To say this was a busy week for interim hearing work at the Legislature would be an understatement. This week alone, and in addition to two statewide board meetings, Texas AFT was monitoring and providing testimony in the following committees:
- House Select Committee on Youth Health & Safety
- Senate Education Committee
- House Pensions, Investments & Financial Services Committee
While no action is taken at these meetings, they are often a good barometer for the topics and priorities of the upcoming session. We will cover the House Select Committee on Youth Health & Safety and Senate Education interim committees this week.
Next week, we will cover the House Pensions, Investments, & Financial Services Committee hearing and the related issues considered in the Teacher Retirement System (TRS) budget hearing held on Wednesday and the TRS board meeting held on Thursday and Friday this week. We will also recap the Senate Subcommittee on Higher Education hearing to be held next Tuesday, September 24.
House Select Committee on Youth Health & Safety
The House Select Committee on Youth Health and Safety held its second interim hearing on Wednesday, Sept. 18, after holding its first hearing on behavioral services for at-risk youth and their families in July. The focus of this week’s hearing was on monitoring the implementation of HB 3, the omnibus school safety legislation passed in 2023.
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) and Texas School Safety Center (TxSSC) opened the hearing by previewing the progress made in implementing the bill’s provisions. These provisions include mandated intruder detection audits, safety and security audits, updated facilities standards, threat assessments (and related record-keeping), and armed security officer requirement.
TEA has made significant progress in partnership with school districts on implementing the mandated intruder detection audits and safety and security audits. These audits began late last year, and we are now in the second year of implementation. The current three-year safety and security audit cycle for K-12 school districts began on Sept. 1, 2023, and will end on Aug. 31, 2026.
While the results of these audits are only shared with school districts, the witnesses reported that there is some variation in how well they have performed. Some school districts have successfully passed the intruder detection and safety and security audits, others have not performed as well. In these cases, TEA provides districts with detailed feedback about areas where they must improve and works with them in partnership with TxSSC and their regional Educational Service Centers (ESCs) to provide the technical assistance necessary for them to make improvement.
A highlight of this discussion was the universal praise for the educators and school employees interviewed during the audits. Across the audited school districts, TEA said that staff were well-informed about what to do in the event of an emergency and their roles and responsibilities in protecting students and fellow staff. TEA specifically mentioned that not only were teachers impressive in their knowledge and preparation, but that support personnel, such as cafeteria workers and custodians, are invaluable sources of information, demonstrating a comprehensive understanding of school safety protocols and often serving as the eyes and ears of the institution, acutely aware of the daily rhythms and potential security concerns within their schools. They are also often the school employees closest to the scene in the event of violent incidents.
HB 3 also requires that when a student transfers to another school district, the child’s school district of residence must provide the receiving district with the child’s disciplinary record and any threat assessment involving the child’s behavior. This transfer of disciplinary records and threat assessments was implemented as of December 2023. Additionally, information provided to or produced by a team during a threat assessment of a student must be maintained in the student’s school record until the student’s 24th birthday.
The armed security officer requirement received the most attention during the hearing as the unfunded mandate that school districts are having the greatest difficulty complying with. Specifically, HB 3 requires that school districts determine how many security officers are necessary to provide adequate protection at each campus and ensure that each campus has at least one armed security officer on site during regular hours. HB 3 provides school districts with several options to implement this requirement.
Approximately 45% of schools audited thus far have provided a school district police officer, a school resource officer, or a commissioned peace offer at each campus, while many others have used the good cause exemption which allows them expanded options for compliance due to the lack of available funding or personnel who qualify to serve as a security officer described above. The board of trustees of a school district that claims a good cause exception must develop an alternative standard with which the district is able to comply, which may include providing a person to act as a security officer who is: a school marshal, or a school district employee or a person with whom the district contracts who: has completed school safety training provided by a qualified handgun instructor certified in school safety under Government Code 411.1901, and carries a handgun on school premises in accordance with written regulations or written authorization of the district under Penal Code 46.03(a)(1)(A).
