Episode 48: Interview with TEEX's Jesse Watkins

On this week's podcast we have our sponsor of the Active Shooter Incident Management Advanced and Intermediate courses, TEEX's Jesse Watkins. In this episode we talk about the courses and training available to the first responder community.

Bill Godfrey:

Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, your podcast host. We have a special guest with us today. Today, we have Jesse Watkins, the director of operations for NERRTC. That's the National Emergency Response and Recovery Training Center over at TEEX out in Texas. Jesse, thanks for joining us today.

Jesse Watkins:

Oh, it's my pleasure Bill. Thank you for having me.

Bill Godfrey:

So obviously NERRTC and TEEX are the sponsors of the Active Shooter Incident Management advanced and intermediate courses that we developed that is DHS funded. And people who've heard me tell this story before, it's a little convoluted, the money flow, but it DHS to NERRTC to or, DHS to TEEX NERRTC, then over to ALERRT and then over to us to go out and do the classes. But Jesse, it's actually a little more complicated than that, isn't it? Tell everybody a little bit about how the structure works and how the pieces fit together.

Jesse Watkins:

It is a little bit more complicated than that. For those of you that don't know a whole lot about who TEEX is or who NERRTC is, TEEX is an agency within the state of Texas or for the state of Texas, and it's within the Texas A and M University System, which is comprised of 11 universities and now eight state agencies. And our primary mission is an extension. And within that extension, training, and in some cases, exercise. Back in 1998, as a result of the Oklahoma City bombing, we solicited Congress as a part of an organization called the NDPC, National Domestic Preparedness Consortium, for funding to go out and do online security training around the country. At the time that funding came on to DOJ and then after 9-11, it moved under Homeland Security with FEMA being the oversight organization, it was the checks and balances for what we do and how we spend the money that being said, NERRTC proper, National Emergency Response Recovery Training center, has 73 courses that we've developed under our funding to go out and train first responders, elected officials, a whole host of organizations.

But you know, our primary mission is incident management, cyber security, critical infrastructure, and several other areas. I won't go into all of them, but a lot of resources, put it that way, that we pour towards going out and doing training at no cost to participants or to the jurisdictions that's requesting it. As a result of that, a few years back, we started looking at the active shooter situation that was going on in the country. Obviously, Bill, you and I had conversations at the time. Steve, in a different capacity, and I had conversations at the time and agreed that we would like to be able to fund doing some active shooter training around the country. And you obviously had the course resources in terms of going out with the materials, going and doing the deliveries. We had some funding that we could put behind that, but it's under our DHS funding.

And what was born out of that is this relationship where we have now in which we subcontract to ALERRT and then ALERRT in turns, subcontracts to you. That being said, the relationship works. It is a little cumbersome. You know, when you stop thinking about how many different organizations it's taken to get this done, but we have figured out a way to make that effective and efficient over the years. And I'm happy about the relationship. That being said, the mission is the thing that's the most important piece to me. Going out and observing you all do this training obviously brings me a lot of satisfaction and that satisfaction is in knowing that we are training that first response community to be better and to react and respond better to active shooter situations and also to extrapolate out of that, using what they use in the classroom during this training and other scenarios as well.

I think it makes them more effective as a operational unit by the time they're done with it. So, I love that aspect of it. That's, that's really the driver for me. But when you stop and think about NERRTC or I can explain a little bit about NERRTC, most of the training that we do, we do in-house meaning we have SMEs and full-time staff that are devoted to doing nothing but delivery of those courses that I mentioned before.

So this relationship that we have with alert and with you is, it's not unique because we do have one other subcontractor that we work with that has a similar relationship, but it is out of the ordinary for what we typically do. We have roughly 80 full-time staff an...