Improving school safety is a top priority in Texas during this legislative session after last year’s deadly school shooting in Uvalde. But instead of making guns less accessible to children, for some GOP legislators the solution to ensuring school safety means tossing out any at-risk students, deemed to be disruptive or aggressive.
“Not all kids belong in the classroom anymore,” state Senator Charles Perry said during last December’s hearings of the Special Senate Committee to Protect All Texans, the group tasked with investigating and proposing measures to improve school safety.
One bill under consideration in the Senate’s education committee would allow teachers to remove and refuse a student reentry to the classroom based on only a single incident of behavior deemed “disruptive,” and interferes “with the teacher’s ability to communicate effectively with students.” Under the proposed law, instead of first receiving behavioral and academic support in school, the student could be placed in a disciplinary alternative education program or expelled. Perry is cosponsoring that bill, SB 245, along with senators Mayes Middleton and Drew Springer.
