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Texas School Safety Center and TEA brief committee on biennial report, EOP reviews, intruder-audits and new Sentinel system
Summary
Texas School Safety Center director Kathy Martinez Prather and TEA's James Finley told the committee the center's training and TEA's audits have expanded statewide and that TEA's new Sentinel system will host audits, a document repository and a standardized behavioral-threat-assessment tool with automated transfer capabilities.
Kathy Martinez Prather, director of the Texas School Safety Center at Texas State University, and James Finley, deputy chief for school safety at the Texas Education Agency, presented a joint update on school safety work and statutory implementation.
Martinez Prather summarized the center's training and technical-assistance activities: a statewide learning portal with self-paced EOP and threat-assessment courses (more than 96,000 completions through fiscal 2024), 10 online toolkits, bullying-prevention videos and a new youth-ambassador effort to engage students in prevention and positive social norms. The center said it reviewed 100% of basic EOPs in a statewide review cycle and a random selection of annexes (severe-weather and hazardous-materials in the last cycle); deficiencies were addressed with follow-up. The center also published an aggregate safety-and-security-audit report for districts and charters and is compiling the next audit cycle.
Finley outlined TEA's Office of School Safety work: the intruder-detection audit (exterior doors sampling and full-door sweeps where required) and district vulnerability assessments (DVAs) that examine plans, drills, operational policies, facilities and staff preparedness. TEA organized the state into seven safety sectors with regional agents to deliver on-site technical assistance and to liaise with local law enforcement and emergency-management partners. Agents will complete 100% of applicable campus intruder-detection audits in the current cycle and a statutory random-sample proportion of DVAs; TEA plans aggregate reporting on findings.
Finley described Sentinel, a state web platform TEA launched to host intruder-audit and DVA reports, a document repository, door-sweep tracking and event notifications. Sentinel will also house the new standardized behavioral-threat-assessment (BTA) tool: teams must use Sentinel for BTA reporting starting Aug. 1; the platform automates parental-notification templates, documents interventions and will permit transfer of BTA records when a student changes enrollment. Finley said Sentinel pilots concluded and TEA will open the BTA module to districts in mid-April. Committee members asked about trustee access to Sentinel records, data privacy, whether records follow students indefinitely and whether parents can view BTA contents; TEA replied that districts control access, parents receive findings and conclusions (not necessarily entire reports) and that BTAs are retained in the K—2 space but are viewable as required under statute for transfers.
