Some parents want Fort Worth ISD’s board to limit outside speakers. Can they do that?

As a growing number of school boards across the state change public comment rules to give priority to parents, teachers and residents in their districts, some parents in the Fort Worth Independent School District are asking trustees to do the same.

At board meetings over the past two months, speakers have asked trustees to adopt a policy limiting the amount of time outsiders get to speak and making them wait until after district stakeholders have spoken. Advocates for those policies say they would limit the influence of outside groups and tamp down on culture war conflicts.

But are those policies legal?

“A very short answer would be yes, comma, but,” said Joy Baskin, associate executive director for policy and legal services at the Texas Association of School Boards.

Fort Worth ISD parents ask for meeting format changes

During a Sept. 26 board meeting, Sabrina Ball, a parent in the district, asked board members to consider a policy that would give priority to Fort Worth ISD stakeholders like parents, teachers and district residents during public comment.

Ball, a volunteer with Defense of Democracy, a group that advocates for inclusivity in education, argued that speakers from outside the district routinely make the public comment section drag on for too long. In many cases, those speakers advocate for policies that are outside the board’s purview, she said, and demand that biblical principles be injected into public education.

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In recent years, a number of Fort Worth ISD school board public comment sections have devolved into shouting matches over culture war issues like book bans, sex education and claims that critical race theory is being taught in schools.

“It used to be speakers were civil and polite and mainly Fort Worth ISD stakeholders,” Ball said. “Now, when a parent wants to address the board, they have to be a little brave. They might be accused of being a groomer or a pedophile or evil.”

During a school board meeting last month, a number of speakers voiced support for Ball’s proposal and asked the board to consider it. Taylor Duncan, the mother of three students at Daggett Elementary School, asked the board to allow district stakeholders to speak first, and limit all others to one minute per speaker after stakeholders are finished.

Layne Craig, who has two kids in the district, agreed, saying prioritizing stakeholders would allow the board to make better use of meeting time and focus on issues that affect families in the district. She said she would like to be able to bring her 14-year-old daughter to board meetings to advocate for equitable resource distribution across the district.

“Every time I come here, though, with the exception of tonight — so far — I have encountered foul language, signs that are homophobic and the kind of environment that I don’t feel comfortable bringing my teenager to and telling her this is democracy in our city,” she said.

Frisco, Lewisville school districts have adopted speaker policies

If Fort Worth ISD did adopt such a policy, it wouldn’t be the first district in North Texas to do so. In January, the Lewisville Independent School District began allowing district stakeholders like parents, students, teachers and district residents three minutes to speak, and limiting all other speakers to one minute. At the same time, the district began requiring speakers to register online before board meetings. Registration begins when meeting agendas are posted online, typically 72 hours before the meeting begins, and ends at 1 p.m. on the day of the meeting.

In March, the Frisco Independent School District broke its public comment section out into two categories. District employees, parents, students and residents speak during a so-called stakeholder testimony period. All others wait until a public testimony period that begins once district stakeholders are finished speaking.

Camille Rodriguez, Fort Worth ISD’s school board president, said the board is looking into the possibility of similar rules. But she acknowledged that those rules would be difficult to enforce. Speakers could give a false address or register using a post office box address, she said. She’s hesitant to adopt a policy that would create more work for district staff, who would have to sort out who counts as a stakeholder and who doesn’t.

Rodriguez said she understands why some parents and other stakeholders in the district want the board to adopt those restrictions. The fact that some activists travel across North Texas speaking at school board meetings can be frustrating for district parents who want to bring concerns before the board, she said. But the board has a responsibility to hear public comment from anyone who has something to say, whether they live in the district or not, she said.

“In the end, I’d rather just do public comment all together and see how that goes,” she said.

Districts must be careful when changing comment rules

Baskin, the Texas Association of School Boards attorney, said the conversation about reformatting public comment sections is happening in many school districts across the state. There are sound reasons school boards would want to give priority to members of the communities their districts serve, she said, but they need to be careful about how they implement them.

The Texas Open Meetings Act’s public comment rules require that boards allow members of the public to give input on any issue on an open meeting agenda before the board makes a decision on that issue. The law doesn’t define who “the public” includes, Baskin said, leaving a certain amount of room for interpretation. But as written, the law wouldn’t seem to allow school boards to shut non-residents out of public comment entirely, she said.

Policies like the one in Frisco, where district stakeholders get to speak before others, are allowed under the law, Baskin said. But in a larger district, that plan could create logistical headaches, since staff members would have to sort through large numbers of registered speakers to figure out who lives in the district and who doesn’t.

Complicating matters further is the fact that school district boundaries rarely line up neatly with city limits — thousands of students who live in Fort Worth go to school in the Crowley and Keller school districts, for example, and kids who live in certain neighborhoods in northwest Arlington go to Fort Worth ISD schools. So staff members can’t simply sort out people who live in the next town over and treat them as nonresidents.

Restricting how long a speaker gets to speak is theoretically legal, Baskin said, but districts considering implementing those rules should work closely with their attorneys to make sure they don’t run afoul of First Amendment case law. School districts are allowed to restrict speech based on time, place and manner, but not the opinions speakers express, she said. In most cases, a speaker’s viewpoint most likely won’t have anything to do with whether they live inside the district or out of it, she said, but there may be cases in which residency status has more of a bearing.

For that reason, Baskin said, districts need to make sure any rules they adopt are as clear and specific as possible, so everyone understands that the regulations are intended to make meetings run more efficiently, not to enforce restrictions on what viewpoints are allowed and what aren’t.