Senate Education votes out bills including public school choice transfer expansion

The Senate Education Committee held this week’s hearing Thursday, but closer attention is due to the bills that are moving out of the committee, as the remaining weeks of the session (which ends May 29) begin to bring key deadlines for the legislative process.

Bills voted out of Senate Ed this week include:

• SB 418 by Sen. Angela Paxton, which expands public school choice by eliminating the requirement that districts to which a student can transfer must be adjacent to the original district.
• SB 595 by Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, which would require parent consent for psychological or psychiatric exams, testing or treatment. A provision specifically including “check-ins” in that category raised concerns among educators and educator groups, but a committee substitute clarifies that a teacher’s verbal check-in of a child about their general well-being is not a check-in that would require parent consent.
• SB 1557 by Sen. Tan Parker, to allow parents of a student victimized by a public school employee to either transfer their child to another school or receive funding to send their child to a private school.
• SB 2497 by Sen. Mayes Middleton, which would allow school districts/charters that offer alternative language educational methods to receive a weighted allotment of 0.15 under the bilingual education allotment (but capped at $10 million statewide) for students enrolled in the programs.