(Texas Scorecard) – Senators heard powerful testimony this week on two key public education reforms to safeguard students from predatory school employees.
Both measures address how administrators report alleged sex crimes committed against students by teachers and other school employees—what the state calls “educator misconduct” or “inappropriate relationships.”
On Tuesday, the Senate Education K-16 Committee heard from parent and student advocates, educators, abuse victims, and law enforcement on the measures.
Senate Bill 1224 by State Sen. Kevin Sparks (R–Midland) requires superintendents to report allegations of a school employee’s “romantic” or sexual contact with a student directly to outside local law enforcement within 48 hours.
Superintendents who fail to report would face a state jail felony and an administrative penalty of up to $10,000.
Current education law requires superintendents to report employees’ sexual misconduct to the Texas Education Agency within seven business days, while family law requires suspected abuse to be reported to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services within 48 hours.
Superintendents are also required to conduct their own investigations into alleged misconduct, but they are not required to report to outside law enforcement and often utilize internal school district police.
However, the Texas Education Code requires school district police to report to the superintendent.
Sparks said this creates a conflict of interest, which can—and does—lead to misconduct being swept under the rug to protect the reputation of the district.
He said some school officials who should be disciplined for sexual misconduct with students are allowed to resign rather than face punishment. They are then hired at a different school and abuse more children—an illegal process called “passing the trash.”
Sparks told committee members that an estimated 10 percent of K-12 students will experience sexual abuse by a school employee by the time they graduate from high school.
According to an analysis by Texas Education 911 titled State-Sponsored Child Abuse, the TEA received more than 2,400 reports of educators sexually abusing or having “improper relationships” with students from September 2021 to July 2024.
While it sounds innocuous, improper relationship between educator and student is a second-degree felony punishable by 2 to 20 years in prison. The offense includes sexual contact or sexually explicit communication, regardless of the student’s age.
Public Testimony on Senate Bill 1224
“Our schools are facing a crisis with educator misconduct and inadequate reporting practices that allow predators to evade justice,” Texas mom and former teacher Christin Bentley told the committee during public testimony.
She said SB 1224 is endorsed by the Republican Party of Texas, “although I do believe this is a bipartisan bill.” Bentley leads the RPT legislative efforts to Stop Sexualizing Texas Kids.
“The statistics are alarming,” she said. “In 2015, the TEA opened 188 investigations into improper educator-student relationships. By 2022, that number surged to 429, representing a 128 percent increase.”
She testified that the numbers have continued to climb and cited specific cases, including:
—A City View ISD coach who abused multiple students, quietly resigned, then committed suicide when the story became public. Seven administrators were arrested for covering up his crimes.
—An Atlanta ISD teacher with a record of sexual misconduct who was convicted of abusing students. School resource officers dismissed the allegations without examining key evidence.
—A Millsap ISD superintendent who was arrested for failing to report two special ed teachers caught on video abusing an autistic student. The teachers were also arrested.
“The current reporting system allows offenders to slip through the cracks,” added Bentley. She said SB 1224 would close loopholes, eliminate conflicts of interest, and create more safeguards to protect students.
Bentley agreed with Democrat State Sen. Royce West of Dallas that the reporting requirements should also apply to private schools, as the state has a compelling interest in protecting all children.
“We have a lot of passing the trash between public and private schools,” she added.
“Kids in schools are not being treated as citizens who are experiencing crimes. I sure wasn’t,” said Callie McDonald, who was sexually groomed and abused by a coach when she was a child—under the noses of adult school employees.
“I want you to understand that everyone turns their head, not necessarily because they have intentions that are poor, but because they don’t know what to do. We don’t have a reporting structure for grooming,” she told the committee.
McDonald testified that allowing administrators 48 hours before reporting sex crime allegations gives them time to consult lawyers and intimidate victims.
“Immediate reporting is what I’d like to move toward. As soon as you know there’s a crime, you need to report a crime,” she said.
Later in the hearing, State Sen. Jose Menéndez (D-San Antonio) asked TEA representative David Rodriguez why the current reporting requirement is seven business days.
Rodriguez replied that TEA now has an online misconduct reporting portal, giving administrators the ability to report immediately. “So I can’t think of another reason why they would need seven days.”
