On July 25, Governor Greg Abbott announced the launch of a new school safety system called Sentinel. This new platform– designed to collect, process, store, and distribute school safety and security information– is housed within the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and is a part of ongoing school safety and security improvement measures.
We have written extensively about House Bill 3 from the most recent session but primarily in the context of requiring (but not fully funding) armed security officers on every public school campus. However, this legislation was more comprehensive in scope and requires TEA to establish an office of school safety and security, provide technical assistance to school districts to support the implementation and operation of safety and security requirements, and conduct district audits. Sentinel is the result.
In a letter to administrators, TEA described the components of the new monitoring system.
- School safety initiatives required by state statute, including intruder detection audits, behavioral threat assessments, district vulnerability assessments, and Emergency management
- Connecting data from multiple sources to provide a complete, accurate, and current dataset for data analysis and other applications and business processes
- Tools and resources that users can interact with or use to gain a better understanding of their work
- Processes designed to facilitate the functioning, optimization, and automation of the system
Among its capabilities, Sentinel is equipped with a mass communication feature that can transfer information out when emergencies happen to Texas’s more than 1,200 school districts.
Overall, this new system seems to be a long-overdue step in the right direction of greater organization and transparency regarding school safety at the state level. If utilized correctly, this can be a secure repository and access point for all districts to house both required and reliable historical data on safety. As one school district police chief pointed out, it can be a valuable resource for understaffed districts where the duty of safety falls to a campus or district leader without specialized training.
Systems of self-reported data are only as strong as the users who create and maintain them, so the effectiveness of Sentinel will depend not only on local districts but also the Texas School Safety Center and TEA’s Office of School Safety and Security to ensure this functions optimally.
Even though HB 3 and Senate Bill 30 pumped over $1 billion dollars into school safety, we know that districts are still lacking the support and staff necessary to implement it with fidelity. If Texas is serious about protecting its students, substantial new investments must be made to adequately fund all the mandates of HB 3. The Texas House Youth, Health, & Safety Committee is charged with reviewing the implementation of this bill before the next legislative session, but they have not announced a hearing. Similarly, the Senate Education Committee has a charge of reviewing “measures ensuring public school safety;” this, too, awaits a hearing.
It really should not have taken tragedies like the school shootings at Sante Fe and Uvalde (or Parkland or Newtown for that matter) for the state to prioritize student safety in this manner. Sentinel represents an important, but by no means singular, step in addressing the scope of work related to making our students, teachers, and communities feel safe and secure while on our school campuses. We sincerely hope lawmakers will address the critical and persistent problems of campus mental health and gun safety when they reconvene in January.