Texas Scorecard explains the state's new Educator Misconduct Reporting Dashboard displays data on reports submitted to the Texas Education Agency (TEA), the administrative state branch responsible for overseeing pre-K-12 public education, from various sources—including fingerprint-based criminal history alerts from the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Christin Bentley is an East Texas-based state Republican Executive Committee member representing Senate District 1 who leads the Republican Party of Texas legislative priority for Stop Sexualizing Texas Kids.
She says Texas lawmakers approved two helpful bills in the last legislative session, one of which (HB 4623) removed sovereign immunity from public schools.
"When they are negligent in their hiring, employing, or reporting practices, it results in sexual misconduct," Bentley tells AFN. "It's almost every day that we hear at least one sexual misconduct case in a Texas public school."
The dashboard data for the first eight months of the 2026 fiscal year, from September 2025 through April 2026, shows 17,060 criminal history alerts, which means an average of 2,100 Texas school employees were arrested or had their criminal records updated every month.
In fiscal year 2025, the monthly average was 1,940.
For both years, non-certified school employees accounted for three-quarters of the criminal alerts.
Bentley believes the abuse has hit a crisis point, and she attributes the increase to a culture that has sexualized children for decades.
"The TEA is responding to calls for them to be a lot more on top of these investigations and transparency," she thinks. "It's really a transparency tool, and I'm so grateful that they put it on there."
