Enrolled Bill Summary

            House Bill 318 amends the Education Code to allow the State Board of Education to grant up to 100 charters for open-enrollment schools that adopt express policies for admitting students eligible to receive public education grants and additional charters for open-enrollment schools whose prospective student bodies will include a certain percentage of dropouts and at-risk students.

            The act makes a student eligible for a Public Education Grant if the student is assigned to a school where 50 percent or more of the students taking the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) or the required exit-level test perform poorly on the test in any two of the preceding three years rather than for three consecutive years previous, and it provides that a student using a grant to attend a school outside the student's home district remains eligible for the grant even though the school on which the student's eligibility is based no longer meets the low performance criteria, but the student becomes ineligible if the student is assigned to a school that does not meet the criteria for identification as a low performing school.

            House Bill 318 provides that a student using a grant to attend a school outside the district in which the student resides is included in the average daily attendance (ADA) of the district in which the school is located and not of the student's home district. The act provides that a receiving district is entitled to a public education grant allotment and, if applicable, additional state aid, including additional facilities funding, for each student using a grant to attend school in the district.

            The act requires the commissioner to notify each district having a campus whose students are eligible for public education grants of that fact not later than January 1 of each year, identifying such campuses and informing the district of its obligation to comply with certain parental notification requirements, and it requires each district, not later than February 1, to notify the parents of each student assigned to a campus described above that the student is eligible for a grant and to include in the notice an explanation of the public education grant program and how to obtain further information.

            The act applies beginning with the 1997-1998 school year.