Lawmakers and education officials are in agreement: Texas schools need more money to implement the school safety overhauls enacted last session. A House bill co
House Bill 124 , before the House Public Education committee, would raise that amount of funding to $37,000 per campus and $14 per student. Critical education groups, including the Texas State Teachers Association, Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, and the Texas School Boards Association, all support the legislation.
But Democrats in a hearing on Tuesday said they thought the bill could go further. Lawmakers and education officials are in agreement: Texas schools need more money to implement the school safety overhauls enacted last session. A House bill could as much as double the amount of spending on school safety, but Democrats have called for more., which provided each school with $15,000 and $10 per student to go toward new school safety implementations. It also required public schools to put new protocols into place, in an effort to prevent and prepare for deadly mass shootings, like Texas saw in, before the House Public Education committee, would raise that amount of funding to $37,000 per campus and $14 per student. Critical education groups, including the Texas State Teachers Association, Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, and the Texas School Boards Association, all support the legislation. But Democrats in a hearing on Tuesday said they thought the bill could go further. "I don't really know anybody who lives on $37,000 a year who has a family," Rep. John Bryant, D-Dallas, said. Several schools have raised similar concerns, though Republicans in the committee noted that the mandate does not explicitly require a full time police officer but rather a licensed peace officer.Rep. Bryant, as well as Austin Democrat Gina Hinojosa, both attempted to raise questions to the bill's author, Rep. Greg Bonnen, R-Friendswood, who also chairs the House Appropriations committee, over whether the state's budget proposal had enough surplus remaining to invest more into HB 124. Both times, the committee's chair, Rep. Brad Buckley, R-Salado, and Rep. Bonnen declined to elaborate, given that they were not discussing the budget but rather HB 124. "It's a little more complex than just this binary, 'more is always better for a given strategy,' and I think this committee understands that probably better than most," Bonnen said to the committee.The bill was left pending before the House committee without a vote. Texans say investments in school safety are the most important education topic this session, according to recent polling from the University of Texas/Texas Politics Project, more so than school vouchers or curricula. Fully 95% of voters said the topic was important, with 63% calling it extremely important. Last fall, John Scott, the chief of the Office of School Safety and Security at the Texas Education Agency, said that fewer than half of all schools are fully compliant with HB 3, mostly due to not having a peace officer on campus. He indicated that Texas would need to significantly increase its funding for that provision to be fully implemented.
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