TALAS E-newsletter – February 1

The Dallas ISD Board of Trustees Thursday night adopted three calendars for the next two school years, with the majority of schools set to have a traditional calendar. The calendars represent a bold investment, of up to $100 million, to support the Dallas ISD students who need it the most.

Schools that get buy-in from families, teachers and campus staff now have the option to rethink the school year. Research shows the pandemic could seriously impact students academically, and an extended school year calendar helps make sure students get the extra support needed to stay on a path to success. Meanwhile, teachers and campus staff who work at a school with an extended year can make a considerably higher annual salary that counts toward retirement.

Corpus Christi ISD is facing a shortage of bilingual teachers at a time when many students need them most.

Maria Alvarado has been teaching English Learning students for roughly 10 years. She currently teaches fourth grade students at Zavala Elementary and said it’s difficult to teach EL students because some come to her school almost directly from their native countries.

“When my students come in, their native language is Spanish,” Alvarado said. “To be able to juggle the instruction in English and Spanish, you want them to understand academically what they need to know, but you have to do it in their language because then they won’t understand.

Immunize El Paso announced Friday that it will partner with the Socorro Independent School District to expand Covid-19 vaccine efforts. The local nonprofit has also petitioned the state of Texas to become a ‘Hub Provider’ of vaccinations.

Immunize El Paso currently has three permanent locations capable of offering Covid-19 vaccines to up to 500 El Pasoans a day, and a new drive-thru location the group plans to open in February would increase their capability to up to 1,000 a day.

Texas public school students must show up in person to take the STAAR test this spring, and districts can apply for waivers to socially distance test takers, according to recent guidance released by the Texas Education Agency.

The state is moving forward with the state standardized tests, taken in grades three through 12, this spring and summer during the pandemic and requiring students to take them at a “monitored” testing site. School districts can set up sites outside of their schools, including performing arts centers, hotels and recreation centers where they can “ensure equitable access and maintain test security.”

Two freshman Republican state representatives want to stop undocumented immigrants from being able to pay in-state tuition at Texas’ public universities, they announced Friday. Immigrant advocacy groups immediately criticized the plan as insensitive and dehumanizing.

State Reps. Jeff Cason of Bedford and Bryan Slaton of Royse City said the bill they are co-authoring will allow colleges to determine a student’s residency status and decide if they then qualify for in-state tuition.

Texas State Demographer Lloyd B. Potter says he expects there to be a census undercount in South Texas.

Speaking at a virtual Senate redistricting committee hearing on Tuesday, Potter said he has concerns about how accurate the count was during Census 2020.

“Historically there has been an undercount in places in South Texas. In the 2010 census that was an area that certainly had indications of an undercount. There were some contested count resolutions, concerns, there, and in other parts of the state as well,” Potter said, “but, yes, the lower Rio Grande Valley and Laredo, there were some pretty strong indications there was an undercount in those areas.”

Fannin Elementary teacher Valeria Ruiz started out teaching her Pre-K students virtually this school year.

“I was definitely nervous, Pre-K is a lot of socialization and I was like, how can I help them socialize online, through a screen?” said Ruiz.

Despite the new challenge, Ruiz says it was one of her students who made her realize she was doing something right.

“Miguel was always the first one to log on and he used to always say ‘Hello, did you miss me?’ every single day and that was so great it would just get me so excited to begin class,” said Ruiz.

One day Ruiz captured Miguel’s voice on camera excited for the day.

An executive order signed by President Joe Biden is intended to address food insecurity caused by the pandemic by extending a benefit to a federal nutrition program and focusing resources on children who have missed meals due to closed schools over the last several months.

The executive order, signed by Biden on Friday, directs the U.S. Department of Agriculture to consider issuing new guidance to allow states to increase emergency benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (commonly called SNAP) that Congress has approved but have not been made available to those in need due to the pandemic.

Days before the Senate runoffs in Georgia this month, a canvasser with the Latino progressive political group Mijente knocked on the door of an 80-year-old man who didn’t know there was an election or who was running.

The man asked the canvasser to talk to him about who was best for the community, and that’s who would get his vote, said Tania Unzueta Carrasco, political director for Mijente, who related the story told to her by a canvasser.

After her Jan. 7 resignation, former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos left office with little to show for her signature push to fund private school scholarships through federal tax credits.

But on the heels of Espinoza v. Montana Dept. of Revenue, a Supreme Court ruling from June 2020 in which a 5-4 conservative majority ruled that states could not constitutionally exclude religious institutions from participating in programs that subsidize private school tuition, and in the throes of a deadly pandemic that has led many families to seek new education opportunities, a number of state governments are now expanding programs that provide publicly funded scholarships for private schools.

The College Board’s decision on Jan. 19, 2021 to eliminate the essay portion of the SAT may have delighted millions of current and future high school students but its discontinuation could also be a loss for students of color and those whose primary language isn’t English.

“The essay may actually have been particularly helpful for predicting the college success of disadvantaged students,” said Jack Buckley, a former head of research at the College Board, via email. “Ironic that, at a time when standardized testing is under immense pressure not only due to the pandemic but also from the anti-racist movement, CB [College Board] would discontinue a feature of their flagship college entrance examination that their own research argues helped level the playing field.” 

Carmen Vázquez, a longtime LGBTQ and social justice activist, died Wednesday due to Covid-19-related complications, according to the National LGBTQ Task Force.

She was 72.

“The loss of Carmen tears open a hole in the heart of the LGBTQ+, social justice, immigration, reproductive justice, and sexual freedom movements,” Rea Carey, the task force’s executive director, said in a statement. “I’m deeply sad that one of our movement’s most brilliant activists is no longer with us. Rest in power, Carmen. We will continue your work for liberation.”

The new documentary “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It” premiered at the virtual Sundance Film Festival on Friday. As you can probably guess, the film focuses on the indomitable EGOT-winning icon Boricua.

According to the film’s director, fellow Boricua Mariem Pérez Riera, the movie is supposed to offer a stripped-down and intimate portrait of the real Rita Moreno.

“We always knew that we wanted this documentary to not be just a showreel of her career and how great she is,” Pérez Riera told NBC News.

“When I make or watch a documentary, I want to be able to know that person more than just what I already know, so it was very important for me to go deeper and to understand her as a human being.”