Shannon Ayres, state education director for Citizens Defending Freedom, testified that “In the real world, the sexual abuse of a child would be considered a crime to be reported to local law enforcement. But in a school setting, it’s considered a grievance that is investigated and adjudicated within a system that is designed to protect itself—a system that in many districts includes an independent ISD police department that reports solely to the superintendent.”
This almost never results in the justice for the child victim, and almost always prioritizes the district’s reputation over student safety. The current reporting framework has significant deficiencies that substantially undermine student protection.
Ayres said a CDF investigation of TEA’s educator misconduct data showed less than 5 percent of the educators found guilty of sexual misconduct had their teaching certificates permanently revoked as required by law.
“The bottom line is, our current system really only serves to protect the institution and not our children,” she concluded.
Texas Education 911 President Aileen Blachowski testified that SB 1224 is “best supported by independent oversight,” because in communities with close relationships between school officials and law enforcement, “the culture is to protect the system.”
Her parent advocacy network is endorsing legislation to create an independent inspector general for education.
“The system as it is, including investigations through TEA, is not adequate,” said Blachowski. “We need outside, independent investigations. We need independent oversight to accompany this bill, to ensure that we really do the very best we can to protect Texas students.”
“We must ensure serious misconduct is reported immediately and not hidden behind closed doors,” testified Brady Gray, president of Texas Family Project. “Let me be clear: as a conservative, I believe in limited government, but not when it comes to shielding predators. Parents deserve to know that their children are safe, and educators who violate that trust should face real consequences, not secret transfers and cover-ups.”
The committee also heard testimony Tuesday on Senate Bill 571 by State Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R–Houston).
Bettencourt said SB 571 is an attempt to close “loopholes” in the Do Not Hire Registry of people who are not eligible to be employed by a Texas public school based on misconduct or criminal history.
The bill would expand DNHR eligibility requirements to contractors, subcontractors, and any employees who will be physically present at an instructional facility.
The measure would also apply to the new Interagency Reportable Conduct Search Engine—established by lawmakers last session to serve four state agencies, including TEA, but not yet completed.
Public Testimony on Senate Bill 517
“We’re trying to make sure that predators can no longer find loopholes where they can simply change environments to continue to abuse. And for too long, that has been the situation in Texas,” said Jennifer Allmon, Executive Director of the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops.
Allmon testified that SB 517 “appropriately covers more than 250,000 personnel in public schools who were not previously covered by our Do Not Hire Registry.”
However, she cautioned that private schools’ noncertified personnel are not included.
“So our bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers, if they were to abuse in our schools, we cannot report them to the Do Not Hire Registry, and then they can move on to other settings. So we get this false sense of security when we check the registry,” she said.
“It’s critically important that we align the public school section of the bill with the private school section of the bill regarding these noncertified personnel,” Allmon told Bettencourt. He agreed and said he would amend his bill accordingly.
“You need to fund every dime of it because our children deserve that,” she added.
Aileen Blachowski testified on SB 517, highlighting two “non-negotiable” points.
“We must make sure that that ‘confidentiality’ doesn’t mean that the public can’t access data about reporting and misconduct, because this report here [State-Sponsored Child Abuse] exposing what’s wrong with the system would never have been possible. It’s the reason why there are so many bills on this topic this session,” she said.
She also rejected a clause stating superintendents don’t need to report misconduct if they believe the accused employee is deceased—presumably contemplating a case like Prosper ISD Superintendent Holly Ferguson’s apparent failure to report a bus driver who was arrested for molesting two young students then died a month after his arrest from injuries sustained in a jailhouse suicide attempt.
“I absolutely disagree with that premise,” said Blachowski. “Any time we’re dealing with child sex offenders, there are often victims that are not known, and those people need to see the record when they do come forward, that the person was indeed an abuser. That person should never be shielded.”
Callie McDonald agreed with Blachowski, telling the committee that the principal who covered up her assault is dead. “We should still be able to investigate the things that he did. We should still be able to report the things that he did. Dying does not make you innocent.”
“There is a mass exodus from public schools,” said McDonald. “The current reality is families in Texas don’t feel comfortable sending their kids to the schools you provide them.”
Matt Antkowiak—arguably the most compelling witness for SB 517—told the committee, “This bill is more than a legal matter, it is a moral mandate.”
