Price and convenience are easy to compare. They are also not the things that go wrong.

What goes wrong in security training is a school that takes your money and then becomes hard to reach, a certificate that shows up late or not at all, and an instructor who cannot answer a question that is not on the slide. So here is what you are actually buying when you train with us.

A DPS-approved school that issues its own certificates

ETXSTA is approved by the Texas Department of Public Safety and we issue our certificates under our own school license number. When you finish a course you download your own certificate of completion to submit with your application to the DPS Regulatory Services Division. It is not forwarded from somewhere else, and it does not depend on a third party remembering to send it.

An instructor who has done the work

Our training is delivered by Ryan Karvoski, who holds Level 2, Level 3 and Level 4 officer and instructor certifications, is a licensed private investigator, is a certified License to Carry instructor, and is a certified instructor in six NRA disciplines.

That combination matters in a specific way: the person teaching you the armed commission course has held the commission, and the person teaching you the firearms portion teaches firearms for a living, not as a sideline. When you ask what happens in a real situation, you get an answer from experience rather than a paraphrase of the manual.

Straight answers, in public

Our FAQ page now covers two dozen of the questions people actually ask, organized by course: getting started, LTC, Level 2, Level 3 and the armed commission, Level 4 and personal protection work, OC certification, renewals, and the NRA courses.

We also hold ourselves to a rule on the legal content: where a statement rests on Texas law or administrative rule, we cite the rule. Where we cannot verify something against an official source, we say so rather than smoothing it over. Your ability to work legally depends on this information being right, and we treat it that way.

Which is also why, earlier this year, we corrected our own site. Our old pages described Level 4 as the general “advanced commissioned officer” level. That is wrong. Level 3 is what a Security Officer Commission requires, and Level 4 is specifically the Personal Protection Officer course. We fixed it everywhere rather than leaving a convenient error in place.

What support actually looks like here

We are a small school, which has one disadvantage and one large advantage. The disadvantage is that we are not staffed around the clock. The advantage is that when you do reach someone, it is someone who teaches the course and can answer the question properly rather than reading from a script.

The new site is designed to reduce how often you need us at all: prices published, dates published, FAQ answering the common questions, courses unlocking instantly. That is deliberate. The fewer people who have to contact us about logistics, the more attention the people with real questions get.

On price

We are not the cheapest school in Texas on every line, and we are not trying to be. We are transparent instead: every price is printed on the page before you commit, DPS licensing fees are clearly identified as separate and not ours, and bundles are compared against the a-la-carte total so you can see exactly what the discount is.

If a school will not tell you what something costs until you give them your phone number, that is information too.

Have a look

Read the instructor credentials, read the FAQ, and read a course page in full. Then decide for yourself.