The Texas Legislature recently passed a bill requiring preschools to publish a notice addressing the rights of families in a preschool program. The list below is presented for your review.
A parent or guardian of a child at a child-care facility has the right to:
- Enter and examine the program during the facility’s hours of operation without advance notice;
- File a complaint against the program;
- Review the program’s publicly accessible records;
- Review the program’s written records concerning the parent’s or guardian’s child;
- Receive from the program the commission’s inspection reports for the program and information about how to access the program’s compliance history online;
- Have the program comply with a court order preventing another parent or guardian from visiting or removing the parent’s or guardian’s child;
- Be provided the contact information for the division responsible for regulating the program, including the division’s name, address, and phone number;
- Inspect any video recordings of an alleged incident of abuse or neglect involving the parent’s or guardian’s child, provided that:
- Video recordings of the alleged incident are available;
- The parent or guardian of the child is not allowed to retain any part of the video recording depicting a child who is not the parent’s or guardian’s child, and
- Before allowing a parent or guardian to inspect a video recording, a program must provide written notice to the parent or guardian of any other child captured in the video recording.
- This does not affect the ability of a law enforcement agency or the department to access a video recording as part of an investigation of an incident depicted in the video recording.
- Obtain a copy of the program’s policies and procedures;
- Review, on the request of the parent or guardian, the facility’s:
- staff training records, and
- any in-house staff training curriculum used by the facility and
- Be free from any retaliatory action by the program for exercising any of the parent’s or guardian’s rights.
- A program shall provide the parent or guardian of the child with a written copy of these no later than September 30, 2023.