Local police coordination concerns arise for EISD following September incidents

“Although it wasn’t happening in our district, it affected a lot of our students because it was so close,” Greer said.

In both cases, Greer said EISD faced a similar problem: cross-agency coordination in dispatch services.

Following the situations in September, officials in EISD and the city of Rollingwood are calling for better local police dispatch coordination.

The issue

Within EISD boundaries, there are five separate police jurisdictions: West Lake Hills, Rollingwood, Travis County Sheriff's Office and two Austin Police Department sectors. In practice, this means dispatchers must monitor several separate channels to understand what’s happening within district boundaries.

Additionally, when it comes to dispatch services, the jurisdictions within EISD are dispatched by three separate agencies.

Police services for West Lake Hills and Rollingwood are dispatched by the Travis County Sheriff's Office on one channel. Austin Police Department is dispatched out of the city of Austin-owned Combined Transportation, Emergency, and Communications Center, or CTECC, with each sector having its own channel.

Meanwhile, Eanes ISD is dispatched out of Lakeway—a move made out of necessity after Travis County was unable to provide services, Greer said.

In September, Rollingwood Mayor Gavin Massingill expressed concerns about the current system. Similar to EISD, the city was also not directly notified of the Sept. 10 incident, despite being directly across from Zilker Park. Additionally, only some of Rollingwood’s residents received "shelter in place" warnings; of the warnings they did get, the messaging was conflicting, Massingill said.

Conflicting messaging was from the responding agencies, Austin ISD and APD, resulting in "shelter in place" warnings being lifted too early, according to Community Impact reporting. Officials with both agencies have since been working to improve emergency communications by increasing coordination and standardizing the language used between agencies, according to a Dec. 1 presentation from Austin Emergency Management.

The city of Rollingwood has also been in communication with city of Austin officials to work out issues experienced in the communication process, Massingill said.

The why

Prior to creating its own police department in 2023, EISD previously had a contract with Travis County for two school resource officers, or SROs, according to previous Community Impact reporting.

EISD Police Department was created in response to Senate Bill 3, a bill passed in 2023 that requires each public school campus to have at least one armed security officer. Currently, the force includes nine officers alongside Greer.

When an agency is created, it can be more cost-effective to partner with other agencies to receive dispatch services, rather than a smaller agency doing dispatch itself, Greer said.

For this reason, EISD asked Travis County Sheriff’s Office, or TCSO, officials to provide dispatch services to the district but was denied. That’s when EISD turned to Lakeway for services instead.

“What doesn’t make sense is for our responding agencies that are adjacent to our school district to not be dispatched through the same dispatch that the school district is,” Massingill said at a Sept. 17 Rollingwood City Council meeting.

Although TSCO already provides dispatch services to a variety of smaller surrounding entities, in 2023, the agency was flooded with new requests from other school districts creating their own police forces, a Nov. 10 statement from TSCO states.

“All of the ISDs in which TCSO formerly had SROs requested dispatch services for the new police departments they created. Consider how much additional radio traffic is generated when you apply that level of increase to all the other ISDs in our jurisdiction,” the statement said. “TCSO desires to assist law enforcement agencies throughout Travis County in absolutely any way we can, but we had to respectfully decline the requests due to lack of capacity.”

Agencies who receive dispatch services through Travis County pay the county for those services. In fiscal year 2025-26, the city of Rollingwood budgeted $45,595 to receive dispatch services through Travis County, while West Lake Hills budgeted $194,611.

“Not only do we have to pay for [dispatch services], we have a 15% [increase] in that contract with them for them to provide those services,” Massingill said. “So for them to tell Eanes ISD that they won’t dispatch for them does not sit well with me, to say the least.”

Next steps

Moving forward, Greer said he would like to have a meeting with all local stakeholders to discuss solutions.

“Ultimately the safest solution is to have agencies within the same geographic area on the same channel,” Greer said in an email. “If that isn’t possible, then dispatchers should be collocated to promote immediate information sharing. Unfortunately the issue is complicated, and implementing a solution may be difficult.”

One potential solution floated by Lakeway Chief of Police Glen Koen at a regional school safety event was housing TSCO’s west radio channel out of Lakeway Police Department, Greer said, which would allow TSCO dispatch to community directly with Lakeway dispatch and reduce communication delays between agencies in the area.

“The door isn’t closed on this, but we have to work together to figure out the funding, and overcome technical obstacles like additional radio channels and other operability requirements that make dispatching for additional agencies impossible for TCSO at this time,” TSCO Sheriff Sally Hernandez said in a statement.

As far as emergency notifications for residents in the area, Massingill recommended residents sign up for the city’s Rave Mobile Safety Alert system, which sends city-specific notifications for local emergency events.

CTECC officials did not respond to requests for comment, and Massingill did not respond to a request for updated comments as of press time.