The increase would allow board members to serve an additional year, bringing term lengths from three years to four years, according to district documents.
What you need to know
The Texas Education Code allows trustees of independent school districts to serve three or four year terms. Currently, CCISD’s trustees serve three-year terms based on board policy, according to district agenda documents.
CCISD holds trustee elections every year for at least a couple of seats. At the Oct. 14 board workshop, CCISD’s General Counsel Leila Sarmecanic said having elections every year is costly.
District agenda documents note increasing the trustee term length of three years to four years “would promote stability and save time and money by only requiring the district to conduct elections every other year instead of every year.”
The district first discussed the potential change at its September Legislative Affairs and External Affairs Committee meeting. This committee meets with district administration to review and prepare recommendations for federal, state and local legislative issues, according to district documents.
The committee is a standing board committee that consists of three members in active legislative years. In nonactive legislative years, those members include two board members and one alternate, according to district documents.
During CCISD’s board election in May, Harris County was not able to administer elections for CCISD due to it being the year of a presidential election, Sarmecanic said.
“After an election recount and election contest, we’re really moving in that direction of wanting the counties to run the elections, but especially during a presidential election year ... Harris County did not have the bandwidth ... to administer the election for us, so [it put] us in the position of having to run our own election,” Sarmecanic said.
In the 88th legislative session in 2023, the state passed a bill to increase the board term length for another school district in Collin County, Sarmecanic said.
This bill, titled as House Bill 2285, was tailored to the district’s population. Sarmecanic said a bill for CCISD would do the same thing but for Galveston County and League City.
Sarmecanic also said if approved by the state, district officials believe a bill for CCISD would be best to allow the district to have elections during odd-numbered years during primary elections in May.
Next steps
Board member Scott Bowen said at the workshop the Legislative Affairs and External Affairs committee members discussed when it would be most ideal time to start the new election system in order to “cause the least disruption.”
“It seemed like having one more even-number election in 2026 allows us to have the fewest truncated and extended terms in order to get everybody on the new schedule,” Bowen said. “We would want to write it so that we would not pass our resolution until after the [2026] election, but get it in time for [2027] and then go ‘27, ‘29, ‘31, onward.”
- January 2025: Superintendent Engle seeks legislative action to increase board member term lengths
- 2025: Legislators consider increasing board member term lengths for CCISD
- 2025-2026: If the district receives a resolution from the state, the board will consider increasing term lengths
- 2027: Board terms will be increased to four years, and elections will be held every other year
