TALAS E-newsletter – February 18

Millions of Texans are without power, heat and essential services during a winter storm that has led to freezing temperatures and hazardous road conditions throughout the state.

City officials, local outreach teams and other organizations are providing warming shelters and support for people seeking help. Many nonprofit organizations are also asking for donations so they can help people experiencing homelessness or those who are in need of support. Here’s a list of the resources being offered in cities across the state.

Due to the ongoing weather crisis throughout Texas, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) is allowing school districts to submit waivers to cancel classes in the next few days.

According to TEA, school districts can submit “missed school day waiver” requests to the TEA if their area is experiencing widespread power outages.

An advisory sent to school districts across Texas states that districts will have to submit the waiver following the weather event’s passing.

A school with a majority Hispanic student body is embracing Black History Month.

“One thing I love about my students is they are open and wanting to learn about the Black culture and the Black community, and Black history,” said teacher Shyra Moody.

Moody and several students spoke with KHOU about what they’ve been doing for Black History Month.

“And they, you know, are very open to expressing what they’ve learned and talked about what they’ve learned and how it affects them today,” said Moody.

On Sunday, kids in the Borderland woke up to a winter wonderland when a winter storm dropped inches of snow in the area. Inches!

By Monday morning, that snow was still on the ground. But instead of kids building snowmen, having snowball fights or simply staying bundled up in bed, most were sitting in front of their computers or tablets, learning virtually.

As much of the world has evolved with technology – save for a Zoom filter here or there – through virtual learning and online meetings, are snow days a thing of the past? The short answer is yes.

“I can even think back to when I was a kid and, ‘oh yay, no school, we get to go out and play in the snow,’ and certainly it’s fun for children – we don’t see that very frequently in this town,” said Fabens Independent School District Superintendent Dr. Veronica Vijil.

The stage is set for local school board races and many are lining up to represent the interests of their communities and ensure a better future for younger generations.

Elections for school board will be held on May 1. Area school districts closed their filing periods for candidates last Friday.

The Ysleta Independent School District will stick with its current leadership in four positions. No challengers have signed up to compete against incumbents Shane Haggerty, Cruz A. Ochoa Jr., Carlos Bustillos and Kathryn Lucero, according to the YISD website.

El Paso Independent School District board trustees Bob Geske and Chuck Taylor do not appear to be running for reelection, according to the district’s website. Trustees Josh Acevedo and Diane M. Dye will be competing to keep their seats on the school board.

Texas students need additional resources to overcome academic setbacks brought on by the pandemic, but school leaders aren’t so sure they’ll have the flexibility to spend new federal dollars to help them.

The federal government gave Texas two big education stimulus packages — totaling around $6.8 billion — to help students recover from the pandemic.

But as the first package of $1.3 billion flowed to districts, local school administrators saw aid cut elsewhere. It was hard to keep up with the new needs driven by the pandemic— such as physical improvements to campuses so students can learn safely in person and expanded online infrastructure for those in remote classes — as Texas used federal dollars to replace state funding.

After winter storms continued to barrage the state Tuesday night, officials with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the body overseeing the grid that serves 90 percent of the state’s homes, couldn’t offer a timeline for when power for every Texan would be restored. Over the long weekend, the council had advised local utilities to shed energy use with rolling outages in order to maintain the reliability of the electric system after a surge in demand, or otherwise risk uncontrolled blackouts that will take longer to reverse. Some four million homes in the state had been left in the lurch without energy in the bitter cold—many for over fifty hours—and as of Wednesday morning, 2.7 million homes still lacked power.

After a months-long push by students in the nation’s second-largest public school system, leaders in Los Angeles approved a plan on Tuesday to cut the district’s security force by a third, joining a growing number of cities that have reduced the presence of police officers in school hallways.

Calls to downsize or significantly alter police forces surged during nationwide protests across the country last summer after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But those efforts have faced roadblocks in the months since, making schools one of the few places where major changes have been enacted.

To protect students who are learning English from being forced into schools for the sole purpose of testing, and to enable parents to withdraw them from testing if they do not feel safe sending their children to school, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE), TESOL, League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and several other organizations sent a letter to then-president-elect Joe Biden’s education transition team before his inauguration. The letter asks for the prioritizing of issuing guidance for state and local education agencies to make sure all students can maintain their health and well-being.

Welcome to Race on Campus. This week, Katie Mangan talked to an expert about one of the most troubling flips in the college-enrollment scene: the decline in Latino/a students, a population many see as key to higher education’s future.

For years, Latina/o students have been the fastest-growing segment of undergraduates, and in the fall of 2019, they were the only demographic to chalk up enrollment gains. But by the fall of 2020, their families disproportionately devastated by Covid-19-related sickness and job losses, the number of Latino first-time freshmen tumbled by 20 percent, according to a recent report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Racial gaps especially pronounced in more segregated schools

In predominately minority schools, when surrounded by other non-white students, Black and Hispanic students are less likely to receive the specialized education services they need, Todd Elder and Scott Imberman of Michigan State University, and David Figlio and Claudia Persico of Northwestern University report in a new article for Education Next.