Does a Texas School Board Have Complete Authority Over its Health Council?
Does a Texas School Board Have Complete Authority Over its Health Council?
Yes...mostly? A deep dive into the 1995 Texas Education Code reform and subsequent law on School Health Advisory Councils.
Conroe ISD, like many school districts, continues to make headlines in local (and sometimes national) news. Like many districts across the country, the Board of Trustees in CISD are in conflict over everything from book banning to budget balancing, as well as fellow Trustees attacking the Board President in video ads during his Republican primary challenge for State office, which he lost.
There are arguments in public meetings about Board members using cell phones to manipulate voting, and even the idea of supporting public education in resolution becomes a debate.
Now a new battle has begun. Recently, at the end of the February 2024 Board meeting, the CISD Board President added an agenda item for the March meeting to review the bylaws for the district’s School Health Advisory Council (SHAC), saying the Board needed to rewrite the SHAC bylaws, “Because they are way out of whack, and they need some help to rein that in.”
You can watch the following meeting’s discussion here, starting at 2:45:35:
YouTube Link
This change caused quite a stir within the Board and the SHAC itself, as they were seemingly not aware that bylaw changes were needed. The SHAC typically manages its own bylaws and activities, presenting on occasion to the Board on student health related topics as required by the State of Texas. Their meetings are honestly pretty boring, which is expected with any Board committee (excluding of course the cell phone subcommittee, which spawned from the SHAC).
The Board is set to vote on completely new SHAC bylaws during the May 2024 meeting.
If you are not familiar with what SHAC does, here is a quick recap:
A School Health Advisory Council assists the district in ensuring that local community values are reflected in health education instruction. Additionally, SHACs play an important role in strengthening the connection between health and learning. They can help parents and community stakeholders reinforce the knowledge and skills children need to stay healthy for a lifetime.
The SHAC is a group appointed by the school district to serve at the district level. Members of the SHAC come from different areas of the community and from within the school district. The majority of members must be parents who are not employed by the district. Texas law (Texas Education Code, Title 2, Subtitle F, Chapter 28, Subchapter A, §28.004) requires the establishment of a SHAC for every school district. SHACs are required to meet at least four times each year.
Why does the Board need to bother with its SHAC bylaws? Is the Board President targeting the SHAC for some reason?
The three newer Board Trustees, commonly named the “Mama Bears”, took the unusual step of contacting the Texas Attorney General, requesting guidance over the issue of SHAC bylaws. I say unusual because typically this type of request comes jointly from the Board itself, with input from the district’s attorney, and likely part of an existing legal case.
In this instance, it also seems unnecessary to involve the Attorney General for a simple school Board dispute. The request letter itself is an immediate escalation of an internal dispute that has not had the chance to be fully discussed or resolved. Based on the Attorney General’s ongoing legal battles, I am curious if they even receive a response.
Putting the back-and-forth aside, a properly functioning Board would be aligned in discovering the needs and requirements together, rather than going on their own and firing shots across the dais each meeting. Both sides being surprised by each other’s actions truly shows how dysfunctional the CISD School Board has become.
You can read a copy of the Mama Bear’s letter to the Attorney General below. Here are the questions they are requesting guidance on (exactly as written):
Does a Board of Trustees have the authority to require a SHAC to submit their bylaws for adoption by the Board?
Does the Board of Trustees have the authority to draft or amend the bylaws of the SHAC?
If a SHAC has bylaws that set forth and published procedures to become a member of a SHAC, can the Board of Trustees override that procedure and appoint other members to the SHAC that do not comply with the published procedures?
If the SHAC has a goal to have more than the minimum requirement of a “majority” of parents on the SHAC, does the Board of Trustees have the authority to override that goal?
Does the Board of Trustees have the authority to appoint a Co-Chair, who is a district employee, who has not been elected by the members of the SHAC?
Does the Board of Trustees have the authority to determine or command the priorities of the SHAC as to what should it recommended to the Board of Trustees.
Does the Board of Trustees have the authority to determine or command the priorities of the SHAC as to what should it recommended to the Board of Trustees?
Does the Board of Trustees have the authority to set the priorities or projects for the SHAC?
Does the Board of Trustees have the authority to force the SHAC to violate the statutory requirement of presenting the recommendations to the board and instead present their recommendations to the Superintendent of the ISD who will “work with” the President of the Board to determine how and if it will be presented to the board?
