Thursday, June 02, 2022

Situation Normal All F….

 Pay attention, this gets ridiculous real fast:

Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday instructed state school security and education officials to start conducting “in-person, unannounced, random intruder detection audits on school districts” to find weak access points and see how quickly staff can enter a school building without being stopped. 
The mandate was one of several the governor laid out in a letter to school security authorities in an effort to ensure district emergency operations plans are solid and school buildings are protected in the wake of the Uvalde school massacre that left 19 children and two adults dead. 
In his letter to Texas School Safety Center director Kathy Martinez-Prather on Wednesday, Abbott said the tragedy in Uvalde last week demands more action. 
“The State must work beyond writing words on paper and ensuring that the laws are being followed; it must also ensure that a culture of constant vigilance is engrained in every campus and in every school district employee across the state,” he said.

Let’s just compare Abbott’s idea to reality: 

The Texas Education Agency flagged that the Texas School Safety Center has a toolkit for districts to audit their own security practices, which state that facility staff should be unaware of the assessment and it should be unannounced. 
"It is highly suggested that a member of the law enforcement jurisdiction and a district level administrator be notified of the assessment in the event someone calls in from the school, facility, district, or community in response to the intruder," the toolkit states. The TEA did not immediately answer questions about its role in these audits and whether the agency has conducted similar audits before.

In short, Rep. Bernal is right: this is a terrible idea. But let’s go back to Abbott’s statement about statewide ISD compliance. 

In 2019, state lawmakers passed a package of school security laws including a law that gave the school safety center the authority to audit the school district’s emergency operations plans. 
Under that law, if a school district does not satisfactorily submit an emergency operation plan, they must notify the community in a public meeting. If they do not hold such a meeting, the TEA can take over school leadership, according to Abbott’s letter. 
An audit conducted by the center in 2020 found only 67 school districts out of 1,022 had viable emergency operations plans. Meanwhile, just 200 districts had active-shooter policies, while an additional 196 school districts had policies that auditors deemed insufficient.

So basically 955 ISD’s are out of compliance, and TEA has done nothing about it, and won’t anytime soon. TEA is not going to take over one school district anytime soon, much less almost 1000. And they’ve had three years to enforce compliance. They aren’t going to get it done by September, but neither does Abbott direct them to. They’re an independent agency with elected leadership. The Safety Council is maybe a state agency because the Lege started giving it money after it had begun at a state university to help schools with safety issues. It has no enforcement authority. That’s with TEA. But Abbott isn’t directing TEA to enforce state law.

This is just more farce, as Rep. Bernal pointed out:

SNAFU.

FUBAR.
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