TALAS E-newsletter – February 9

TASA’s online Member Services Center is the place to go to become a member of TALAS. Please read these step-by-step directions or contact Debbie O’Donnell at 512.852.2108.

Fort Stockton ISD Superintendent Gabriel Zamora was disappointed after two bond proposals on the ballot last May did not pass. The week after the election, Zamora sent an email to parents, staff, and students expressing his post-election frustrations. He admits the email was not well received. The Fort Stockton Pioneer printed it as a letter to the editor, prompting a few angry responses. “But it at least made some people pay attention,” said Zamora.

Zamora set aside his frustrations and got back to work on the bond proposals, launching a communications strategy that focused on consistent, educational conversations with community members throughout the spring and summer. The board met in August with a facility advisory committee made up of more than 40 parents, staff, and community members who unanimously supported the committee’s recommendation for a November bond election.

Gov. Greg Abbott’s office is warning state agency and public university leaders this week that the use of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — policies that support groups who have been historically underrepresented or discriminated against — is illegal in hiring.

The Charles Butt Foundation is sponsoring five campus leadership teams serving Texas public schools to attend the School Turnaround Leaders institute. This institute provides your campus leadership team the opportunity to develop or refine your campus’ targeted improvement plan or school turnaround plan to ensure buy-in and improve academic performance.

The 2023 session will be held from June 5, 2023 to June 9, 2023 with travel to Harvard on June 4 and return from Harvard on June 9.

Campus leadership teams applying for this Institute must currently be assigned to a school that received an overall D or F in 2019 and which did not receive a rating of A, B, or C in 2022.

The Charles Butt Foundation is sponsoring thirty principals serving Texas public schools to attend the Achieving Excellence: Leadership Development for Principals institute. This institute will provide you the opportunity to strengthen your leadership and management skills and revitalize your personal vision of leadership. Participants will learn new methods for improving individual, group, and organizational performance.

The 2023 session will be held from July 9, 2023 to July 14, 2023 with travel to Harvard on July 8 and return from Harvard on July 14.

Growing up in northern Vermont, people who looked like Irian Adii were few and far between. She recalls that her all-white second-grade classmates spread the rumor that the young girl, who has a Black father and white mother, was sick and contagious.

“No one would touch what I touched because they thought someone that looked like me must have been, like, riddled with disease,” Adii said. One peer told her to change her skin color like pop superstar Michael Jackson did.

Educator and community activist Ted Victor was outraged when he learned Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had decided an Advanced Placement African American studies course his daughter planned to take “significantly lacks educational value.”

“No educational value, like something you can discard, something you can just throw away, something that says you are not as important as other people,” said Victor, who is Afro Latino and has taught for 25 years at the middle and high school level, and college.

The late Cuban American singer Celia Cruz, known as the Queen of Salsa, will be the first Afro Latina to appear on the U.S. quarter.

Cruz was one of the 20th century’s most celebrated Latin music artists. She recorded over 80 albums and gained worldwide fame. She was recognized with 23 gold albums, three Grammy Awards, four Latin Grammy Awards and the President’s National Medal of Arts, according to the Smithsonian Institution. She was also honored with a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2016 Grammys.