In light the recent passage of House Bill 3, which requires schools to have armed personnel on all campuses, Community Impact interviewed Martinez-Prather to see what measures including the latest legislative acts are being implemented to keep schools secure. She has more than 15 years of experience working with schools in developing research-based guidance and tools for educators and school-based law enforcement to improve the safety and security of schools.
This interview has been edited for length, style and clarity.
What types of data and research does your organization lean on to inform its work, and when did it begin?
We do a lot of work that focuses on prevention and mitigation, ... and so we're big proponents, and we're charged [by] law to provide school behavioral threat assessment training—that is an evidence-based approach to violence prevention in schools.
Has the way school districts approach safety changed since recent incidents in Santa Fe and Uvalde?
In 2019, after the Santa Fe High School shooting, Texas passed legislation that requires every district in the state of Texas to ensure that every campus has access to a school behavioral threat assessment team. Now, threat assessment isn't new. ... [It is] something that is used by the Secret Service to identify individuals who pose a threat to our president and other elected officials, and so it's born out of a collaboration of applying these concepts in a school setting, which school districts have already been doing.
When you think about threat assessment, we often think we're waiting for someone to make a threat and we act, ... and part of that process is determining, “Is this threat credible, or is it not credible?” If it's credible, ... the next step is making sure we have a group of multidisciplinary folks because of the requirement in [school safety] laws.
So how important are active shooter drills for schools and students?
We don't want to create more trauma, but there is utility to drilling and exercising. It's got to be age appropriate. And what we want our students and our staff to understand is creating that muscle memory, of being second nature, of what we do when we go into these types of situations.
So by law, every school district is required to conduct a certain amount of drills with a certain amount of frequency. We don't call them “active shooter” drills—the terminology that we use is “lockdown” drills, ... and in them we're focusing on ... turning the lights off, locking the door, [staying] out of sight.
What impact will House Bill 3 have as it requires armed personnel in schools?
The law requires to the greatest extent practicable ... that threat assessment teams encompass various areas of expertise—law enforcement being one of them [or someone with a] mental health background. And so the idea here as part of the evidence-based approach to threat assessment is making sure you have a multidisciplinary group of folks.
And it's not just an [armed] law enforcement officer. It's also not just an assistant principal who typically deals with discipline. You’ve got school districts out there such as Marfa that are very different [in size and resources] from Dallas ISD, ... so [they have to] think about what resources they have.
What other best practices does the Texas School Safety Center recommend?
I will say that school safety is a layered approach. ... There is no one end all be all to it. And so it touches everything from the prevention side ... to ensure that school districts are preparing and working with their local first responders to ensure a more effective response should they ever have an active threat.
The approach that we take at the center is that in order to have a very successful school safety program, you've got to be thinking about these things from all phases of that emergency management cycle.
What are some additional solutions that could prevent future school shootings in Texas?
Sometimes [a student] brings a weapon to school; there's going to be a law enforcement intervention. But at the end of the day, we want to make sure that student is getting connected with ... mental health, campus [and] district administrators, everybody—triaging, if you will, this situation from a different perspective—ultimately to determine what is the best intervention to make sure that this individual gets off a pathway to violence. And I think that often, the idea is we're going to implement punitive measures.
What are some less obvious potential threats to school safety that educators and parents should be aware of?
If we notice that little Jimmy used to be a very outgoing student but has become very reclusive; he's not talkative; we've seen a change in him, in his hygiene, in his demeanor, his attitude—what is going on with this kid now? There hasn't been a threat made, but this is an opportunity to intervene right now and figure out what's going on.
Because it could be that this individual is experiencing suicidal ideation, and we need to intervene right now. That's part of what the threat assessment team is charged to do, and that's what our training that we provide across the state focuses on.
