On Tuesday, April 2, 2019, the House Public Education Committee heard several bills related to a variety of topics.

ATPE registered positions in support of three of the bills heard in committee:

• House Bill (HB) 1517 (Coleman, D-Houston): Would require schools, including charters, to notify parents if they do not have a full-time nurse for 30 or more consecutive instructional days. The bill excludes schools that enroll fewer than 10,000 students.
• HB 2030 (Turner, John, D-Dallas): Would allow eligible three-year-olds enrolled in pre-K to continue their eligibility the next school year, which helps parents avoid intensive paperwork of re-registration and reduces the administrative burden on districts.
• HB 2184 (Allen, D-Houston): Would create collaborative policies for improving a student's transition from an alternative education setting back to the regular classroom. A committee substitute for the bill clarifies that teachers who implement the transition plan are included on the planning committee.

The following bills were also heard by the committee:

• HB 963 (Bell, C., R-Magnolia): Would add technology applications courses to the career and technical education (CTE) allotment, so that students in those courses would receive the same weighted funding as students in CTE courses.
• HB 1468 (Talarico, D-Round Rock): Would create a “public school mental health task force” to determine the effectiveness of school counseling programs and ways to improve school climate and report that data to the Texas Education Agency (TEA).
• HB 2984 (Allison, R-San Antonio): Would require the State Board of Education (SBOE) to add essential knowledge and skills (TEKS) to the technology applications curriculum related to coding, computer programming, computational thinking, and cybersecurity. One witness noted that the TEKS are set to be revised in 2021 regardless.
• HB 3007 (Turner, Chris, D-Grand Prairie) Would require TEA to provide districts all source data that was used in computing their accountability ratings. Rep. Turner stated that districts are not given access to all the data used to determine their A-F accountability ratings and that his bill gives districts the opportunity to view the data during the appeals process. Witnesses representing Arlington ISD, who requested the bill, testified that their college, career, and military readiness data was missing information on 206 students.
• HB 3217 (Ashby, R-Lufkin): Would reauthorize institutions of higher education to offer a bachelor's degree in education and eliminate the 18-semester-hour cap on the number of education courses allowed for a degree. One witness testified against the bill, stating that Texas needs subject matter specialists and that content hours should not be decreased. The Texas Association of Colleges for Teacher Education spoke to the importance of pedagogy and testified that students would not experience longer degrees as a result of the bill.
• HB 3323 (Burns, R-Cleburne): Would require a school district to post employment policy documents on its website.
• HB 3435 (Bowers, D-Garland): Would establish March 1 as Texas Girls in STEM Day.
• HB 3966 (Raymond, D-Laredo: Would require the governor to designate Holocaust Remembrance Week in public schools.
• HB 3710 (Bell, K., R-Forney): Would require TEA to develop free, electronic tutorials for end-of-course assessments at an estimated cost of $3/student.
• HB 4310 (Dutton, D-Houston): Would require districts to allow teachers sufficient time to teach a given curriculum and states that districts may not penalize a teacher for failing to follow the scope and sequence timeline if the teacher determines that the students need more learning time.
• HB 4487 (Frullo, R-Lubbock): States that students sent to the campus behavior coordinator are not considered to have been removed from the classroom for purposes of reporting in the Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS).
• HCR 59 (Guillen, D-Rio Grande City): Would designate the second week of November as School Psychologist Appreciation Week.

The House Public Education Committee will meet again on Thursday, April 4, to hear bills on UIL and student health, and again on Tuesday, April 9, to hear bills related to charter schools. In news from the full House, Chairman Huberty's school finance and tax reform bill, House Bill 3, will be up for debate in the House chamber on Wednesday, April 3. Follow @TeachtheVote and your ATPE lobbyists (@ATPE_AndreaC, @ATPE_MontyE, @ATPE_JenniferM, and @markwigginstx) on Twitter for updates on the action!