The rest of the letter is a confusing read, seemingly written as legal correspondence yet fraught with incorrect salutations, grammatical errors, and without all the history and context we will attempt to discover here. In fairness, the letter itself may have been rushed out the door to get guidance before the Board made any decisions.
It also accuses the Board President and Superintendent of disenfranchising the volunteer parents on the SHAC, which in my opinion is the most critical part of the entire letter.
Yet, I believe some of these questions are interesting and could use guidance. After all, the SHAC is mandated by the State, and the spirit of its creation is based on parent involvement that requires the Board to listen on a range of health topics before making important decisions. How can the SHAC operate as required if hampered by its own Board?
To begin, we need to step back and look beyond the rhetoric and posturing so we can get to the basics of Texas law and Board policy. We will then come back to the latest updates to compare.
Come back in time with me, nearly 30 years ago, to the beginning of the School Health Advisory Council.
As usual, these write-ups are long. There is a TLDR at the bottom if you need it.
Education Code
In 1995, the 74th Texas Legislature rewrote the Texas Education Code with Senate Bill 1. You can read a copy of an old article here prior to its passing:
After five years of exhaustive legislative sessions that focused on overhauling the way Texas pays for its schools, lawmakers have found a way to create even more upheaval: rethinking the state’s entire school code.
Sen. Bill Ratliff, the chairman of the Senate education committee, proposed a gargantuan school-reform bill last month that is just short of 1,100 pages and comprehensive enough to offend everyone, as its sponsor proudly predicted.
“A lot of sacred cows are going to be gored, and some of them will be yours,” Senator Ratliff said in greeting about 300 members of the Texas Association of School Boards who gathered in the state capital last week to learn about the plan.
The amount of history we would need to cover, to explain why Texas went through a rewrite of the Texas Education Code, would include all the way from the first “parent empowerment” and textbook challenge movements that started in the 1960’s, to the national drive to restructure U.S. public education in the 1980s and early 1990’s. There are many resources available on these topics, and I am still attempting to review as many as I can, but I have a few recommendations if you need good history lessons:
Podcast: Teaching Texas, Season 2 - Focuses on the most famous of early parent movements into Texas school textbooks and school public policy, from the 1960’s to today. It includes info on how the State Board of Education manages TEKS and the methods used to approve textbooks from publishers.
Dissertation: Senate Bill 1: An analysis on the development and adoption of the new Texas Education Code by Patricia Linares (1997) - Provides an insider’s history on Texas Senate Bill 1 (1995), including understanding the how and why the bill was developed, as well as identify the political influences that impacted the policies within. The link above is a sample.
Book: Restructuring Schools: Capturing and Assessing the Phenomena by Joseph Murphy (1991) - A critical analysis of the school restructuring movement, advocating for decentralized, school-based solutions to educational reform. The book evaluates the successes and challenges of these efforts, emphasizing the need for sustainable change in educational institutions.
Ironically, or perhaps not, what I learned through reading and listening to these materials is that the rewrite of the Texas Education Code, along with the same rewrites within every other U.S. state, was to make America more competitive through a stronger public education system.
Solutions included a more decentralized approach to schools, focusing importance on empowering students, teachers, and parents by advocating for bottom-up, school-based solution strategies over top-down mandates.
This is interesting when compared to today’s Texas politics, where more decisions have been moved to higher levels of government, including how schools are financed, the required curriculum that must be taught, which textbooks are allowed, student discipline, and a plethora of other laws geared towards centralizing power of public education at the highest levels.
The amount of control a local Texas School Board has over its district has decreased considerably over the last few decades.
SHAC’s Creation
We already recapped the purpose of the SHAC earlier, but how about the reason for its creation in the first place?
This all begins with how public schools teach human sexuality. If you are new to this discussion, then I am going to state the obvious - people have different opinions on things.
This includes how people view human sexuality, and these opinions are especially debated in how human sexuality is taught within public schools. Whether you believe in teaching abstinence-only education, or the A-To-Zs with the birds and bees, the fight on teaching sex in school has been raging for longer than most of us have been alive.
The SHAC’s creation in Texas law was a response to decades of parental concerns about human sexuality instruction, aiming to give parents and the community a voice in the health education of their children. This way, the State would not need to mandate human sexuality by pushing it down to the local school districts. This lets the values of local communities decide what they teach their children.
The goal of the SHAC was to enable a direct voice from the community to its school board through research and recommendations on human sexuality (among other things), and the Board would be required to listen to them by law. Arguably, this has worked really well for school districts that are able to find enough volunteers to manage their SHAC.
