The overview
CCISD Superintendent Karen Engle said at the panel the district has the following programs to ensure safe schools:
- A Positive behavior interventions systems, or PBIS, committee, which is used to support students’ “behavioral, academic, social, emotional and mental” well-being, according to the system’s website. Engle said this committee ensures students make good choices from the beginning of their schooling, and has resulted in less office referrals. At Bayside Intermediate, for example, Engle said since last year, office referrals have been cut in half with 108 office referrals this year compared to 222 referrals last year.
- Anonymous alerts, which allows any student or parent to notify district administration of any issues in an anonymous manner
- Threat assessment teams, which consists of three to 12 members on each campus to evaluate and monitor serious threats
- School liaison officers, or SLOs. Since 2018, CCISD has spent over $35 million on school safety, officials said. Part of that has included adding 20 SLOs, bringing the total number of SLOs at CCISD from 26 to 46 since 2017, according to the panel presentation.
District officials also discussed the effects fake school threats have on the educational environment.
Christopher Soyez, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI in Houston, said FBI Houston has received over 30 hoax school threats since the beginning of the 2024-25 school year.
CCISD Director of Counseling Kristina Ford said that when the district receives a threat, it becomes a collaborative effort between district administration, counselors and SLOs to work with the student that makes the threat through a threat interview—if appropriate to do so.
This threat interview is conducted with school counselors and is used to understand what the student is experiencing to determine next steps, whether that be to provide the student with mental health resources, or to work more with SLOs for additional support, Ford said.
Quote of note
Captain Julius Campbell, CCISD’s SLO division commander, said that when a school receives a threat, the district also contacts the parents of the student making the threat to ensure the student doesn’t have access to any weapons. Next, law enforcement will “arrest and prosecute [the student] to the fullest extent of the law” if the threat meets the elements of a criminal offense, he said.
“It’s really unfortunate that we’re even talking about this,” Campbell said. “Enough is enough. The days of parents coming to us saying ‘it’s just kids being kids’ is gone.”
Learn more
More information on school safety, including the panel presentation, can be found on the district’s website.
