Texas Agency Urges Educator Board to Reject Three-Year Cap on Teacher Reprimands

When Texas publicly reprimands an educator, the censure is written onto the face of that person’s certificate, and nothing in the board’s disciplinary rules provides for it to expire. A petition asking the state to change that — to cap every reprimand at three years — was the only substantive item in front of the State Board for Educator Certification when it met Nov. 10, and the Texas Education Agency’s own staff had already recommended that the board refuse.

Reprimands are not a rare sanction. In the year to Aug. 31, 2025 the board issued 302 of them among 1,168 final disciplinary actions, more than any other single sanction except the 501 suspensions, by a Dispatch count of the agency’s own disciplinary action report. Only the four routes out of the profession — surrender, revocation, permanent revocation and cancellation — outnumber reprimands when they are counted together. They reach teachers, administrators, counselors, librarians, educational diagnosticians and paraprofessionals.

The item the agency posted for the meeting puts the request in a single sentence:

“The petitioner requests the SBEC amend 19 TAC 249.15, to provide that an inscribed or non-inscribed reprimand shall be issued for a defined term not to exceed three years.”

A line beneath it adds that the change “would apply to all reprimands issued by the SBEC”. The rule as it stands never speaks of a reprimand in terms of time at all. It lets the board restrict a certificate “either indefinitely or for a set term”, suspend one “for a set term”, and bar a revoked educator from reapplying “for a set term or permanently”. On reprimands it says only that the board may “issue an inscribed or non-inscribed reprimand” — giving it neither a term nor any way to set one, which is the gap the petition asks the board to close.

There are two kinds, and the difference decides who sees it. An inscribed reprimand is a published censure that appears on the face of the educator’s virtual certificate — the online record any district or parent can look up — and the agency notifies the employing district as well, if it knows of one. A non-inscribed reprimand is confidential, filed away with the investigation; but the rules let agency staff, an administrative law judge and the board “consider a non-inscribed reprimand” when weighing punishment for later misconduct. The yearly report does not say how many of the 302 were which, so how many Texas educators picked up a mark the public can see is not knowable from it.

In the item posted for the meeting, agency staff advised the board that the change would go too far. Capping reprimands, they wrote, would “significantly restructure existing SBEC sanctions by effectively nullifying the purpose of inscribed reprimands as a potential sanction, while removing any justification for the Board to issue a noninscribed reprimand”. Their second argument — that putting a term on the sanction would collide with the agency’s separate duty to keep a record of it — breaks off in mid-sentence at the foot of the page, in the document the agency itself published.

What the board made of any of it is in no written record. The meeting was webcast and archived, and the video runs 33 minutes; it carries no captions and no transcript, and this desk has neither. Minutes have not been posted, and the board’s practice has been to approve them at its next meeting. The petitioner is missing too: the item lists the petition itself as its second attachment, and the file the agency posted contains only the first.

The petition also runs against the direction the state has been moving. A dashboard the Legislature ordered last year now publishes misconduct reports, investigations and sanctions, and the registry of people barred from school employment has been widened. Texas AFT has argued in a suit against the agency that being investigated damages an educator’s reputation even when the inquiry leads nowhere — a claim about investigation flags rather than reprimands, and one the courts have so far not accepted. No organization has taken a public position on this petition; a search found none.

The agency’s own item tells the board it must act within 60 days, either denying the petition or directing staff to open rulemaking; the rule behind it is softer, asking that the board act in that time “Where possible”. If the board refused, nothing changes, and the reprimands issued in that one year stay where they are. If it did not, a proposed amendment would reach the Texas Register in the ordinary course. The first written account of either will be the minutes, which go to the board’s next scheduled meeting, Dec. 3–4.