Fast forward to today, and SHACs are now required to assist with all kinds of things well beyond its original mandate. You can go through the 52 pages of the State’s latest SHAC Guide here. Here is a sample of responsibilities SHACs now have:
Program Planning: SHACs collaborate with schools to plan and impact student health, including selecting programs and providing training.
Promotion: They assist in promoting school health within the district and community, highlighting the work of the SHAC.
Fiscal Impact: SHACs make recommendations to the school board, considering the financial implications for the district.
Collaboration: They work with district and state agencies to recommend health programs, services, and policies.
Liaison with School Board: SHACs report to the school board annually, providing recommendations and evaluations of health education curriculum and instruction.
And from the law itself:
The local school health advisory council's duties include recommending…
policies, procedures, strategies, and curriculum appropriate for specific grade levels designed to prevent physical health concerns, including obesity, cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and mental health concerns, including suicide…
appropriate grade levels and methods of instruction for human sexuality instruction…
strategies for integrating the curriculum components…
strategies to increase parental awareness…
appropriate grade levels and curriculum for instruction regarding the dangers of opioids…
appropriate grade levels and curriculum for instruction regarding child abuse, family violence, dating violence, and sex trafficking…
It amazes me that so much is placed onto a SHAC. There may be plenty of parent volunteers willing to take on these responsibilities within large school districts, but how SHACs function within small or rural districts must be very difficult. I am guessing there are plenty of consultants in this field who do not mind assisting.
SHAC Bylaws
Let’s now get the meat of this debate, which is about who controls the SHAC, and more specifically, the SHAC bylaws. I also believe this discussion impacts Board power and responsibility into almost every other area under their purview.
If you are not familiar with what bylaws are, then know they are essentially the rules that an organization creates to govern its operations and activities. Bylaws set the ground-level boundaries and processes for how things will work, which in this case is the School Health Advisory Council.
The interesting thing is that SHAC bylaws are not even required by Texas law. They are highly recommended in the Texas SHAC Guide, but since they are not required, not all SHACs have them. Even some of the larger districts in Greater Houston do not appear to have them (or at least not post them online).
In trying to understand the Conroe ISD SHAC bylaws, found here, I concluded that they are as standard as you would expect them to be. However, they were completely rewritten from 2022 to 2023.
Before 2022, there were no bylaws for the CISD SHAC (that I could find).
I had begun to run through the major bylaw’s differences between 2022 to 2023, but since it was a complete rewrite it’s probably not worth going through it line by line. Here are the big changes:
Formalized SHAC process and procedures. This is expected for any bylaws.
Limited size of SHAC to 31 members. This is not super controversial, and too many people on a council/committee is always a recipe for disaster.
Changed the process for removal of members, even if they are on a 3-year appointment. If you miss too many meetings you get removed. This is also not super controversial, but previous members complained that they were removed for not even completing a simple survey. So it appears that this policy was being taken farther than intended.
As a side note, if it is the Board’s responsibility to appoint members, then it should be the Board’s responsibility to remove them, in my opinion.
The only reason I wanted to review these was to better understand why the Board President was wanting these changed, which largely seems to revolve around membership selection, replacement, or removal.
For today (May 2024), the new draft SHAC bylaws will be voted on during the May meeting, and I imagine they will be adopted with a vote of 4-3. Here is the latest draft, which is yet again a complete rewrite, but includes all the standard bylaw language you would expect.
Case Thought Experiment
Regardless of what changes were made to SHAC bylaws last year or today, let’s complete this discussion on Board authority.
Unfortunately, there is no case law related to a Texas School Board and its SHAC. The best bet is to consider what would happen if members of a SHAC sued its school board.
Let us pretend we are on each side of a lawsuit and argue each position.
A SHAC parent has sued its School Board, claiming overreach of its authority, acting in bad faith, and disenfranchising its members. Does a Texas school board have complete oversight of its School Health Advisory Council, including the management of bylaws, members, and priorities?
I decided to ask the AI on these hypotheticals.
AI Lawyer for School District
As a lawyer arguing that the school board has complete oversight of the School Health Advisory Council (SHAC), including its bylaws, I would present the following points:
Statutory Authority: The Texas Education Code §28.004(a) explicitly mandates that the board of trustees of each school district shall establish a local SHAC. This statutory requirement underscores the board’s foundational role in the creation and governance of the SHAC.
