Since 2023, the Texas Education Agency’s school safety rules — currently codified at 19 TAC §61.1031 — have set physical standards for every instructional facility in the state. The rule reads like an engineering spec, because it is one. If you run facilities for a district or a private campus, these are the five obligations that touch doors, entrances, and the hardware on them.
1. Exterior doors: closed, latched, and locked by default
The baseline requirement is that all exterior doors “be set to a closed, latched, and locked status” — locked-by-default, not locked-when-someone-remembers. The rule allows a door to be unlocked only in narrow cases: when it’s actively monitored, when it sits inside a defined exterior secured area (fenced to specification, with locked gates and emergency egress hardware), or under a written ventilation exception documented in the district’s emergency operations plan and explicitly authorized by its safety and security committee.
The hardware requirements underneath that are specific: doors must close and lock themselves without manual intervention, must allow emergency egress from the inside while staying locked outside, and glass doors and adjacent glazing must resist easy breakage — forced-entry-resistant film is the rule’s own example. Staff re-entry runs on master-key access, and law enforcement gets key-box access of its own.
2. The weekly audit
This is the part that changed daily life for facilities teams. Board policy must require at least weekly inspections, during school hours, of every exterior door on every instructional facility — certifying that each door is closed, latched, locked, and cannot be opened from the outside without a key. Findings go to the district’s safety and security committee, are retained for the state safety audit, and are reported to the campus principal.
Separately, districts must run at least twice-yearly maintenance checks covering doors, window locks, perimeter gates, panic alert systems, 9-1-1 location accuracy, key boxes, and radio coverage.
Records from all of it must be retained for three years, and compliance is certified annually as part of the district’s state safety audit. In practice: the district that meets this standard comfortably is the one whose doors report their own status — electrified hardware and door monitoring turn the weekly certification from a two-hour walk into a report a facilities director can stand behind.
3. The primary entrance: a vestibule — or its equivalent
A common misreading of the rule is that every school must have a secured vestibule. What it actually says is sharper: unless a secure vestibule is present, the primary entrance must meet all exterior-door standards and provide a way to visually identify anyone seeking entry (windows, cameras, or intercoms), a physical barrier that prevents unassisted visitor access, and a visitor check-in point.
In other words, every campus front door must be a controlled entrance — the vestibule is the cleanest way to get there, not the only one. A video intercom paired with access control on the inner door is precisely the mechanism the rule describes.
4. Door numbering
Every exterior door on every instructional facility — portables included — must carry alphanumeric door numbers on both the interior and exterior, sized to the International Fire Code’s signage standard (four-inch minimum). Numbering starts at the primary entrance and runs clockwise. Districts must keep door-numbering site plans in each main office and share electronic copies with the local 9-1-1 authority, DPS, local law enforcement, and first responders.
5. What’s changing next
As of this writing, TEA has proposed re-adopting the rule — updated for 2025 legislation — as 19 TAC §103.1215, with a proposed effective date of September 1, 2026. The substance above carries forward; the proposal adds security reviews for newly built or substantially renovated facilities and moves compliance certification into TEA’s Sentinel system. If you’re reading this after fall 2026, check the new section number — the obligations themselves aren’t going away.
Current as of August 2026. This is an explainer, not legal advice — statutes and agency rules change, and their application to a specific campus is a question for your district’s counsel and TEA. What we can tell you precisely is what the systems that meet these requirements look like, because we build them.