The leader of the North East Independent School District is asking parents, students and teachers to be mindful of door safety protocols.
Sean Maika, the district’s superintendent since 2019, made the comments during a board meeting last week and told the San Antonio Report that he planned to release more messaging in the coming days to reiterate the district’s policies.
“This has now become a people issue,” Maika said during the meeting. “We’re at a point now where our doors are operating, it is now about staying vigilant and not becoming complacent.”
He urged parents to talk to their children about not letting anyone through campus doors and not to prop any doors open.
In an interview, Maika did not point to any specific incidents that led to the announcement, but said there are a variety of scenarios that the community should keep in mind.
For example, when parents arrive at a campus, they must show their ID on camera before being buzzed into the building during the day. When let in, they sometimes let others waiting to get in behind them instead of closing the door.
But students also need to be aware of the protocols, he said.
“When people are knocking on the door and they are just letting them in, you are defeating that locked-door piece [of the safety structure],” Maika said.
He added that all NEISD employees have access cards to enter school buildings and shouldn’t need to knock to be let in.
School safety and security has become a vital issue in Texas in the years since a 2022 shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde left 21 dead. A faulty lock on a door allowed the intruder to enter the school.
The state has given school districts millions of dollars to provide or improve security devices, including panic buttons, fencing and doors, as well as adding requirements for armed officials at each school. NEISD also spent about $2.5 million last year on an undisclosed security device to comply with new requirements by the state, arguing at the time that the purchase needed to be kept confidential to ensure district safety.
In addition to new requirements, the state began conducting safety audits of schools statewide after Uvalde, checking that doors were in working order and locked. Eight schools across North East ISD were audited in recent weeks, with three receiving some “findings” in the results.
The specifics of what those could be are not shared by the district or the Texas Education Agency, which took over the responsibility of conducting the audits from a Texas State University think tank called the Texas School Safety Center this year.
According to a TEA spokesperson, findings could relate to the physical operation of a door or the protocols in place.
The audits are one of the many responsibilities of the TEA Office of School Safety and Security, which was founded in the wake of the Uvalde shooting.
John Scott, who was appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott to be the chief of school safety and security several months after Uvalde, told the San Antonio Report that school communities have had to adjust their mindsets to the new protocols that have been put in place to ensure school safety, including those that prohibit doors from being propped open or held open for people who have not been screened to enter.
“Human behaviors are one of the most difficult things to change,” Scott said. “In Texas we were always kind of told when you grow up, if you see somebody trying to get in the door, you help them out. But we are changing that.”
The culture shift has continued to take hold with time, he said.
Maika said that school safety is a shared responsibility among the community.
“We need to keep it at our forefront because our employees and our students have a right to go to a school where they feel safe,” he said. “And it takes us all working together to make it happen.”