“I appear before you as a subject matter expert in school-based law enforcement and in the investigation of sexual assault of children, exploitation of children,” he testified. “But I also appeared before you today as something more personal, as I’m a survivor of sexual abuse.”
Antkowiak is the police chief and director of public safety for Newman International Academy, a North Texas charter school that was recently the site of a sex abuse case involving two teachers and a principal that Antkowiak investigated alongside federal authorities.
“For more than two decades, I have dedicated my professional life to protecting children,” said Antkowiak, recounting a long list of law enforcement credentials and experience such as being a Texas master peace officer, holding multiple board certifications, and serving as a Homeland Security Task Force officer on major cases, including one of the largest multi-jurisdictional human trafficking cases in U.S. history.
I am not just an investigator, but a survivor of child sexual abuse. As a child, I endured repeated aggravated sexual assault and trauma, which was compounded by the silence of the adults that were charged to protect me and the laws that failed to protect me—not just in the courtrooms, but in the classrooms.
That legislation that you’re working deeply matters to me. It addresses structural, operational, and policy gaps that have left children vulnerable far too long.
Antkowiak asked lawmakers to focus on tangible consequences for school officials and districts who fail to act, including meaningful financial penalties and criminal prosecutions; prevention training and practices that involve ongoing care for victims; and closing “statutory conflicts and loopholes that allow abuse to hide in plain sight within our education systems.”
“Oversight must be independent and rooted in law enforcement that is outside municipal police departments, outside TEA, and outside the local education agency,” he said. “I believe there must be an independent inspector general’s office tasked to address this epidemic plaguing our schools.”
“Investigations must not only focus on the abuse itself but the process failures, cover-ups, witness tampering, and destruction of evidence that I’ve seen in recent cases that made the news in North Texas.”
Antkowiak revealed that his current case involving the arrest of three Newman educators includes a teacher who faced sexual misconduct allegations in two other school districts—one private, one public—including Fort Worth ISD, where the teacher was allowed to “resign in lieu of further investigation” after he admitted to making sexual contact with a 16-year-old female student.
Fort Worth ISD officials refused to cooperate with the chief’s investigation until he obtained a court order from a criminal district court judge in Tarrant County.
“Under sworn testimony, I can tell you that Fort Worth ISD failed to cooperate with my investigation into failure to report as well as sexual contact with a student. That educator went through a background check—which, by the way, I hope the panel understands a background check is worthless if the information is not provided to the state or the federal government, because then you don’t end up on the registry.”
Antkowiak said 11 victims had come forward regarding one suspect after a press conference about the arrests hit the internet, and five victims in five different states had also come forward on two of the educators.
“In both cases, Senator, we could have prevented this,” Antkowiak told Bettencourt.
“The whole purpose of this is to prevent, get these people out of the education system, keep them out,” Bettencourt responded.
Antkowiak noted that in addition to the two teachers charged with sexual offenses, he charged the principal with failure to report, tampering with a witness, and three counts of tampering with evidence.
“I decided to go after those processes more than those two sexual contact and sexual assault cases because I was trying to send a message across Tarrant County and Dallas County that there’s a police chief that’s not going to put up with failure to report. We’re going to charge it,” he added.
Bettencourt said it “infuriates” him to hear about “abhorrently stupid, injurious behavior” by school superintendents, “because this is part of what we’ve been passing for the last number of sessions.”
“There’s a whole bunch of bad things that can happen to a superintendent that does this,” he added.
Antkowiak said, “You have to have a mechanism to issue them with a teaching credential and then revoke it so they’re unemployable, as well as hit them with fines individually, and have teeth in a bill that hits the institution—no matter its type—through an administrative fine.”
“I’m going to do what’s right for kids, partly because of what I went through as a child, candidly. I’m going to be a voice no matter what,” Antkowiak concluded. “I literally flew down here as quick as I could today because I wanted you to hear from a police chief in the trenches that it’s hard, and you can write laws that solve this problem if you put things in place to equip me—a law with both civil and criminal penalties.”
In just the past few years, hundreds of Texas school employees have been accused of sex crimes against students and other children.
Also on Tuesday, the House Committee on Public Education heard parent-backed reform proposals, while on Wednesday, one of Texas Education 911’s top legislative priorities—eliminating governmental immunity for school districts and employees in cases of student sexual abuse—also received a committee hearing.
Seven weeks remain in the regular legislative session.