TALAS E-newsletter – January 14

Charles Lachman, 16, opens his laptop and flips his phone to do-not-disturb when it’s time for class to start each morning.

His desk in the game room holds the essentials: A copy of “Of Mice and Men,” headphones and notebooks. Otherwise, there are limited distractions — no fellow students tapping their feet, no whispers flowing around the room.

“I can sometimes get distracted by very small things,” said Charles, who attends Frisco’s Lebanon Trail High School. But in his virtual classes: “I can pretty much stay focused on my work and get it done.”

For Sarah Baray, a dream seemed within reach as 2020 opened. More four-year-olds than ever before would spend at least part of their days in San Antonio classrooms, giggling and exploring with teachers skillfully guiding their play into crucial learning.

After four years as chief executive of an ambitious program to bring pre-K programs to San Antonio’s children, Baray saw it becoming an equalizer in the nation’s seventh-largest city, just as she knew it could.

Austin-Travis County Interim Health Authority Dr. Mark Escott said the positivity rate among school-aged children is outpacing that of the entire community.

Austin Public Health said after testing 2,560 kids ages 3 through 18 last week, 19.8% of elementary-aged students came back positive, 20.2% of high schoolers came back positive and a record 27.1% of middle schoolers came back positive.

According to the City of Austin/Travis County dashboard, the current positivity rate for the entire area (all ages) is 17.8%.

Magnolia ISD Director of Communications Denise Meyers said one of the district’s biggest accomplishments in 2020 was maintaining structure during a school year where nothing was normal.

Last year, the school district learned to navigate virtual and on-campus learning for students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking ahead, Magnolia ISD aims to continue providing a safe learning environment for students and staff while meeting the needs to a growing community.

Come January of any other odd-numbered year, I’d use this space to rile you up about how crazy the upcoming regular session of the Texas Legislature was going to be. I would be doing so, in part, to try to get people to tune in. State government is where some of the most important decisions affecting our day-to-day lives are made—schools, hospitals, roads—but it competes for attention with, well, everything else, and there’s a lot of everything else this year. The fact that the Lege is a natural font of inanities and lunacy is helpful, in that respect, like a poisonous tree frog’s unmistakably bright colors. Here lies danger.

Lawmakers report to the state Capitol on Jan. 12 for the start of the 2021 Texas legislative session. They have a difficult road ahead of them to determine the state’s biannual budget amid revenue shortfalls caused by the pandemic. And a major part of that budget is public education.

During the 2019 session, lawmakers passed House Bill 3 – a major overhaul of the state’s education finance system that allowed for teacher raises and more money per student. This year, a Democratic state representative from San Antonio, Diego Bernal, says lawmakers will have to figure out how to continue that work despite the difficult financial circumstances. He told Texas Standard that lawmakers have to do more this year than just maintain the status quo.

Chronic illnesses, the result of inadequate access to health care, are more prevalent in Texas’ Black and Latino communities, contributing to more deaths from COVID-19 and costing billions of dollars in increased health care costs and lost economic activity, according to a new study.

The study, by the Episcopal Health Foundation, a Houston nonprofit, found that disparities in both health and access to health care between Blacks, Latinos and the overall population are expected to cost Texans up to $2.7 billion annually in excess medical spending. That includes increased spending during the pandemic due to more serious cases as a result of chronic conditions, according to the report.

It’s costly, researchers said, to fail to address the roots of health inequity such as racism, poverty and access to health care.

Twenty-eight coronavirus vaccination hubs will receive most of the state’s next shipment of COVID-19 vaccines this week.

More than 877,000 Texans have received a COVID-19 vaccine since they first began arriving in Texas nearly four weeks ago, and that number is expected to increase by at least 50,000 more per day, Gov. Greg Abbott said Monday.

“Never before in the history of this state has Texas vaccinated so many people so quickly,” Abbott said during remarks at the Esports Stadium Arlington & Expo Center, a newly-designated “vaccination hub” that local health officials said can vaccinate thousands per day. “It’s stunning to see what we’ve accomplished.”

For four years, opponents of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos deplored her private school priorities, so it was hardly expected she’d be hailed as a hero for a sudden epiphany disassociating herself from President Donald Trump and resigning.

The most succinct reaction to her meaningless resignation 13 days before her term ended came in a two-word statement from a longtime nemesis, the American Federation of Teachers: Good riddance.

Taking advantage of flexibilities allowed by the U.S. Department of Education this school year, Ohio, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Tennessee and other states have moved to suspend school accountability report cards or waive or reduce the weight of certain accountability measures, like assessments, for the 2020-21 school year.

While the National Assessment of Educational Progress has been postponed until 2022, state assessments are still continuing in many places with added flexibilities. States suspending report cards or putting in place flexibilities for accountability cited the need to have supports for struggling schools and students with the aid of assessment results, while detangling those results from penalties.