The Texas School Safety Center at Texas State received a $1.4 million dollar grant to fund training for teacher safety.
The training, which will be available for all K-12 public and charter schools in the state, will focus on teaching school administrators how to handle incidents of teachers being assaulted or harassed.
“We partnered with colleagues at UTSA who have been doing some research on teacher victimization, and from that data, they found that teacher victimization does have an impact on school climate,” Kathy Martinez-Prather, the director of the Texas School Safety Center said.
According to Martinez-Prather, the Texas School Safety Center, located on West Hopkins Street, was created by the Texas Legislature in response to the Columbine High School Shooting. The center’s mission is to oversee all aspects of school safety.
The new training will expand on the research center’s mission of making Texas schools safer.
“Our charge is to provide training, research and technical assistance,” Martinez-Prather said. “We review every emergency operations plan for every school district, charter school and junior Community College.”
A National Institute of Justice (NIJ) study led by the University of Texas San Antonio and Rochester Institute of Technology surveyed 1,628 high school and middle school teachers in Texas. Just 17% of teachers surveyed said they had experienced no form of victimization at the end of the four-year study.
According to Martinez-Prather, teacher victimization affects teacher retention in school districts, but also whether teachers choose to change professions entirely. The NIJ study backs this, with 42% of teachers leaving the profession before the study was completed.
Texas is currently facing a decrease in the number of teachers. The decline has forced some school districts to turn to hiring uncertified teachers. According to a study from the UT School of Education, 52% of newly hired teachers in the 2023 school year were uncertified.
According to a press release emailed to The Star by Sen. John Cornyn’s office, some of the grant funding comes from the Department of Justice’s STOP School Violence Program created by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
According to the release, the program behind the grant is aimed at ensuring the safety of students and teachers in response to the Uvalde school shooting.
“The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is about mental health, school safety and ensuring that the tragedy that struck Uvalde was not in vain,” Cornyn wrote in the release. “I’m grateful this law is giving schools across our state the resources needed to keep students, staff, and teachers safe.”
In the NIJ study, 48% of teachers who were physically victimized reported that they were dissatisfied with the response of school administrators.
“The researchers concluded that the quality of school decision-making and treatment of teacher victimization reports correlates positively with a substantial increase in teachers’ satisfaction with schools’ responses,” the study wrote.
The training the Texas School Safety Center is working on aims to improve the experience of teachers when they report victimization by better training administrators to deal with it.
“We’ll work through different scenarios, different situations, different types of victimization. In the training, we’re really focusing on leaning more into educator maltreatment, because it’s not just teachers. We had an incident just recently where it was a school principal that was assaulted,” Martinez-Prather said.
Martinez-Prather said they will check back in with school districts after they have received the training to see how it is working, and make any necessary changes to improve the training going forward.
“What we’re hoping to collect is some baseline data to see if there are improvements in attitudes and perceptions about how district and campus administrators are addressing this issue,” Martinez-Prather said.
Martinez-Prather said all training through the Texas School Safety Center is free to all K-12 public and charter schools in Texas. She also said that registration to receive the training is currently open for schools.