Unlike other school safety requirements in this bill, noncompliance with the armed security officer requirement does not trigger the onerous enforcement mechanisms in the bill such as TEA conservatorship, loss of TEA grant funding, and restrictions on the use of bond proceeds for projects besides coming into compliance with HB 3’s updated facilities standards.
The TEA and TxSSC witnesses also testified about the launch of the Sentinel Program, a statewide platform for collecting information from and communicating information to school districts related to intruder detection audits, behavioral threat assessments, district vulnerability assessments, and emergency management.
While the grant funding provided to school districts under HB 3 has been fully disbursed to school districts, many superintendents testified that it has been inadequate for reaching compliance with the bill’s updated facilities standards and will leave them stuck having to shoulder recurring costs that will be unable to afford, such as those for silent panic button systems.
The armed security officer requirement is the unfunded mandate that received the most attention in the hearing and is causing the greatest stress on districts’ already strained budgets. As stakeholders warned during the 88th legislative session, the inadequate school safety funding provided under HB 3 through the school safety allotment – an additional $0.28 cents per student ($9.72 to $10) and $15,000 per campus.
School districts, TEA, and TxSSC testified that the additional school safety funding provided is nowhere near the cost of hiring armed security officers, which can reach costs as high as $80,000 – $100,000 for a single peace officer. For that reason and due to the lack of peace officers available to serve in that role in many school districts’ communities, many school districts have established much cheaper school marshal or guardian programs and pay their marshals or guardians a stipend that varies from $4,000 to $60,000, depending on whether they serve full-time in that role or have additional duties for which they are paid.
Texas AFT is grateful to the bipartisan group of members who asked tough questions and made strong statements about the impacts of inadequate school safety funding and inadequate public school funding in general. Chairwoman Senfronia Thompson (D-Houston), Rep. Steve Allison (R-San Antonio), Rep. Ann Johnson (D-Houston), and Rep. Brooks Landgraf (R-Odessa) were especially effective advocates for Texas public schools. Johnson was also outspoken about the lack of any discussion about gun violence or gun safety legislation in a hearing solely dedicated to school safety.
In response to questions from members of the committee, the superintendents represented at the hearing testified that the lack of adequate school safety funding directly harms students and educators, as they must cut resources from elsewhere in their budgets to muster the revenue necessary to comply with the state’s school safety requirements. For example, superintendents testified that they have had to terminate positions resulting in increasing class sizes.
We know from state data that in the 2022-2023 school year, prior to the unfunded mandates imposed on public schools by HB 3, there was already a massive school safety funding gap. In that school year, school districts spent approximately $861 million more on school safety and security than they received from the state through the school safety allotment. This school safety funding gap has likely grown significantly in the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 school years. For example, the superintendent of Plano ISD testified that the district received $1.5 million in funding through the updated school safety allotment for the 2024-2025 school year. After implementing a new school marshal program to comply with HB 3, the district’s total school safety expenditures were $9.9 million. That $8.4 million school safety funding gap represented one-quarter of the district’s $34 million budget deficit this year.
Given the budget deficit crises school districts are experiencing across the state and lawmakers’ attention to the school safety funding gap, we expect there will be proposals to provide significant additional school safety funding in the next legislative session. There may also be a continued discussion about establishing a new mental health allotment in the next legislative session – building on the work of Sen. Royce West (D-Dallas), Rep. Allison (R-San Antonio), and school mental health advocates in the 88th legislative session – so that school districts are not forced to choose between school safety and mental health. School districts can currently use their school safety allotment funds at their discretion, but most of these funds have been used for enhancing schools’ physical security. The TxSSC has found only 8.4% of districts used a portion of their school safety allotment funds for providing behavioral health services and 12.2% used some funds on providing mental health professionals.
Noticeably absent from the conversation was any information related to compliance with the new requirements on mental health training and notifications of violent incidents on school campuses. Under HB 3, school districts are directed to require each district employee who regularly interacts with students to complete an evidence-based mental health training program designed to provide instruction regarding the recognition and support of students who experience a mental health or substance use issue that may pose a threat to school safety. HB 3 also directs school districts to adopt a policy for providing notice to students, staff, and parents (or those standing in parental relation) of violent incidents in a manner that is timely and provides adequate information using electronic and real-time notifications.
