AUSTIN, Texas — Local leaders want to make sure Austin-area schools are safe by encouraging constant collaboration between educators and law enforcement.
On Wednesday, a public safety symposium was held at the Norris Conference Center in North Austin.
It was a free event for all public safety personnel, secondary education staff and security directors, as well as threat-assessment professionals in the private sector.
Those involved say clear communication is important in order to stay informed about any potential threats.
"The whole concept behind it is to try to provide as much information, as much learning to simplify and streamline some of the challenges for some of the other schools districts that haven't experienced these things, the process, and also give them the ability to explore their policies and procedures – to know if they need to make additional changes or if what they have is actually appropriate," said West Williams, training coordinator with the Austin Regional Intelligence Center.
The Austin Regional Intelligence Center helps law enforcement across a 10-county network share intelligence. It said each year, it gets about 1,200 suspicious activity reports. About 20% of those are related to school safety, so much of its work involves looking into online threats.
Organizers said the goal is also to help people who may be on the wrong track before anything bad happens.
"We believe that if we can insert ourselves into their lives and provide them the appropriate resources, then that would subvert them from actually taking action on some kind of targeted violence," said Williams.
The event was hosted by the Austin Regional Intelligence Center, as well as Texas State University, the FBI, Hutto ISD and the Texas Education Agency.