Texas Education Agency says no full-time staff focused on school safety

The Commissioner of the Texas Education Agency disclosed today that none of his staff are devoted full-time to improving school safety in the state.

This revelation came at a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Violence in Schools and School Security, which meets this week to discuss plans to prevent another mass school shooting like the one that happened in Santa Fe last month.

Under questioning by Texas senators, Education Commissioner Mike Morath said, “There is both capacity weakness and regulatory weakness for us in the area of school safety.”

He added that his agency has “a quarter of an FTE devoted to school safety at present.” FTE stands for “full-time equivalent” and is a ratio that represents the number of hours that an employee works compared to a typical workweek of 40 hours a week.

So 0.5 FTE represents a half-time worker while a quarter of an FTE represents about ten working hours or one long workday per week that an employee at the Texas agency is looking at the issue of school safety. Morath stressed, “The total amount of agency capacity in the 800 or so FTEs is one quarter of one person’s time.”

Under the Texas education system, local school boards have significant control over how schools are run and secured, but during the hearing today one of the lawmakers expressed concern that the Education Agency should take a greater leadership role following the school shooting last month.

Senator Eddie Lucio, Jr, Democrat of Brownsville, told Morath, “I believe in local control.. but I also believe there is so much infighting in some of our school boards that they don’t have time to look at some issues… like school shootings.”

“I feel very strongly that your agency should take some sort of leadership role to ensure we have some kind of plan,” he said, before adding that he thinks it will cost school districts and the state significantly to improve school safety. “This is going to be costly just like 9/11 was costly,” Lucio said, referring to the changes made to federal airport security systems after the terrorist attack nearly two decades ago.

Morath’s agency says it is a focal point for implementing some of the recommendations in Governor’s Greg Abbott’s recently announced school safety action plan. But this role is largely limited to dissemination of information on existing programs. Last Friday, for example, the education agency sent a letter to school administrators informing them of training opportunities, funding opportunities, mental health services, and training for the state school marshals program.

The Agency is also involved in coordinating between a federal funding program for school safety improvements and local school districts.

Legislative hearings on school safety will also be addressing questions of gun safety and access, school architecture, school marshals, fire alarms and active shooter alarms, and other topics relating to the governor’s safety plan.