TALAS E-newsletter – February 25

Texas public schools will not be required to make up the days they missed during last week’s energy blackouts.

School districts and charter networks can apply for waivers with the Texas Education Agency so the missed days don’t count against them.

TEA is also allowing districts to stay closed or go 100% remote this week as needed to complete repairs.

Damage to North Texas schools was so widespread during last week’s record-shattering winter weather that multiple schools may not be able to reopen until sometime next week.

Districts from Dallas to Arlington to Fort Worth have reported that some campuses will not be able to open on Wednesday.

Dallas ISD announced Tuesday afternoon that due to ongoing repairs, students at J.P. Starks, Lang MS, Bryan Adams HS and Lincoln HS will be virtual for the rest of this week.

The Edinburg Consolidated Independent School District Board of Trustees unanimously approved Dr. Mario Salinas as the Superintendent of Schools during a Special Called Board Meeting on Feb. 16.

Dr. Salinas became the 20th superintendent for Edinburg CISD and was selected nearly 102 years since the first superintendent was named in 1919.

“I am excited to get going and take this District to another level of quality,” said ECISD Superintendent Dr. Mario Salinas. “As a former high school principal, I am different from the 19 other superintendents that I followed. Most of those had the elementary experience. I am coming in here as a superintendent with a high school principalship experience, which is the same job, but a different perspective.”

Fabens Independent School District School Board President Rey Sepulveda passed away on Monday due to non-COVID-related health issues, according to FISD officials.

“Mr. Sepulveda was a champion for Fabens ISD,” said FISD Superintendent Dr. Veronica Vijil. “We can honor his memory by continuing to advocate for the children who he held so dearly in his heart.”

He is survived by his wife, Linda.

It wasn’t COVID-19 that worried Bruno Reis most when he moved from Miami to Creekside Forest Elementary in Tomball ISD at the end of fourth grade.

In his old school, he said, kids would misbehave and distract entire classes. Teachers would be totally lax, authoritarian or, in the case of his Spanish teacher, would pass out worksheets but do little else.

“The teacher would always give us work but never really teach us anything,” Bruno said. “But then I came here, and then all the teachers connected with us.”

Shortly after the beginning of the second semester in January, Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath declared that the state had “basically completely closed” gaps in student access to take-home computers, largely thanks to massive state and local purchases amid the pandemic.

“It’s pretty remarkable when we’ve talked about the digital divide for the better part of 20 years in the country, and we will have effectively bridged it with computing devices at the scale of Texas,” Morath said.

That success, however, could prove short-lived without more investment in the coming years.

Texas sued to block the ban on Biden’s third day in office. Federal Judge Drew Tipton had already temporarily paused it twice before Tuesday night’s order.

A federal judge in Texas put an indefinite halt to President Joe Biden’s 100-day ban on deportations late Tuesday.

The ruling by Judge Drew Tipton comes after he had already temporarily paused the moratorium twice. The ban is nationwide and is in place as the case continues to play out in courts.

The ruling is a victory for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who sued to block Biden’s order three days into the Biden administration. Paxton’s office argued the state would face financial harm if undocumented immigrants were released into the state because of costs associated with health care and education, and he said the moratorium would also lure others to Texas.

Questar III BOCES Superintendent Dr. Gladys Cruz has joined with her colleague Dr. Lupita Hightower, who leads Arizona’s Tolleson Elementary School District, to launch a groundbreaking new program for leaders who have been long underrepresented in public schools. Despite being 2,500 miles apart, Cruz and Hightower are leading The Aspiring Superintendents Academy for Latino and Latina Leaders, a project of AASA, the School Superintendents Association. AASA is a professional organization for more than 13,000 educational leaders in the United States and throughout the world.

AASA selected Cruz and Hightower to help design the academy and serve as its lead teachers, due to their recognition as leaders in the education community.

Democrats in Congress introduced a comprehensive immigration reform bill on Thursday crafted around the priorities President Joe Biden articulated on his first day in office, including a path to citizenship for the estimated 10.5 million undocumented immigrants living in the US.

If passed, the long-anticipated bill, known as the US Citizenship Act of 2021, would mark the most sweeping reform of the US immigration system since 1986 — and would be a rebuke of former President Donald Trump’s nativist agenda.

The Education Department said Monday that it will not allow states to forgo federally required standardized testing in schools this year but will give them flexibility to delay testing or hold it online during the pandemic.

Aiming for a middle ground in a polarized debate, the Biden administration said states must continue with annual testing but can apply to be exempted from certain accountability measures tied to the results.

Though all students have lost ground due to school closures amid the pandemic, Dallas Deputy Superintendent Susana Cordova says “there are bright spots illuminating a path to success for our high school students: giving them a genuine purpose for learning in high-quality career-technical education (CTE) programs.”

Cordova, citing experience rolling out innovative CTE initiatives in Colorado and Texas, says learning can carry new purpose and relevance when students are actively engaged in the “reasons for learning” and have accessible opportunities to carry what they learn into a trade, certification, or post-high school opportunity. This opportunity to rethink school programs that engage, motivate, and lead students to success, Cordova says, could serve as a means to increase racial equity at a time when Black and Latino students are widely experiencing the harshest of impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures.

Last month, workers from the state Department of Children and Families knocked on the door of Raquel, an El Salvadoran immigrant living in Worcester. DCF had gotten an anonymous call about a fight between her husband and her teenage son.   

Since then, Raquel, speaking Spanish through an interpreter, said she has struggled to communicate with DCF workers, often because of the language barrier. DCF sometimes has an interpreter available, but not always. She had to pull her 17-year-old son out of his remote class to translate one meeting.