Educator Board to Consider Petition Capping Teacher Reprimands at Three Years

The State Board for Educator Certification will meet Nov. 10 in Austin to decide whether to take up a question it has never answered: whether a reprimand on a Texas educator’s record should ever expire.

A Texas resident, business or organization may ask a state agency to change one of its rules, and the Administrative Procedure Act gives the agency 60 days either to refuse in writing, with reasons, or to begin the rulemaking. Someone has asked this board to amend the rule listing the sanctions it can impose so that a reprimand runs for a defined term of no longer than three years. Nothing the board had published by Nov. 2 named the petitioner or said what its staff will recommend.

The rule sets terms for its other sanctions but none for a reprimand. The board may restrict a certificate “either indefinitely or for a set term,” suspend one “for a set term,” and revoke one with no chance to reapply “for a set term or permanently.” On reprimands it says only that the board may “issue an inscribed or non-inscribed reprimand.” An inscribed one is a published censure on the face of the educator’s virtual certificate, the official record the state keeps online; a non-inscribed one is confidential but stays in the agency’s file and can count against the educator if the board later has evidence of further misconduct. An educator can seek a rehearing or appeal, but no rule lets a reprimand lapse with time.

Lawmakers have put a clock on something adjacent. When they told the board to post notices of alleged misconduct on an educator’s public certification record, they also required rules setting how long such a notice may stay there, and required the board to bring a case or take it down when time runs out. But that covers unproven accusations, not sanctions imposed after a finding, and a reprimand’s permanence can be defended as deliberate: it is the mildest sanction the board has and the only lasting mark it leaves. Nothing in the Education Code chapters on certification and misconduct, or in the Administrative Procedure Act, sets a term for one.

The sitting is a one-item meeting on a date absent from the board’s published 2026 calendar, which lists eight meeting days and jumps from Sept. 18 to Dec. 3 and 4. Neither the notice nor that page gives a reason for the added date. The notice sets aside up to 30 minutes at the start for comment on non-agenda and consent items, so how the board will take comment on the petition itself is not spelled out; late registration to speak is accepted up to half an hour before the start.

Meeting at a glance

Board members

• Courtney Boswell MacDonald — chair; Kerrville; community volunteer.
• Julia Dvorak — vice chair; Liberty Hill; public relations consultant.
• Bena Glasscock — secretary; Adrian; child services coordinator, Hereford schools.
• Latisha D. Andrews — Houston; founder and superintendent, Beta Academy.
• Cassidy Estes — Amarillo; fifth-grade language arts teacher, Amarillo schools.
• Rex Gore — Austin; company president.
• JoMeka Gray — Belton; elementary teacher, Temple schools.
• Michael D. McFarland — Crowley; superintendent, Crowley schools.
• Tara Turk-Zaafran — Houston; former vice principal and science teacher.
• Kathy Ward — Plano; former special education teacher and county commissioner.
• Bobbie Lynn Weir — Dallas; technical education teacher, Richardson High School.

Roster from the agency’s board member page, checked November 2, cross-checked against the governor’s appointment releases. That page is stale on the vice chair: it still gives Pflugerville and a term that expired in 2025, while the governor’s November 2025 reappointment gives Liberty Hill and a term to 2031. JoMeka Gray was appointed in February 2026 to the seat of Jean Streepey, who resigned. Four non-voting members also sit: a dean of education, a representative of educator preparation, and staff of the Texas Education Agency and the Higher Education Coordinating Board. Meeting contact: Kameryn McCain, (512) 463-6469.