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House Bill 2678 |
House Author: Smith, Todd |
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Effective: 9-1-11 |
Senate Sponsor: Wentworth |
House Bill 2678 amends the Education Code to require the Sunset Advisory Commission, during its review of the Texas Education Agency (TEA) concerning the agency's abolition on September 1, 2013, to review TEA's jurisdiction and control over driver education and driving safety schools and include in its report to the legislature and governor a recommendation as to whether another state agency should have such jurisdiction and control.
Current law requires TEA to provide to each licensed or exempt driver education school driver education certificates to be used for certifying completion of an approved driver education course. House Bill 2678 authorizes TEA to provide, as an alternative to such certificates, certificate numbers to enable the school and each approved parent-taught course provider to print and issue TEA-approved driver education certificates, each with a unique number in serial order, and sets out requirements relating to the form used for such certificates, the printing and issuance of original and duplicate certificates by a school or course provider in a manner that prevents their unauthorized reproduction or misuse, and the electronic submission of related data to TEA.
House Bill 2678 requires TEA to review the national criminal history record information of a person who holds a driver education instructor license or a driver education school license and to place such a license on inactive status for the license holder's failure to comply with a deadline for submitting information required for review. The bill requires the commissioner of education by rule to establish a schedule for obtaining and reviewing the information a person must provide TEA for review and requires TEA, not later than September 1, 2013, to obtain all national criminal history record information on all holders of the designated licenses. The bill requires the commissioner by rule to require a person submitting to such a review or the driver education school employing the person, as determined by TEA, to pay a fee for the review and caps the amount of the fee. The bill exempts certain identifying information collected about a person for a criminal history record information review from the state's open records law and prohibits its release except by court order, with the subject's consent, or to provide relevant information to driver education schools or otherwise to comply with the bill's provisions. The bill requires such information to be destroyed by the requestor or any subsequent holder of the information not later than the first anniversary of the date the information is received.
House Bill 2678 requires a driver education school to discharge or refuse to hire as an instructor an employee or job applicant if TEA finds through a review that the employee or applicant has been convicted of a felony offense against a person, an offense requiring a convicted defendant's registration as a sex offender, or an equivalent offense under the laws of another state or federal law, and that, at the time of the offense, the victim of the offense was under 18 years of age or was enrolled in a public school. The bill requires TEA to suspend or revoke a driver education instructor license or a driver education school license and to refuse to issue or renew the license to a person convicted of such an offense. The bill makes these provisions inapplicable to a felony offense against a person if more than 30 years have elapsed since the offense was committed and the person convicted has satisfied all terms of the court order entered on conviction. The bill authorizes a driver education school to discharge an instructor if the school obtains information of a felony conviction or conviction of a misdemeanor involving moral turpitude that the employee did not disclose to the school or TEA.
House Bill 2678 authorizes the issuance of a driver education instructor license to a person who has completed the applicable education requirement but who does not hold the required certification and authorizes such a license to limit the license holder to teaching or providing classroom training in a driver education school located in a county that has a population of at least 275,000 but not more than 285,000 and is operated by a private primary or secondary school or open-enrollment charter school.