Texas educators would regain flexibility over how they punish students who bring e-cigarettes onto campus under a bill that ed the Senate Thursday night.
That change — along with giving s more leeway to suspend young kids — is part of a broader rewrite of Texas’ school discipline code that lawmakers are finalizing. Many North Texas superintendents lobbied lawmakers for months on the issue, saying teachers must have better tools to maintain order in the classroom.
The legislation senators ed waters down a 2023 law that required students caught with vapes be sent to off-campus disciplinary alternative schools. Since then, e-cigarette offenses became one of the most common reasons that students were disciplined, with more than 32,000 violations last year.
School leaders asked lawmakers to give them back discretion over how students are punished. The strict mandate led to over-crowded disciplinary campuses and a uniformly harsh approach to children who may need help with nicotine addiction.
Senators appeared moved by examples of young children who got in serious trouble after they accidentally brought an older sibling’s vape onto campus.
“We want to provide flexibility at the community level to make sure that we respond effectively to students’ behavior,” said Sen. José Menéndez, D-San Antonio. House Bill 6 now allows that on a student’s first e-cigarette offense, he said.
Richardson schools superintendent Tabitha Branum said she expects RISD to send students to in-school suspension for an initial e-cigarette offense, where both the child and the parent would be given educational resources related to the harms of vaping.
“It just allows us, with the first infraction, to provide that remediation effort before we are sending them to [a Disciplinary Alternative Education Program],” she said.
Some educators have long urged lawmakers to revamp school discipline laws, detailing horror stories about teachers suffering injuries on the job because of violent students. In a poll cited by the state’s 2023 Teacher Vacancy Task Force report, nearly half of educators listed discipline and safe working conditions as a top concern.
But education justice advocates cautioned legislators against returning Texas to an age of zero-tolerance discipline that led to huge numbers of students — disproportionately Black children and those with disabilities — being punished.
“Decades of research have shown that exclusionary discipline not only hurts the excluded child’s academic and emotional development — it also negatively impacts school climate,” said Paige Duggins-Clay, the chief legal analyst for Intercultural Development Research Association. “We must make meaningful investments in teacher training and s, authentic family engagement and addressing root causes of challenging student behaviors.”
Senators ultimately watered down or eliminated some of the most stringent proposals on the table, including a provision that would have involved civil courts in serious disciplinary cases.
House must agree with the changes before the bill goes to the governor.
“No district wants to give up on a child. No district wants to not have a redemption feature,” said Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock. “But we’ve reached a crisis point where there’s just some kids that absolutely are such a deterrent to the overall learning process that we have to find a better way.”
Among the most controversial elements of HB 6 is a plan to make it easier to kick young children out of Texas classrooms. Students below third grade could be removed for “conduct that results in repeated or significant disruption to the classroom.”
This comes nearly a decade after lawmakers banned out-of-school suspensions for these littlest learners, except for serious offenses such as bringing a gun or marijuana to class.
Opponents worried HB 6 would essentially gut the ban because little kids are frequently disruptive and the original bill language was vague as to what constitutes “significant disruption.”
So senators added a provision Thursday requiring school officials to document the behavior that results in out-of-school suspensions for young students.
“Before you get to an out-of-school suspension for a K-through-three, you have an in-school suspension. So there’s going to be a long history of documenting multiple factors long before this is due,” Perry said.
“You got to be really in a hard place for a kid to get removed,” he added.
Lawmakers said this amendment was about striking a balance while addressing the small number of students who can cause chaos in elementary classrooms.
“Sending a child home — a 5-year-old at K through three — is the last thing we want to do, but we’re not going to let them rob the other kids of their education,” Menéndez said.
Wylie ISD Superintendent David Vinson, a vocal proponent for discipline reform, said his district expects to use the ability to suspend young children sparingly, after trying other strategies to help the child and engage the parents.
“That is absolutely a last resort, but we need the resort,” Vinson said.
Schools could send students to in-school suspension, or ISS, for an unlimited time, under the bill. Placements would be reviewed at least once every 10 days.
Current rules cap ISS to three days.
School leaders in favor of this change say students must sometimes be removed from peers for extended periods so officials can fully investigate and address an incident.
But opponents worry students could languish in ISS, leading them to miss valuable learning time.
Perry, who spent six years pursuing discipline reform, said he liked where the bill landed after several amendments.
“Doing nothing today is not an option because … it’s the No. 1 issue teachers leave the profession,” he said. “So with that, HB 6 found that balance.”
The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with from Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, Judy and Jim Gibbs, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Ron and Phyllis Steinhart, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks, and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.