TALAS E-newsletter – February 28

Students in Texas public schools are experiencing another year upturned by COVID-19 as the delta and omicron variants spread.

Texas schools appear to be turning a corner with the virus after the highly contagious omicron variant caused a surge in student and staff COVID-19 cases in January. Statewide, cases and hospitalizations have declined. For now, schools are prohibited from requiring masks, though some continue to ignore the governor’s order banning mask mandates. 

On Wednesday, First Lady Jill Biden stood in a colorful preschool classroom at the Gateway Child Development Center inside San Antonio’s Lackland Air Force Base, as the young children of service members showed off their counting skills. Afterward, military staff and families joined Biden in a discussion about service members’ access to childcare, particularly for children with disabilities.

Maariya Sheikh is just 16 years old, but every day at school she gets a lesson in inequality she says the adults around her should heed.

Drawn by a specific academic program, Sheikh chose to attend high school outside the affluent, majority-white area of Cobb County, Georgia, where she lives. Her new school is the most racially diverse in the county. It is also significantly less resourced than her middle school. Students, many from disadvantaged neighborhoods, see the difference. Her high school teachers often pay for class materials out of their own pockets. More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, they are short of hand sanitizer.

Since the end of the Great Recession, the U.S. economy has experienced tremendous growth. However, as the economy has grown, so has economic inequality, increasing dramatically across the country.

The average income of the nation’s top 10 percent of earners is now more than nine times higher than the average income of the bottom 90 percent. The pandemic is exacerbating the trend: Over the past two years, billionaires’ wealth increased more than ever before, a report by Oxfam International found. And an estimated 160 million people were pushed into poverty.

President Joe Biden made history Friday when he nominated federal appeals court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to be the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. If confirmed, however, she’ll likely face pressure to sit out one of the most important cases involving race and education in recent years. 

In 2016, she recused herself from a sexual misconduct case against the U.S. Department of Education because she has served on the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, where she previously graduated magna cum laude and served as editor of the Harvard Law Review. Prior to her confirmation hearings for a federal judgeship, she explained in a questionnaire that she “was serving on the board of a university that was evaluating its own potential response” to sexual assault guidelines.

A Latina has created a platform to provide access to scholarships worth almost $38 million for Latinos and other students interested in pursuing science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers.

María Trochimezuk, 47, created IOScholarships after noticing the amount of scholarship money that went unrewarded due to the lack of applicants. The free platform gives STEM students in high school and college a place to find scholarships, internships, work opportunities, financial education and resources based upon GPA, merit and financial background.