.  

The meeting comes less than two weeks before the first day of school in Uvalde.

Arredondo was one of the first members of law enforcement to respond to the shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 24.

Nineteen students and two teachers were killed, while officers waited for over an hour to engage the shooter.

Arrendondo's decisions during the police response to the shooting have been widely criticized.

At a Texas senate hearing in June, Col. Steve McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said, "The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering Room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children."

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Arredondo has said he did not believe he was the person in charge of the response.

He is only one of two known to have faced discipline out of the nearly 400 officers from various agencies involved in the law enforcement response. 

Arredondo resigned from his position on the Uvalde City Council earlier this year.

Arredondo, 50, grew up in Uvalde and spent much of his nearly 30-year career in law enforcement in the city.