The overview
House Bill 7 would expand the state’s Do Not Hire Registry, which is a list of people ineligible to work in Texas public schools. Districts are required to inform the Texas Education Agency when an employee abuses or has an inappropriate relationship with a student or minor.
Current state law stipulates that people convicted of felonies, such as homicide, sexual assault or kidnapping, are also placed on the state registry.
HB 7 would add to the registry school employees who physically mistreated a student, threatened a student with violence, inappropriately communicated with a student or failed to maintain appropriate boundaries.
Certified and uncertified school employees are currently included in the registry. HB 7 would expand this to include volunteers and third-party service providers, which bill author Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, said would more effectively protect students.
The bill would require school districts to obtain written consent from parents before conducting psychological evaluations or teaching students about human sexuality. Students’ parents or guardians would also be able to access a list of any materials their child checks out from a school library under HB 7.
Leach said HB 7 would emphasize that “educators are partnering with parents, not the other way around.”
HB 7 was left pending in the Texas House Public Education Committee on March 25. This gives Leach time to adjust the bill if needed. If the committee approves HB 7 during a future hearing, it will head to the House floor.
Zooming in
During testimony March 25, Texans spoke about their experiences with abuse in public schools.
Dallas-area resident Callie McDonald told the committee she was repeatedly abused by a male educator as a teen. She said she appreciated lawmakers’ efforts to address educator misconduct, but urged them to make additional changes.
“We’re trying to kill an elephant with a BB gun,” McDonald said. “It’s not enough. ... I want [investigations of abuse] taken out of the hands of the schools entirely. I want immediate mandatory reporting as soon as there is a concern. ... I want kids to have mandatory mental health support following this.”
Leach said he wanted to make it easier to report abuse in Texas and give survivors “more tools, not less.”
“Our state has become a sanctuary for individuals who want to prey on children,” Leach said during the hearing. “And our school districts are no exception to that.”
He noted that children are typically abused by people they trust. A February report by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services states parents are the most common perpetrators of abuse.
“Very rarely is it a random occurrence,” Leach said. “It is a coach, it is a teacher, it is a parent, a family member, a counselor—it is someone that we as parents are entrusting our kids with.”
The background
The state has more authority to investigate and respond to misconduct by certified teachers than uncertified teachers, TEA Commissioner Mike Morath told the committee a month earlier.
Morath said the State Board for Educator Certification can revoke certified teachers’ licenses for a variety of reasons, from on-campus drug use to child abuse. But the SBEC does not have the same oversight of uncertified teachers.
“You may be fired for [other offenses], but if there's no permanent record of you, you could then get hired by another district without their knowledge,” Morath said during a Feb. 25 hearing. “We will get criminal history hits on all these individuals, but if it is not one of those things that ends you up on the Do Not Hire Registry, we immediately discard it.”
“It seems to me, when we're talking about conduct, the standard should be the same for any employee that's on a campus, certified or uncertified, when it comes to state law ... in the interest of protecting our children,” Leach said Feb. 25.
About 11% of Texas public school teachers are uncertified, Morath said. The rate of uncertified educators has skyrocketed in recent years, according to previous reporting, with school districts hiring about 5,500 uncertified teachers during the 2019-20 school year and over 17,000 during the 2023-24 school year.
A separate proposal, HB 2, seeks to encourage prospective teachers to become certified by creating a new state allotment to fund classroom residency programs.
