The Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) could be heading toward a legal showdown with former constituent members following an exchange of letters with an attorney representing a number of North Texas school boards and individual board trustees.
According to documents obtained by The Dallas Express, TASB’s legal services division sent a letter to lawyers affiliated with the Texas Council of School Attorneys (CSA) and asked them to advise their clients that they would lose all access to TASB’s proprietary services if they were to leave the organization.
The letter was sent on March 29, two days after the Carroll Independent School District (CISD) became the first public school system in decades to withdraw from TASB, as previously reported in The Dallas Express.
It asserted that virtually all TASB services — including, but not limited to, policy code formulations, student codes of conduct, and models and templates for policy language — are proprietary and have copyright protection.
The letter reads:
“A district owns only the contents of board-adopted local policies, but the district may not use TASB’s unique letter codes and coding structure … Contents means only the board-adopted local policy provisions; it does not include the alphabetical policy code or the form, arrangement, or text of the margin notes. In addition, TASB retains all right, title, and interest to (LEGAL) policies and unadopted local model policies or templates promulgated by TASB.”
The Dallas Express inquired about the letter’s purpose, and a TASB spokesperson stated:
“This letter is intended to clear up any confusion and explain the extent of TASB’s proprietary rights as they relate to TASB’s copyrighted policy publications and its online Policy Online hosting service. The benefits of TASB Policy Service are contingent on TASB membership.”
The alleged “confusion” may have originated at the CISD school board meeting in which trustees voted to leave TASB. During the meeting, one board member seemed to suggest that the district could still utilize the organization’s products without affiliating and paying fees or dues.
“All of the policies that TASB puts out there, any person in our audience right now, our community, or any board member could get on Google right now, look up any policy, read it, [and] use it as a reference material that we don’t have to pay for,” said CISD Trustee Eric Lannen.
Lannen made the statement during an exchange with a fellow trustee who expressed concern that there were not ready alternatives for many of the services TASB currently provides its members.
The Dallas Express subsequently raised the issue at a press conference held at the Texas Capitol on Monday, where a handful of state lawmakers and CISD trustees called on more school boards to drop out of TASB.
CISD Board President Cameron Bryan replied, “When we, Carroll [ISD], had that vote [to leave TASB], people started coming out of the woodwork in terms of businesses. ‘How can we help you? What services do you need? We are ready and willing to give you a cost-fair approach to obtain those services.”
Some alternative services do in fact already exist. For instance, The Dallas Express attended a two-day school board member training session last October that was developed by the Gulf Coast Community Action Agency. The training fulfills a Texas Education Code requirement and has typically been provided by TASB.
Shortly after the press conference, a TASB spokesperson told The Dallas Express, “Their goal in attacking TASB and in trying to get school boards to leave TASB is part of an effort to undermine local governance in public education and to silence and fragment the state’s largest group of elected officials — school board trustees.”
That same day, TASB received a letter from a local advocacy attorney, Tim Davis, who argued that some of TASB’s textual services (providing the language for policy updates) are exempted from copyright protection.
Davis cited federal guidance that suggests that “government edicts” and the written resources used to develop them cannot be copyrighted. He also went on to hint at TASB’s seeming defensiveness in the wake of CISD’s vote to exit the association.
“The timing of TASB’s communication seems directly connected to, as you state, ‘inquiries about the value of TASB services’ because, not even forty-eight hours before your communication, trustees of the [CISD] passed a resolution directing CISD administration to look for those services elsewhere,” Davis wrote.
Texas House Rep. Nate Schatzline (R-Fort Worth) also took a swipe at TASB’s letter to school attorneys, tweeting, “[It’s] a scare tactic to retain their monopoly on TX public schools and deter other school boards from leaving their services in the wake of [CISD’s] courageous exit.”
“TASB seeks to limit competition and stifle the search for the best value. Texas parents are sick of leftist indoctrination in schools and we look forward to Carroll ISD being the first of many school boards to leave TASB in the dust,” Schatzline claimed.
The Dallas Express reached out to TASB and asked about Davis’ response. A spokesperson replied:
“We are in receipt of Mr. Davis’s letter laying out his legal interpretation of TASB’s copyright position. We respectfully disagree with his opinion but have no intention of litigating this matter through the media.”
