House Bill 6 | Effective: 6-20-25 |
House Author: Leach et al. | House Committee: Public Education |
Senate Sponsor: Perry et al. | Senate Committee: Education K-16 |
House Bill 6 amends the Education Code to revise and set out provisions relating to discipline management in public schools. Among other provisions, the bill does the following:
- grants a professional employee of a public school district immunity from disciplinary proceedings for the reporting of a violation of state law regarding discipline in public schools to another professional employee of a district, the Texas Education Agency (TEA), or a law enforcement agency or for an action taken in good faith to remove a student from class;
- for purposes of the parent-directed special education services program, includes crisis prevention and intervention training for a student's parent or person standing in parental relation among the qualifying supplemental services;
- revises the requirements for a student code of conduct;
- revises provisions regarding campus behavior coordinators, including by establishing such a coordinator's responsibility to monitor disciplinary referrals and report certain student conduct to the campus's threat assessment and safe and supportive school team;
- authorizes a district's board of trustees to adopt a policy for parental involvement in school disciplinary placements and sets out requirements for such a policy;
- expands the grounds on which a teacher may remove a student from class, requires parental notification of such a removal, conditions the return of the student to class without the teacher's consent on the holding of a conference in which the teacher has been provided an opportunity to participate and the creation of a return to class plan, and authorizes a student to appeal their removal;
- specifies that an in-school suspension is not subject to any time limit but requires review of such a suspension at least once every 10 school days to determine if it should be continued;
- requires a school to provide a student subject to an in-school suspension with appropriate behavioral support services and comparable educational services as the student would receive in the classroom;
- revises the conduct for which a student enrolled in a grade level below grade three may be placed in out-of-school suspension and allows for reassignment of the student to an in‑school suspension on request of a parent or person standing in parental relation who is unable to provide suitable supervision for the student during school hours during the suspension period;
- revises the grounds for mandatory or discretionary placement of a student in a disciplinary alternative education program;
- expands the conduct that triggers mandatory expulsion of a student, including by removing restrictions on where applicable conduct occurs;
- authorizes placement of a student who has been expelled in a virtual expulsion program that is established by the respective district if a juvenile justice alternative education program is not available for certain reasons and sets out requirements and prohibitions relating to such a virtual program;
- revises the grounds on which a student may be excluded from an open-enrollment charter school;
- prohibits the exemption of a district of innovation from state law regarding school discipline;
- prohibits TEA from withholding any state funding or imposing a penalty on a district based on the number of students in the district that have been removed from a classroom, placed into in-school or out-of-school suspension, placed in a disciplinary alternative education program or a juvenile justice alternative education program, or expelled; and
- establishes that the team conducting a threat assessment of a student in a special education program must include a person who has knowledge of student disabilities and how student disabilities manifest and may include specified types of professionals.
The bill also amends the Education Code and Health and Safety Code to set out provisions regarding the Texas Child Health Access through Telemedicine program operated by the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium. The bill does the following:
- authorizes a district to offer to each enrolled student access to mental health services provided through the program if the consortium makes such services available to the district but prohibits the district from requiring a student to participate in any such service;
- establishes certain consent requirements for program referrals, participation, and record sharing;
- requires the program to maintain, provide to each district at which the program is available, and post quarterly on the consortium's website a list of health providers to which the program refers participants and the process used in vetting those providers; and
- requires the consortium's biennial report to include certain data regarding participants and potential participants of the program.