NONPROFIT
2023 EDUCATION EDITION
Texas School Safety Center Nonpro t 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 nonpro t university-level research center—which was created in 1999 after the Columbine High School shooting—aims to provide a variety of training and research technical assis- tance to all K-12 public and charter schools as well as junior colleges. The TxSSC o ers 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, whose role is to oversee all of the center’s strategic e orts related to legislative mandates around safety and security for Texas, said TxSSC requires training 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 BY AMIRA VAN LEEUWEN
violence. Really [we’re] trying to get schools to understand how to imple- ment 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,” she said. The center’s research and evaluation team is a key component to evaluating the e ectiveness of each training program through pre- and post-testing and participant feedback. “We evaluate all of our trainings, all year long,” Martinez-Prather said. “It helps to inform our strategic plan- ning 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 participants to gather more data to 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 e orts 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 o cers. 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 di erent 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
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SOURCE: TEXAS SCHOOL SAFETY CENTER COMMUNITY IMPACT
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ROUND ROCK EDITION • AUGUST 2023
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