Letter to the Hon. Mike Morath, Commissioner of the Texas Education Agency - Immediate Action To Address The Safety Of Texas Schools

Letter

Commissioner Morath:

All of Texas grieves the tragedy that occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last
week. As Governor, I take seriously the safety of all Texas residents, and as an American, I
mourn the loss of 17 Floridians in a cruel and senseless act of violence. State and national
leaders must work towards solutions that reduce, and eventually eliminate, such heinous crimes.
Education leaders, including you, must take immediate action to ensure that our school children
are safe in Texas schools. To help prevent tragedies like the Parkland shooting from happening
in our state. I ask that you take the following steps:

1. Catalog and share all available information from the Texas School Safety Center on
school safety programs and distribute this information to all school districts, charter
schools and education service centers across the state. To the extent possible, distribute
this information to private schools and childcare providers as well. The goal is to ensure
that all schools have access to the best, most up to date information about strategies to
protect schools and students from attacks like the one in Parkland.

2. Ensure that all Texas public schools have completed their statutorily required school
safety audits and have submitted confirmation of these audits to the Texas School Safety
Center. Also, ensure that all districts have a multi-hazard emergency operations plan in
place and ensure that schools have conducted safety and security audits on all facilities,
both instructional and non-instructional.

3. Publish on the Texas Education Agency website and via Agency press release a list of
any school districts that have not completed the statutory requirements referenced in
point two above within 45 days.

4. Work with the Texas School Safety Center, the Texas Department of Public Safety and
my office to draft recommendations to the Texas Legislature on changes to the school
safety architecture of our state. This could include:

increased quality controls on school safety audits and emergency operations
plans, including a mechanism for TEA intervention when audits or plans are
deemed inadequate;

requiring charter schools to be subject to the same school safety requirements of
school districts;

improvements to the school safety committee, including requiring certain local
and school officials to participate on the committee or requiring the committee to
submit findings to the school board;

required reporting procedures that school districts must follow when terroristic or
other threats are received, including provisions for parental notification of certain
threats; and

provisions for increasing the safety of portable buildings and school sporting
events.

Our first duty as a government is to protect our citizens from harm. These first steps must be
taken to keep our students and communities safe, with the understanding that more will be
expected in the ftiture.
Sincerely,

Source