Project Safe Schools Texas: What's Confirmed So Far

Project Safe Schools Texas: What's Confirmed So Far

North Texas law enforcement agencies announced Project Safe Schools last week, an effort that relies on individual criminal charges and civil settlements to target school employees accused of quietly moving colleagues with misconduct histories into new teaching jobs, according to KERA News. U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould said the goal of Project Safe Schools Texas is to hold school districts accountable for abuse, KERA reported. One week after the announcement, the initiative's confirmed record includes one civil settlement and wire-fraud charges tied to a single hiring dispute at Crosby Elementary, per the same report.

Raybould described a much broader problem than that one case. Sorting out what's confirmed, what's alleged, and what's simply a stated goal matters for parents, educators, and district staff trying to figure out what actually changed this week.

What the North Texas Project Safe Schools initiative has announced

Raybould said the goal is to shift what he called a "culture of noncompliance and concealing sexual abuse" in North Texas districts toward one that stops "passing the trash," KERA News reported.

"Educator misconduct is widespread," Raybould said. "And too many public school administrators in North Texas ISDs are failing to report, investigate and stop abuse," he told KERA News.

Raybould also said "a lot" of districts are currently under investigation. KERA's report did not provide a count of the districts involved.

Officials said districts that delay reporting known abuse could face "stricter civil penalties" and encouraged voluntary disclosure through a Justice Department email address, usatxn.projectsafeschools@usdoj.gov, per KERA. The supplied announcement does not identify the penalty amounts or the thresholds that would trigger them.

The Crosby Elementary case behind the initiative

The initiative's most detailed example involves Crosby Elementary, where prosecutors allege principal Wendy Bailey told job applicant Michael Roell he needed to legally change his name before applying to teach there, KERA News reported. Roell had been arrested in 2016 on an indecency charge involving a special-needs student and was later acquitted.

Roell legally changed his name to Jonathan Michael and was hired at the school, according to the report. In May, he was charged with two counts of injury to a child and one count of child grooming, with prosecutors alleging the abuse involved a special-needs student at Crosby.

Raybould drew a sharp line between this case and an ordinary personnel failure. "These are not allegations of negligence. They are allegations of deception," he said. "And they illustrate exactly how passing the trash operates inside real North Texas schools," he said.

Confirmed actions, allegations, and stated goals

The Crosby case produced the initiative's announced $14,000 civil settlement with Forney ISD, along with two wire-fraud charges filed against a teacher and a principal in the district, not against the district itself. KERA's reporting does not name which individuals face the wire-fraud counts, so it's unclear whether Bailey is among them.

In a separate case Raybould cited publicly, Plano ISD fired Brinker Elementary principal Jennifer King after accusations she ignored abuse allegations against second-grade teacher Paul Campbell, who was later charged with sexually abusing multiple students, KERA News reported. KERA's report did not identify a federal charge or settlement involving Plano ISD itself.

Statewide, the Texas Education Agency has opened more than 9,720 educator misconduct investigations over the past two years and placed at least 480 educators on its Do Not Hire registry, officials told KERA. Those totals describe the scale of Texas's existing misconduct-tracking system; the reporting does not connect them to specific Project Safe Schools cases.

Raybould also said he hopes the initiative becomes a "blueprint" for other U.S. Attorney's offices nationally, KERA News reported. That's a stated goal from one office. KERA's report did not identify a similar action underway anywhere else.

The federal law behind "passing the trash"

Districts quietly helping a staff member with a misconduct history land a new school job is the exact practice a 2015 federal provision, ESEA Section 8546, was built to address. It requires states, state education agencies, and any local district receiving ESEA funding to maintain their own laws or policies against it, according to a U.S. Department of Education study. The provision does not define what counts as "assisting" or "aiding and abetting," and it bars the Department of Education from dictating exactly how states must comply. States keep discretion over how their own laws and policies are written, the study notes.

That flexibility is the point, according to legal analysis published by NCSEsame, an education-law nonprofit: the provision itself isn't new, and adopting a policy with the right wording doesn't by itself stop the practice, the analysis argues. NCSEsame's analysis also treats a district's Title IX obligations as running on a separate track from any Section 8546 hiring check, meaning reporting an allegation to police doesn't erase a school's own duty to investigate a harassment complaint, according to NCSEsame. That same source, rather than an official OCR release, reports the Department's Office for Civil Rights opened 20 directed investigations tied to districts' 2023-24 civil rights data submissions. That figure comes from an advocacy-oriented source and has not been independently confirmed here.

State rules on school district child abuse accountability

A federal study measuring state policy as of October 2020, nearly six years ago, found real gaps beneath the surface of near-universal compliance. Every state required a criminal background check for school hires, but only 35 states had adopted at least one additional provision aimed specifically at stopping aiding-and-abetting hires, the Department of Education study found. Only 27 states required checking an applicant's employment, certification, eligibility, or disciplinary history beyond that baseline check, and only 20 states barred suppressing misconduct information in resignation or severance agreements.

Monitoring varied just as widely. Only 18 state education agencies reported tracking district compliance with anti-aiding-and-abetting laws, 21 offered districts implementation guidance, and 33 documented misconduct complaints at all, according to the same study. No current, 2026-specific figures for individual states appear in this reporting, so these numbers reflect conditions from nearly six years ago, not a snapshot of this year.

What to check next

Parents can ask their district's front office, or check the district website, for how staff misconduct reports are received, investigated, and escalated, and who serves as the Title IX coordinator. Not every district publishes this clearly, so a vague or evasive answer is itself useful information.

Texas educators and administrators can review the state's existing misconduct process on TEA's website, including how an investigative warning, which can remain on a certificate for up to 240 days, a Do Not Hire registry listing, or a referral to the State Office of Administrative Hearings may follow a complaint. Comparing a district's hiring checklist against the specific gaps this reporting identifies, including whether it checks an applicant's employment, certification, eligibility, or disciplinary history beyond a background check, and whether state law restricts suppressing misconduct information in severance agreements, is a reasonable place to start.

Anyone unsure how or when to report a suspected case of abuse should confirm current requirements directly with a state education agency or local child-protective services office rather than relying on any single article.