COLLEGE STATION — Rebecca Tate with the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX) received the prestigious Regents Fellow Service Award, and was honored at a banquet on Jan. 16. The award is the highest honor given by The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents, and recognizes employees who have made exemplary contributions to their university or agency and to the people of Texas.
Tate, who joined TEEX in 2007, was cited for her efforts to enhance the nation’s safety and security by ensuring first responders receive high-quality emergency preparedness training. As Director of Training Support of the DHS/FEMA Homeland Security National Training Program at TEEX, she oversees 60 professional development and continuing education courses, which reached over 73,000 participants last year. These homeland security courses encompass a wide range of subject matter and are offered to state, local, tribal and territorial emergency responders and government officials across the United States. Among those she administers are 10 online cybersecurity courses offered at no cost through TEEX’s National Emergency Response and Recovery Training Center.
Tate chairs the Committee on Curriculum and Evaluation for the National Domestic Preparedness Consortium (NDPC), which promotes rigorous content development requirements, curriculum effectiveness measures and impact analysis of the training on the trainees and the communities they serve. And she represents the NDPC on the National Training and Education Curriculum Management Integration Team under DHS/FEMA.
At TEEX, she has overseen more than 115 course certifications and recertification under the DHS/FEMA Cooperative Agreement as well as the Section 508 compliance review of all course materials. She played a key role in drafting and submitting 5 consecutive DHS/FEMA Continuing Training Grant proposals, which resulted in over $15 million to members of the National Cybersecurity Preparedness Consortium for curriculum development and delivery of cybersecurity courses.
After Hurricane Harvey, Tate was an integral member of a TEEX team that led logistics for eight meetings on “Future-Proofing Texas” in support of the State of Texas and the Rebuild Texas Commission.
Beyond her contribution to the curriculum development and evaluation realm, she oversees all electronic data reporting for the FEMA Cooperative Agreement, including the in-house processing of over 35,000 student evaluation forms a year and the submission of all student and delivery data to FEMA. As a result of her team’s dedication to timely and accurate data, TEEX is often highlighted by FEMA as the example for data processing and reporting procedures.
Tate holds a bachelor’s degree from Texas A&M University and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Phoenix. She is pursuing a doctorate degree in Organization and Management from Capella University.
Her dedication, enthusiasm and efforts to ensure responders have access to the best possible training have helped to make the United States and Texas better prepared to prevent disasters, as well as to respond to them.