In what can only be termed a huge victory for the future of Amateur Radio in Texas, Governor Rick Perry recently signed Senate Bill 11 (SB11) into law in June. Among many disaster response specifications, the new law contains two important Amateur Radio-related provisions: State employees who are ham radio operators may to take up to 10 days of paid leave while participating in a disaster response or training exercise, and Amateur Radio is now allowed in all Texas public schools.
Amateur Radio has been effectively "locked out" of most Texas schools for years, banned right along with boom boxes and cell phones. When school starts this fall, Texas teachers will be legally allowed to conduct classroom-based ham radio activities and students will be allowed form school-based ham radio clubs. Students who hold a ham license will be allowed to use radios at school even if they are not directly involved in a club.
Ham Radio Gets "Equal Access"
A single sentence in Article 2 of SB11 modifies the legal definition of a banned paging device by adding the following ham radio exception: "The term does not include an Amateur Radio under the control of an operator who holds an Amateur Radio Station License issued by the Federal Communications Commission."
Although schools can still have basic rules of classroom decorum to insure that ham radio activities do not disturb academic instruction, SB 11 effectively puts ham radio programs on the same legal footing with all other student-initiated clubs and activities. Texas school teachers are now free to start ham radio programs. Students are now free to form school-based ham radio clubs. Individual students who have a ham license are even legally allowed to possess ham radios at school regardless of whether a club exists yet.
Texas is the first state to enact such a sweeping change allowing school-based ham radio programs statewide. It is hoped that similar measures will be enacted in other states. Local clubs in Texas are urged to contact their school boards and encourage them to bring school policies regarding student possession of RF devices into compliance with the new law.
Fixing an Old "Flaw"
A decades-old provision in the Texas Education Code (Section 37.082) long ago granted Texas schools blanket authority to ban student possession of all RF devices, including ham radios. The old law was originally enacted with the best of intentions, but had unintended negative consequences both for student safety and for the cause of Amateur Radio. More than 20 years ago Texas -- like many states at the time -- passed a law granting schools sweeping authority to ban student possession of "paging devices." The original intent of the law was to prevent on-campus drug dealers from communicating with one another using now-obsolete numeric pagers. Cut off their communication, the logic went, and drugs on campus would be seriously curtailed.
The old law broadly defined a prohibited "paging device" as any RF device which had the ability to vibrate, emit a sound, display a message, or in any way convey a communication to the possessor. There was no exception for school-based Amateur Radio programs or clubs. Practically all Texas schools immediately exercised their newly-granted right by banning all RF devices to the maximum extent allowed by law -- and sometimes to a greater extent than the law allowed.
For example, some schools went so far as to write policies banning mobile units in cars, even though the Texas Attorney General specifically ruled the practice to be unlawful. The old law granted schools the legal authority to ban RF devices far beyond the schoolhouse doors, at off-campus locations during nights and weekends if the student was doing anything broadly defined as "school related." Merely possessing a cell phone or radio was often considered by school authorities to be the same category of offense as possession of large quantities of drugs or bomb-making materials. With "zero tolerance" policies bring the norm, a handheld in a kid's backpack could easily get him expelled for the entire school year, and the radio seized by school officials.
The result of the old law was that in most Texas schools, starting a ham radio club was simply out of the question. Existing ham radio programs were even removed from some San Antonio area schools as a direct result of the old law.
The old law -- originally intended to reduce drugs on campus -- actually decreased student safety by regulating out of the school environment or any school activity the ability of a student to promptly summon help by calling 911 from a cell phone or putting out a MAYDAY call over the radio.
In recent years, some schools have loosened cell phone restrictions to a small degree in the name of student safety. This move has come about in response to such disasters as Columbine and 9/11, and also in response to some high profile child abductions that attracted media attention -- not the least of which was the abduction and murder of Amber Hagerman, after whom the "Amber Alert" is named. Parents and school officials are slowly warming up to cell phones since all modern cell phones now come with built-in tracking capability that can allow police to locate a missing child (or at least the child's cell phone) within seconds. Some 10,000 children are abducted in Texas each year.
Individual schools in Texas have largely been very slow to back down from their 100 percent bans on all RF devices. As recently as five years ago, three out of four public school students in the North Texas area were still prohibited from even possessing any kind of RF device at school. The old no-exceptions law certainly proved harmful to the ARRL's vision of establishing ham clubs and programs throughout the nation's schools as an investment in the future of Amateur Radio.
SB11 takes effect on September
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