Appointment Power: The board of trustees has the power to appoint members to the SHAC, which includes setting forth procedures for membership. While the SHAC may have its own recommended procedures, the board retains the authority to make appointments, reflecting its oversight capabilities.
Advisory Role of SHAC: The SHAC serves an advisory role to the school board, providing recommendations on health-related issues. The board is not legally bound to follow these recommendations, which further demonstrates the board’s decision-making power over matters concerning health education instruction.
Local Community Values: The SHAC is designed to assist the district in ensuring that local community values are reflected in health education instruction. The school board, as the elected representative body of the community, is best positioned to interpret and implement these values, reinforcing its oversight role.
In conclusion, the school board’s statutory responsibilities, appointment powers, and the advisory nature of the SHAC collectively affirm the board’s comprehensive oversight of the SHAC, including its bylaws.
AI Lawyer for SHAC plaintiff
As a lawyer representing the plaintiff, a SHAC parent member, I would argue the following points:
Autonomy of SHAC: The Texas Education Code establishes SHACs to ensure that health education programs reflect local community values. The autonomy of SHACs is essential for them to fulfill this role effectively. By overriding the SHAC’s published procedures for membership, the board undermines this autonomy and the council’s ability to represent community interests.
Legislative Intent: The legislative intent behind the creation of SHACs was to provide a voice to parents and community members in health education. If the board can unilaterally appoint members without following the SHAC’s procedures, it contravenes the spirit of the law, which seeks to promote community involvement and not board dominance.
Procedural Fairness: The SHAC’s bylaws, including membership procedures, are established to ensure transparency and fairness. If the board can circumvent these procedures, it raises concerns about procedural fairness and the equitable representation of community members on the SHAC.
Good Faith: The SHAC and the board are expected to operate in good faith, respecting each other’s roles and contributions. The board’s actions, if they override the SHAC’s procedures, could be seen as acting in bad faith, undermining the collaborative relationship mandated by the Texas Education Code.
Impact on Effectiveness: The effectiveness of the SHAC can be compromised if the board imposes members who do not comply with the established procedures. This could lead to a lack of confidence in the SHAC’s recommendations and diminish its role as a representative advisory body.
In summary, the plaintiff would argue that the board’s actions, if they indeed override the SHAC’s published procedures for membership, violate the principles of autonomy, legislative intent, procedural fairness, good faith, and effectiveness that are central to the SHAC’s purpose and function as defined by the Texas Education Code.
Interesting! Let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion / TLDR
Without further clarification from the Mama Bear’s letter to the Attorney General, which is still pending as of May 2024, I would say these are the key points to consider:
A school board has absolute authority to manage its SHAC, including its bylaws, because the board itself is elected and has complete purview over the district, which includes its health council and committees. Further, the board is mandated to create the SHAC, and thus has the ability to create and manage it under its discretion as defined in the law. A SHAC, filled with unelected appointees, has no power to get around this. The SHAC ultimately has only influence.
However…
SHACs are required by Texas law, and they must meet certain requirements as defined in law. This places it into a weird area where if a SHAC cannot perform its duties, then the board is not following the law. The spirit of the SHAC itself is built upon decades of parental empowerment movements, and if it is the goal of a board to hamper its SHAC efforts, then they may not be operating in good faith based on the intent of the law.
Ultimately, I believe this debate is not about a school board’s purview over its SHAC or the district as a whole, but it is about influence over policy and what is taught within schools. We elect school boards for a reason, and if in their purview they wish to adopt certain textbooks, certain curriculum, or certain health education policy, then they have the power to do it.
Elections matter.
The SHAC, although important, has little impact without the power of the board itself, which we know because the board appoints SHAC members and approves the health curriculum and other materials used in schools, whether they were recommended by the SHAC or not.
We didn’t even discuss what this would look like for school districts that have no established SHAC membership.
Even if a SHAC parent sued the board over what we reviewed above, I would imagine the result would not change anything in Texas law regarding SHAC autonomy. Instead, a ruling would likely review if a School Board violated the law, which as we’ve viewed does not give a SHAC control over anything. At most, you may find Board individuals working in bad faith based on the types of changes made, but would that change anything? Probably not.
To conclude: Yes, a School Board has complete purview over its Student Health Advisory Council, including the ability to manage its creation, membership, policies, procedures, and bylaws. It has the power, the authority, and the capability to do so.
At least until someone becomes case law.
Thanks for reading!