Texas AFT is particularly concerned regarding the apparent lack of compliance with the campus threat notification requirement. We will be working with legislators and other stakeholders to advance a more robust notification requirement, including effective enforcement mechanisms, in the next legislative session.
Senate Education Committee
This committee set itself an ambitious agenda, tackling topics of testing reform, reading and math readiness, and COVID-19 funding oversight, as well as monitoring implementation of recent legislation on public school libraries content, school safety, and health education.
The day began with Commissioner Mike Morath giving a wide-ranging update on the state of public education. He fielded many questions from the committee on the topics of school finance, student performance, and complaints and investigations. Interestingly, he would not directly answer a question on how inflation has impacted the real-dollar school funding numbers. He also discussed the ways we can support educators, and it was encouraging to see some honesty about the impact inflation has had on teacher salaries.
He also took the opportunity to tout the work on HB 1605 (more on this in the SBOE recap) and the turnaround work of the board of managers and the improved scores in Houston ISD, although there is some controversy over significant drops in the number of students tested.
The first panel of the committee’s invited testimony, also including the commissioner, was primarily concerned with the Texas Through-Year Assessment Pilot (TTAP) as a possible replacement for the existing STAAR assessments. Three districts testified to their experiences with the pilot. They cited several benefits of the pilot, namely shorter assessments and the ability to use test data to inform instruction. However, some also cited testing fatigue and some limited insight into test construction. We have a concern that moving in the direction of through-year testing will push us toward a state-mandated curriculum and take away teacher and district autonomy. This will be an intriguing topic to watch next session.
Following this were panels on COVID funding oversight. While the discussion was supposedly about how districts had spent — and were planning to compensate for the loss of — Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds received to close learning loss gaps during the pandemic, it soon became a proxy debate over school finance for the coming session. The fiscal cliff created by the end of these grant funds was the crux of hundreds of tough discussions among school boards across the state this summer as districts struggled to adopt workable budgets for this school year. The subtle implication from the dais was that districts should not have hired as many staff and should have prepared and managed their funds better.
Next up was a discussion on early readiness in reading and math. There was a general desire among the panel to bring early math screening and intervention to be on par with what has been done for reading over the last several years. It was noted that Reading Academies have had a positive impact on student outcomes and that the state could see similar results with required Math Academies or similar intervention. The positive impacts of early childhood education are many and have lifelong impacts, but we do have concerns that potential legislation could overreach on diagnostics and interventions. We will be watching this closely as we want to prevent another disastrous roll–out like we saw with the Reading Academies. Happily, panelists and witnesses also chose to use this item to advocate for fully funding pre-K and extending eligibility for these and other early learning programs.
Additionally, there was a panel related to the implementation of HB 900. As a reminder to our Hotline readers, the rating portion of this censorship bill is enjoined by the courts, but the collection development policy required of the bill has been adopted by both the State Board of Education (SBOE) and the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC). Districts should be using this as a basis for materials acquisition and also challenges to content. This did not stop some testifiers from opining about what they claim is still widespread harmful and indecent materials in our school libraries. Disturbingly, Sen. Donna Campbell (R-New Braunfels) suggested that they “need to make an example” out of a few districts via fines or other actions to enforce the bill. The discussion also hinted that there is more to come on this type of censorship legislation.
The final panel was related to reinstating the parental opt-in for human sexuality instruction. This “opt-in” provision in statute expired before the 2024-2025 school year. Chairman Brandon Creighton (R-Conroe) made sure to get the last word in and plugged the “don’t say gay” provision that was in his so-called parental rights bill (SB 8). Notably, after Florida passed its version of “don’t say gay” in 2022, a court settlement overturned a large part of the Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Law.
The Senate Committee on Natural Resources & Economic Development was also set to take up the issue of childcare, but this topic was postponed. We know this is an important issue for our members and we look forward to voicing our members’ concerns at a future hearing.