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Daily Using/Supporting
| Amateur Radio Now Legal In All Public Schools |
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| Saturday, 14 July 2007 | |
In what can only be termed a huge victory for the future of Amateur Radio in Texas, Governor Rick Perry 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. 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." 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. 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 The old law was originally enacted with the best of intentions, but had unintended negative consequences both for student safety and for the cause of Amateur Radio.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. 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. 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. SB11 takes effect on September 1. -- James Alderman, KF5WT This is a reprint of this article from The ARRL Letter, Volume 26, Number 28 (Friday, July 13, 2007). This article is reprinted under permission granted by the ARRL - The National Association of Amateur Radio. |
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