(Just The News)—The Texas House on Wednesday passed with strong bipartisan support a bill to address what’s been called the “sexual abuse crisis” in Texas public schools.
HB 4623, filed by state Rep. Mitch Little, R-Lewisville, seeks to provide redress in response to tens of thousands of complaints filed against Texas educators.
“We have a sexual abuse crisis in our public schools in Texas. It’s indisputable and we can’t look away,” Little said when discussing his bill on the House floor Tuesday night.
“In 2019, this chamber established a mandatory educator misconduct reporting portal. Between September 21, 2021, and July 2024, there were 52,782 total complaints recorded against Texas educators,” he said.
Little said he paid $60 to have the House Printing Office print out a spreadsheet detailing the complaints by House district, which totals 1,533 pages.
“In the last three years, there were 6,888 reports of sexual and violent misconduct by public school employees against our students in the state of Texas,” he said. “As of July 2024, 6,654 of these allegations were left unresolved.”
The report lists 44,349 educators “who were flagged as ‘do not hire’ in the state of Texas. Yet, enforcement actions remain either inconsistent or nonexistent at all,” he said.
His bill “seeks to provide for civil claims against Texas public schools or professional school employees when there is justification,” according to the bill analysis. It removes sovereign immunity from public school districts for certain acts and omissions by their employees to constitute sexual misconduct.
“We now cannot go in Texas one single week without learning of a new active sex abuse against a child in our public schools. These are euphemistically referred to as an ‘improper relationship’ between a student and educator. That is not what this is,” Little said, referring to sex abuse of a child.
There were 38,778 abuse cases reported statewide, but no formal investigation was opened in response to any of them, he said, referring to the report.
“We must do better. We can do better. This bill will allow the courts some ability to at least … address the harms that are occurring in our public school system,” he said.
The bill would amend state code “to make an independent school district or open-enrollment charter school liable for an act or omission that is committed by a professional school employee against a student enrolled in the district or charter school,” including sexual misconduct or failure to report suspected child abuse or neglect as required under state law.
The bill requires that a professional school employee who committed the act or omission be named as a defendant and makes the district or charter school and employee jointly and severally liable. It requires the claimant to be awarded actual damages, court costs, and reasonable and necessary attorney’s fees. The bill establishes that these remedies are in addition to any other legal remedies.
It defines a professional school employee as a superintendent, principal or equivalent chief operating officer, teacher, substitute teacher, supervisor, social worker, school counselor, nurse, and teacher’s aide employed by a district or charter school; a contract teacher; student in education preparation program; school bus driver; school board member or trustee, among others.
It defines “sexual misconduct” as any sexual abuse or conduct including “trafficking of persons; continuous sexual abuse of young child or disabled individual; public lewdness; indecent exposure; indecency with a child; improper relationship between educator and student; invasive visual recording; unlawful disclosure or promotion of intimate visual material; unlawful production or distribution of certain sexually explicit videos; voyeurism; sexual coercion; unlawful electronic transmission of sexually explicit visual material; sexual assault; indecent assault; aggravated sexual assault; or sexual performance by a child,” according to the bill language.
The bill passed with widespread bipartisan support by a vote of 109 to 19.
The 19 who voted against the bill include Republicans and Democrats: Darby; Davis, Y.; Flores; Gates; González, J.; Goodwin; Hayes; Howard; Jones, V.; Manuel; Morales, C.; Reynolds; Rodríguez Ramos; Romero; Schofield; Simmons; Smithee; Thompson; Vo, according to an unofficial vote reported by the Texas Legislature.
Six voted “present, not voting”: Anchía; Bryant; Collier; Harris(C); Hinojosa, and the speaker, who has generally voted present on motions and bills before the chamber.
The bill heads to the Senate for consideration.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
