TALAS E-newsletter – January 10

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

The Beltrán family always stocks two to three cases of bottled water in the cluttered garage of their home in Grand Prairie, Texas. They’ve used it to drink and cook for 15 years. And they trek to the nearest Walmart to stay fully stocked. 

“We got here and the water was salty, super salty,” Santa Barbara Beltrán, 72, said in Spanish. “We buy jugs of water for cooking.”

President Joe Biden’s plea to keep schools open in the face of the fast-spreading Omicron variant is confronting major challenges this week as staff shortages, illnesses and labor unrest grip some of the nation’s biggest school systems just as students are supposed to return from winter break.

White students are especially likely to go to a school where most of their classmates share their racial or ethnic background, a new analysis has found.

The same is true for students of all backgrounds but the rate remains highest among white children, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Department of Education data.

Alma Lopez, a counselor at Livingston Middle School in Livingston, Calif., went to college almost by chance.

The daughter of Mexican immigrants growing up in a predominately white, rural neighborhood, Lopez, was never called in to meet with her high school counselor, who was white. One day she asked a fellow student about a California State University, Fresno sweatshirt he was wearing at the time. The conversation led her to apply and later attend the school.

She had no knowledge of financial aid she could apply for, no insight into what the college experience as a first-generation student would entail, and no clue how much her family would initially struggle emotionally with the move.

In 2011, eight large school districts formed a network to figure out how to implement research on effective social and emotional learning programming into real-life, districtwide practices.

To the surprise of several participants, not only did those districts discover it was possible to expand their SEL practices, they’ve also sustained high-quality programming despite changes in local leadership and budgets. The districts also saw positive student outcomes as a result of their collaborations and independent efforts.

From reimagining the classroom to tearing down imposter syndrome, author, critic and fierce public intellectual bell hooks inspired women of color across generations to create a world in which all are free to reach their potential.

Born Gloria Jean Watkins in rural, segregated Kentucky, hooks graduated from Stanford University in 1974 with a degree in English literature. Throughout the course of her career, she wrote dozens of books under the name she adopted to honor her maternal great-grandmother. Each one helped cement her reputation as a great thinker, a woman whose observations about education, race and love would earn iconic status among the many students she taught through the years and the hordes of other college and graduate students assigned her work.