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The proposal at the Texas home could make it much easier for schools to suspend the state’s homelessness and the youngest students.
House Bill 6 – signed by the majority of House Republicans as co-authors on the Support Show – will expand the district’s authority to train students due to classroom disruptions. The House Public Education Committee heard testimony on Tuesday on the bill.
A 2017 state law prohibits halting suspensions for second- to second-year students unless students commit serious crimes such as bringing guns into schools. In 2019, Texas enacted similar restrictions on training homeless students, but only allowed suspensions if they violated rules related to violence, weapons, drugs and alcohol.
HB 6 is what appears to be a major reversal, aiming to empower teachers and their school districts to respond to class disruptions. The proposal comes when Texas schools struggle to hire and retain teachers. Inefficient discipline support and poor working conditions were cited as the highest concern among educators in a 2023 report from the government of the task force, Greg Abbott, created to identify solutions to key teacher shortages in the state.
“This bill is to ensure that classroom teachers are deserving to be supported and create a structured, intensive learning environment,” Rep. Jeff Leach, a Republican of Plano who wrote the bill, said at a hearing Tuesday.
Under HB 6, schools can issue out-of-school suspensions to all students when they “engage in significant disruptions of repeated classrooms” or “threatening the immediate health and safety of other students.”
Texas schools use two types: two types of outages. Suspensions within the school must require students to learn in a supervised environment outside the regular classroom. As an alternative to halt or expulsion, students can also be sent to a disciplinary alternative education program.
The bill will repeal current laws requiring schools to provide virtual learning at these alternative schools and require schools to send students distracted by the alternative education environment. The bill also allows schools to issue indefinitely suspensions within schools.
Opponents of the law say the bill’s broad language could lead to relying on discipline that drives students out of the classroom. They also fear that virtual learning could lead to the state’s most vulnerable students being released into their education.
At a committee hearing Tuesday, Rep. Gina Hinojosa, D. Austin, questioned how the home could tighten the bill, and students still faced with discipline.
“We want to make sure we don’t wash these kids’ hands,” she said. “I just want to make sure the language is tight enough to avoid sending kindergarteners home to empty apartments. There’s no kids sitting in a room in a school building for indefinitely.”
The epidemic of violence in schools
State school leaders explained the rise in student violence on Tuesday. There, incidents of chaos have become increasingly persistent and dangerous since the Covid-19 pandemic.
During the first two months of this school year, district chief Tonya Knowlton, at Collin County Community ISD, reported more than 30 cases of staff injuries, including bites and punches.
“We changed the staff’s glasses, sent the principal home with black eyes, and sent the staff to the emergency room,” Knowlton said. “Other students, young children who are passionate about learning, like school. They are forced to overcome the ongoing classroom chaos… to stop learning in that classroom entirely.”
Educators like Knowlton said that working conditions for teachers are unacceptable. She said teachers have left their profession because of the way cheating affects classroom management.
One assistant principal of Corsicana ISD, Candra Rogers, was blinded when she intervened in the fight and a student threw a hanger at her. Students have a history of disciplinary issues as early as kindergarten, and may have benefited from discipline like a halt early on, Rogers said.
“Our schools need the flexibility to create a safer environment by quickly dealing with student discipline like the ones who have lost my vision,” Rogers said.
“It makes little sense.”
Gina Zenor, an educator and fellow at the Texas Institute of Educational Policy, said the bill’s language was vague. For example, she said it doesn’t define what is considered “repeated or serious confusion.”
“It’s essential to maintain classroom orders, but this lack of clarity leads to inconsistent discipline practices,” Zenor says. “Undefined terms such as repetition and substantial confusion create room for implicit bias.”
Black students already experience more severe disciplinary actions than their peers, which can lead to poor academic achievements and affect school perceptions.
Creating virtual options for disciplinary alternative education programs could have unintended consequences for students who need help with action, opponents of the bill said.
Leach, author of the bill, said virtual settings should be reserved when direct programs are capable.
“Creating a virtual (disciplinary alternative education program) makes little sense for children who are already experiencing behavioral problems. Virtual settings during Covid have proven difficult for many children.” “These children that have been removed are probably the children who need the most attention.”
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