BILL ANALYSIS

Senate Research Center	H.B. 3075
85R5894 PAM-F	By: Huberty (Garcia)
	Education
	5/17/2017
	Engrossed

AUTHOR'S / SPONSOR'S STATEMENT OF INTENT

Currently, students in a Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD) facility can be served by a traditional independent school district or a charter school for educational services. Students in a TJJD facility who are provided educational services by a public school district are not counted for the purposes of dropout and completion rates. However, if a TJJD facility provides educational services to its students through a charter school, the same exemption does not apply.

H.B. 3075 extends the same dropout and completion rate exemption for students receiving educational services through a charter school that currently exists for public schools.

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Currently, only Harris County and Dallas County provide education services through a charter school.

Harris County's charter school provides education services for expelled students, delinquent youth placed in a county-operated juvenile institution, and students on probation who want to earn their general education degree.

Because this is a hard-to-teach population that floats in and out of the school system, their drop-out and completion rates are skewed.

Since this exemption does not currently apply to these two schools, they must apply for a waiver from the Texas Education Agency every school year.

There is no known opposition at this time.

H.B. 3075 amends current law relating to excluding certain students from the computation of dropout and completion rates for purposes of public school accountability.

RULEMAKING AUTHORITY

This bill does not expressly grant any additional rulemaking authority to a state officer, institution, or agency.

SECTION BY SECTION ANALYSIS

SECTION 1. Amends Sections 39.053(g-1) and (g-2), Education Code, as follows:

(g-1) Requires the commissioner of education (commissioner), in computing certain dropout and completion rates, to exclude students who are detained at a county pre-adjudication or post-adjudication juvenile detention facility, and in the district exclusively as a function of having been detained at the facility but are otherwise not students of the district in which the facility is located, or provided services by an open-enrollment charter school exclusively as the result of having been detained at the facility. Deletes existing text specifying a county detention facility.

(g-2) Requires the commissioner, in computing completion rates under Subsection (c)(4)(A)(i) (relating to using dropout rates to evaluate high school districts in the fourth domain), rather than Section (c)(2) (relating to the second evaluation domain of indicators of achievement), to exclude certain students.

SECTION 2.� Provides that this Act applies beginning with the 2017-2018 school year.

SECTION 3. Effective date: upon passage or September 1, 2017.