North - Northwest Austin Edition | August 2023

NONPROFIT

Texas School Safety Center Nonprot provides training for school districts

D esignated by Chapter 37 of the Texas Education Code, the Texas School Safety Center, located at 400 W. Hopkins St., San Marcos, is meant to serve as the state’s central hub for school safety information. The nonprot university-level research center—which was created in 1999 after the Columbine High School shooting—aims to provide a variety of training and research assistance to all K-12 public and charter schools as well as junior colleges. The TxSSC oers a plethora of virtual and in-person training as well as self-paced courses, all of which are funded through four governmental entities, including the Texas Legis- lature, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, the Texas Department of State Health Services, and the Food and Drug Administra- tion’s Center for Tobacco Products. Since the programs and training receive outside funding, they are at no cost to Texas teachers or districts. Director Kathy Martinez-Prather, who oversees all of the center’s strategic eorts related to legislative mandates around safety and security for Texas, said TxSSC requires train- ing focused on threat assessment. “We spend a lot of our time and a lot of our work on prevention, mitigation and preparedness,” Martinez-Prather said. “We want to prevent these things from happening in the rst place—any sort of act of violence. [We’re] trying to get schools BY AMIRA VAN LEEUWEN

to understand how to implement the threat assessment process with delity and to look at it as a tool to identify individuals before they get on a pathway to violence and intervene with early intervention.” The center’s research and evaluation team is a key component to evaluating the eectiveness of each training program through pre- and post-testing and participant feedback, Marti- nez-Prather said. “We evaluate all of our trainings, all year long,” she said. “It helps to inform our strategic planning for the following year, but we also do a statewide needs assessment every spring. We ask questions about training needs, topic areas that need to be covered.” The center implements three-, six- and nine-month follow-ups with entities who participated in trainings to gather more data and understand whether there were any takeaways. Martinez-Prather also noted the center has seen trends with Texas school districts hiring directors of school safety, creating district police departments and increasing school marshals since 2019. “We’re seeing a lot of physical security measures being put in,” she said. “We’re also seeing a lot of preventative eorts being addressed in school settings when it comes to the threat assessment processes.” Educators interested in signing up for courses can visit https://registry.txssc.txstate.edu.

The Texas School Safety Center organizes training sessions on domestic violence with school- based law enforcement ocers. TRAINING EDUCATORS PHOTOS COURTESY THE TEXAS SCHOOL SAFETY CENTER

The Texas School Safety Center provides over 300 trainings each school year in anywhere from 25-30 dierent topic areas, including:

Introduction to School Safety Audits

Severe Weather Annex

TxSSC often collaborate with other organizations on school safety initiatives.

Active Threat Annex

Texas School Safety Center 400 W. Hopkins St., San Marcos 512-245-8082 Hours: Mon.-Fri. 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

School Behavioral Threat Assessment

Digital Threat Assessment (prerequisite)

Charter School Safety & Security Requirements

SOURCE: TEXAS SCHOOL SAFETY CENTER COMMUNITY IMPACT

HALF-DAY PRESCHOOL 18mos-5yrs | 8:30-12:30 2, 3, or 5 days/week Optional “Nap & Snack” until 3:00 The joy of learning through play in a nurturing environment NOW ENROLLING • OPEN YEAR-ROUND 12233 RR 620 N - SUITE 201 AUSTIN 78750 | 512.243.6539 www.nicholsonECEcenter.com

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austincc.edu

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