The heat map shows the threat assessment law compliance score we gave 1,019 public school districts in Texas and reveals uneven implmementation of the law across the state. Charter schools are not reflected on this map.
The Texas Observer compared all school districts’ 2021-22 responses to the Texas Education Agency’s Safe and Supportive Schools questionnaire with that year’s discipline data. We then assigned a compliance score—a grade—on a scale of 0 to 100 for each school district based on their adherence to the multiple provisions of the threat assessment law. The grades are based on five elements: The percentage of district campuses served by threat assessment teams; 2. The percentage of team members who received training. 3. The percentage of reported incidents of bullying, fighting, assault, sexual assault, the threat or use of weapons, terroristic threats, or deadly conduct disciplinary actions, assessed and addressed with interventions through the districts’ SSSP teams. 4. Whether the district’s SSSP team includes a counselor or mental health experts. 5. While SB 11 does not require all expulsion actions to undergo a threat assessment protocol, high expulsion rates indicated a punitive rather than preventive approach to school safety. So we also rated schools based on the rate of expulsions out of 1,000 students.