The halls of Shepard Middle School are calm on a recent Thursday morning: the bell rings, students move from one room to another without a hitch and teachers greet them at the door.
Safety and ease blanket the campus off Ray Ellison Drive and Old Pearsall Road. But underneath the sea of calm, all staff — from Principal Ricardo Moreno to the cafeteria ladies — are primed to act in a moment’s notice in case of emergencies.
In January, Shepard got brand new silent panic alert technology, or SPAT, a program called CrisisGo that’s downloaded as an app on all staff devices and school computers. The app automatically alerts campus admin and local first responders during a crisis.
“It doesn’t have to be an administrator that alerts. It could be anyone on campus, from a custodian, child nutrition worker to a teacher in the classroom,” said Moreno, who’s been principal at Shepard since the start of the school year.
South San Antonio Independent School District is piloting the program at Shepard because it’s the nearest campus to the district’s headquarters.
Like most public schools, Shepard has many defenses required by Texas in place, like metal fencing, a campus safety officer, locked entryways, bulletproof glass and more. Several of these safety measures became mandates following deadly school shootings in and outside of Texas, most notably the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde.
But getting all campuses up to safety standards is a years-long feat, as school districts choose which mandates to tackle first based on available funding and bandwidth.
“Other than educating, parents entrust us with their most precious cargo,” said Moreno. “And with that — that’s a big responsibility.”
The evolution of SPAT
SPAT systems are only a piece of the puzzle. Taking different forms, they’ve been required by the Texas Education Agency for several years, but they weren’t cemented into code until 2023 with the passage of Senate Bill 838, also known as Alyssas’s Law.
Named after one of the victims of the 2018 mass shooting in a Parkland, Florida high school, the law requires Texas schools to place SPAT systems capable of automatically alerting first responders in every classroom by the 2025-26 cycle.
Before the law, most SPAT systems consisted of singular panic button in school front offices. It’s a system that could lead to slow response times, often leaving the responsibility of pushing the button to front office workers and administrators — a system that also puts their lives on the line.
SPAT systems are much more intricate now.
Apps like CrisisGo allow staff to indicate what kind of emergency is occurring, whether it’s a health crisis, a mental health issue or a campus-wide threat. It also lets administrators and emergency responders know exactly where to go on campus.
Within the first week of implementing the app at Shepard, a teacher used CrisisGo to get an ambulance for a student experiencing a medical seizure.
“It was able to work the way it was supposed to,” said Moreno.
In fact, most alerts are not for campus safety-related issues. At 911Cellular, another popular SPAT provider in Texas, 98% of alerts are for health-related emergencies, said Heather Connelly, the company’s K12 director.
911Cellular recently contracted with the School of Science and Technology (SST) charter network, which operates nine campuses in the San Antonio area.
Similar to the pilot program at Shepard, SST is using a software package that includes an app on electronic devices, and an option for staff to use different key stroke combinations on desk phones and school computers.
Connelly, who’s worked closely with legislators and families of school shooting victims across the country, said SPAT systems are different from other school safety measures like fences and locked doors.
SPAT isn’t about prevention, it’s about fast response after the fact.
“The faster we can get in to triage victims, the more we can save lives,” Connelly said, pointing to Alyssa Alhadeff, the 14-year-old Parkland shooting victim who died after losing too much blood from a gunshot would, inspiring the passage of Alyssa’s Law in several states. “Time equals life.”
While Shepard is the only South San campus using CrisisGo right now, it doesn’t mean other district campuses are unprotected — the SPAT technology there is simply different, and it also varies from district to district.
Some school districts use wearable panic buttons, while others have panic buttons installed in every classroom. But best practices and guidelines often shift, forcing districts to pivot and keep investing in new technology.
Before using the CrisisGo app, Shepard staff wore panic buttons on their lanyards. But using the app is more accessible for all staff, Moreno said.
Last year, Texas lawmakers passed more safety legislation under House Bill 2, requiring “timely notification to all teaching staff, including aides, who may be directly affected by a campus-level threat.”
It’s a move school safety experts like Connelly have been pushing for, noting that Robb Elementary teachers weren’t notified fast enough, or at all, of an armed intruder until it was too late.
It’s unclear how districts plan to implement this part of the school safety code, but Connelly said there’s several ways to do it, from sending alerts to all staff devices to running automatic announcements on all campus screens.
How is SPAT funded?
While school districts often call school safety laws unfunded or underfunded mandates — often going into budget deficits or asking voters to pass bonds to pay for tech upgrades — Connelly says the state is actually “quite generous” with the funding.
Right after the Uvalde shooting, Texas passed several new school safety laws, from requiring armed officers at every campus (a mandate districts still struggle with) to mandated fencing around campuses.
The state also created different safety grants, most of it tied to technology equipment, including a grant that automatically gave districts $1,905 for SPAT, leaving the rest up for grabs by districts to apply based on need.
SPAT-specific grants had to be spent by 2024, and TEA documents show every San Antonio-area district applied for much more than the initial $1,905 amount.
At 911Cellular, SPAT technology can cost anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 per campus depending on the software and hardware a school chooses. But some costs are less visible, like implementation, district-wide training and having a network strong enough to support new tech.
Later, the state created the School Safety Standards Formula Grant, $400 million that districts could use for SPAT and other safety equipment.
Under that grant program, districts automatically got $200,000 each in 2022. Districts could apply for the remaining funds based on need.
Again, state documents show local districts applied for much more than the initial $200,000, but it’s unclear exactly how they spent it since the grant also pays for upgrading doors, windows, fencing, communications and other safety measures
Connelly said there were still $57 million in unspent funds as of February, and the state has extended the grant application deadline several times, currently set to April 30.
In March, however, TEA officials said it was too soon to determine how much, if any, of the grant funding remains unspent and a spending report won’t be finalized until later this year.
South San ISD, secured about $40,000 from the first SPAT grant and later got $410,000, which was spent on things like wrought iron fencing at all of its campuses.
“CrisisGo is going to be pushed out to all campuses,” it’s just a matter of securing more funding, said Andy Rocha, executive director of operations at South San ISD.
There’s a few other safety grants with extended deadlines. Last year, state lawmakers also doubled safety allotments from $10 to $20 per student and from $15,000 to $33,000 per campus under HB 2. Districts tend to use safety allotments on officer salaries because the grants can usually tied to equipment and technology.
Trying to ward off bad actors, districts officials can also be hesitant to reveal exactly how they’re spending safety grants, making it difficult to get an accurate picture of how much progress schools have made on long lists of safety projects.
Some districts, for example, didn’t respond to interview requests for this story, others simply said they were “in compliance” with the SPAT mandate.
