The board of the Texas School Safety Center meets Sept. 28 to rewrite its own bylaws, a year after lawmakers changed who sits on it.
The center, a research unit at Texas State University, is the state’s clearinghouse for school safety. It writes the audit procedure every district must follow, reviews and verifies district emergency plans, trains threat assessment teams and keeps the registry of school safety consultants. What it cannot do is punish anyone. When a district’s plan is deficient or missing, the center tells the district to hold a public hearing and notifies the education agency; only the education commissioner can install a conservator.
A 2025 law reshaped the board that oversees it. The count of governor’s appointees stayed at 12, but the seats changed: a junior college administrator was added and the public members were cut from three to two. The bylaws have not been updated since. The governor’s most recent round of appointments, in June, did not include the chairman or the architect member, whose terms were listed as expiring in February; whether they are serving as holdovers could not be confirmed. Neither the bylaws nor the proposed changes are posted anywhere public, so what the directors will actually vote on could not be established before publication.
The other substantive item is labeled “90th Legislative Insights,” a look ahead to the session that opens Jan. 12. The agenda does not say who is briefing whom. The state’s most recent school safety report gives the board material to work with: unannounced inspectors could not get into 97.5% of the campuses they tried, but 13.2% of campuses drew at least one finding somewhere in the audit, 41.9% had exterior doors not built to resist forced entry or had unreinforced glass beside them, and 22.9% of districts had not ensured their threat assessment teams completed training — training the center itself provides.
Districts now get $20 per student in average daily attendance plus $33,540 a campus for safety, up from $10 and $15,000 under the 2023 law that created the armed-officer requirement. More than half of the districts assessed are still operating under a good-cause exception rather than full compliance with it. The center’s biennial report to the governor and the Legislature is due Jan. 1, which makes the board’s December meeting the consequential one.
Meeting at a glance
- When
- 10 a.m. CT Monday, September 28, 2026. Notice TRD 2026005436 was filed September 10. Later meetings are set for December 7, February 22 and June 28.
- Where
- 9515 Hotel Dr., Austin.
- Governing body & chair
- Texas School Safety Center Board of Directors — 17 members: 12 appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate to staggered two-year terms, plus five state officials or their designees. Chairman Craig Bessent; vice chair Jill M. Tate. Quorum is nine.
- Format
- Regular board meeting, 10 items: chair comments, minutes, the director’s fourth-quarter report, a legislative briefing, and a vote on revised bylaws. State law requires the board to meet at least four times a year.
- Live video
- None announced. The center posts no meeting stream or archive.
- Full agenda
- Secretary of State Open Meeting Viewer · Board page
Board members
- Craig Bessent — chairman; superintendent seat; Wylie ISD, Abilene.
- Jill M. Tate — vice chair; Texas PTA seat; Colleyville.
- Bill “Isaac” Avera — school police seat; Jacksonville ISD chief; Jacksonville.
- Kerri Brady — architect seat; school design practice lead; Cypress.
- Nidia De La Cerda — primary administrator; Tuloso-Midway ISD; Corpus Christi.
- Edwin S. Flores — public member; Dallas attorney.
- Rania M. Mankarious — public member; Crime Stoppers of Houston chief; Houston.
- Rob McClelland — trustee seat; Dripping Springs ISD board; Dripping Springs.
- James M. Mosley — juvenile court judge seat; 316th District Court; Borger.
- Noe E. Perez — teacher seat; Los Fresnos CISD; Laguna Vista.
- Jesus “Roberto” Rodriguez — junior college seat; Texas Southmost College president.
- Michael L. Slaughter — secondary administrator; Princeton High School; Wylie.
- Sydni Gaitan — higher education commissioner’s designee.
- Ashton Millet — Juvenile Justice Department designee.
- Lillian Nguyen — state health services designee.
- Tina Richardson — attorney general’s designee.
- Shane Sexton — Texas Education Agency designee.
Roster from the center’s board page, checked September 21 and cross-checked against the governor’s December 2024 and June 2026 appointment releases. Cities are not published for the five agency designees. The board page’s own page description still says 15 members; 17 is correct under the 2025 law. Kathy Martinez-Prather has directed the center for more than a decade. The center is housed at Texas State University in San Marcos and is not a standalone state agency.