Daffy, Unfunded, & Appropriate: A Look At The Smattering Of Legislation Before The House Public Ed Committee Today

The House Public Education Committee is set to consider a fairly lengthy agenda of legislation today at 1:00 p.m. (or upon final adjournment) in a public hearing.

Included among this legislation are three bills that deserve special attention.

The first piece of legislation that caught our eye on the agenda is one that caught our eye back in February.  It’s Dwayne Bohac’s HB 1024. This is a cute little feel-good bill that would require parents, teachers and students to actually sign an agreement that outlines what is expected of each party.

It sounds good, and might make people feel good. But, it’s daffy. First of all, there are no provisions that make the agreement enforcable. In other words, it is a meaningless piece of paper. Second, it could create both lawsuits and unnecessary discipline for students. After all, since it is an “Agreement,” if the educator doesn’t abide by it, what is to prevent the parent from suing the teacher. And, what’s to prevent the school from assessing unnecessary non-academic penalties against students who seemingly aren’t living up to their end of the agreement?

If it were modified, it might make better sense. But, as it is, this bill is just a piece of paper that requires school districts to create another piece of paper that isn’t worth the piece of paper it’s printed on.

Later on the agenda is HB 346 by Dan Flynn (R-Van). This bill would create mandatory radndom steriod testing. This is geared toward high school athletes, obviously.

This is one of those bills that will probably see a parade of parents coming before the committee whose children have died as a result of steroid use. While no one disputes that steroid use is problematic and dangerous, the need for the legislation alone shouldn’t allow it to sail through committee without a few questions being raised.
The main problem with this bill, if you set aside all civil liberties objections, is that, while it provides that the UIL will pay for the testing (which can run as high as $450 per sample), it doesn’t appropriate the money to pay for the testing and there is no guarantee that any final appropriations bill will, either.

Worse than that, it provides that UIL will charge an admission fee for sporting events to offset the cost of the testing if UIL doesn’t have the funds to pay for it. Since the legislation is worded such that it would cover all UIL sanctioned athletic events (as opposed to simply “playoffs” as is done in some states) we assume such fees would be added on top of existing admission fees charged by schools for football games and other sporting events. How much this fee would be, how it would be collected, returned to the state, and administered is a problem that has the potential to create a massive amount of bureaucracy that would swirl around tickets to high school sporting events.

Finally, the “Appropriate” legislation from the trio of adjectives in our title. That’s HB 1622 by Delisi. This legislation would require that school district grievance policies permit:

a school district employee to report a grievance against a supervisor that alleges the supervisor’s violation of the law in the workplace or the supervisor’s unlawful harassment of the employee to a supervisor other than the supervisor against whom the employee intends to report the grievance.

While we’d like to see this bill go farther and include violations of district policy as actions that can be reported to another supervisor, codifying this language will add some much-needed protections for classroom teachers and other district employees in a system that thrives on “chain or command” and institutional hierarchy.

Bookmark It