Texas SB 869 Parental Rights in Schools: What Family and Education Law Attorneys Need to Know
Texas Senate Bill 869, signed into law on June 12, 2023, is one of several measures enacted in the 2023-2025 Texas legislative sessions addressing parental authority over public education. The law expanded several categories of parental rights relative to school districts: the right to review all teaching materials and library content before instruction; the right to withdraw a child from instruction on human sexuality or gender identity issues; the right to receive regular academic progress reports; and the right to access any survey or assessment given to the child before it is administered.
For family law practitioners, the significance of SB 869 is not principally its relationship with school districts — that enforcement mechanism is set up through the Education Code and Texas Education Agency administrative processes — but rather its interaction with Texas family court orders that govern educational decision-making authority between separated or divorced parents.
Texas courts in custody proceedings routinely allocate "rights and duties" under Texas Family Code section 151.001, including the right to receive information about the child's education and the right to make decisions about the child's education. In joint managing conservatorship — the default presumption for Texas custody orders — educational decision-making rights are typically held jointly, meaning both parents must agree on major educational decisions, or one parent is granted primary educational decision-making authority with the other retaining the right to receive information.
SB 869 creates a new category of conflict in these arrangements. A parent who holds joint educational decision-making rights may now invoke SB 869 rights to withdraw the child from specific curriculum segments, request preview of materials, or limit the child's participation in certain activities — and the other parent may disagree with that exercise. Prior Texas case law on educational decision-making disputes did not contemplate this specific fact pattern, because the parental rights in question did not exist before 2023.
The most common dispute pattern that family law attorneys are now encountering involves one parent invoking SB 869 to exclude the child from health or sexuality education, while the other parent supports the standard curriculum. Under Texas Family Code section 153.132, if one parent has been designated with the right to consent to the child's education, that parent has unilateral authority. But in true joint decision-making situations, neither parent alone has the authority to override the other on a major educational decision — and courts must adjudicate whether SB 869 creates a unilateral parental right that supersedes the family code's joint decision-making framework, or whether the family code' default requires agreement before one parent may exercise the statutory SB 869 options.
Family law attorneys should anticipate these disputes by including explicit language in mediated settlement agreements and proposed orders about how SB 869 rights will be exercised in cases of disagreement — specifically, whether one parent's invocation of SB 869 withdrawal rights requires advance notice to the other, whether it can be overridden, and which parent's choice controls in the event of dispute. Until appellate courts address the interaction between SB 869 and the family code, proactive drafting is the most reliable way to prevent post-decree litigation.