TALAS E-newsletter – June 7

Superintendent Conrado Garcia of West Oso Independent School District has been selected as the 2021 Region 2 Superintendent of the Year.

According to the Region 2 Education Service Center, Garcia has effectively guided the district through difficult times, taken a leadership role in promoting safety and offering vaccination opportunities for educators, and has contributed and been credited with the current district’s status of students and community engagement.

Twin sisters graduating from Garland ISD have earned a combined $600,000 in scholarship offers.

Mayra and Melissa Alvarez are graduating from South Garland High School in the top 5% of their class and both will attend the University of Texas at Dallas this fall. 

Mayra plans on majoring in Arts and Humanities and received $373,850 in total scholarship offers. Melissa plans on majoring in Business and received $268,916 in total scholarship offers.

Seventy-five outstanding graduating seniors are receiving the annual Superintendent’s Scholarships in the amount of $3,000 each.

For over a decade, the Superintendent’s Scholarships have been funded with proceeds from the annual Superintendent’s Scholarship Golf Tournament supported by members of the business and civic community.

The student recipients were selected from each of our comprehensive high schools based on academic achievement, character, service and financial need.

A bill that would’ve allowed public schools to continue offering remote learning next school year without having their funding reduced died at the last moment in the Texas Legislature this past weekend. 

House Bill 1468 had bipartisan support and passed through both chambers of the Legislature, but because changes were made to it in that process, it went to a conference committee where lawmakers worked out a compromised version of the bill. 

It might seem impossible to squeeze in those things you need to do to get a professional leg up in these hectic times. But making headway needn’t be time-consuming or difficult. Here are eight quick and easy ways to make progress in your career.

A TikTok video of a North Carolina graduating senior has gone viral after he was denied his diploma for wearing a Mexican flag over his graduation gown.

Adolfo Hurtado was filming his cousin, Ever Lopez, during the ceremony, watching him walk down the stage at Asheboro High School wearing a Mexican flag draped over his gown, when he appeared to get stopped by a faculty member.

Educators welcome President Joe Biden’s plan to spend $20 billion — on top of the federal government’s current funding for high-poverty districts — to address the needs of schools with the greatest concentrations of disadvantaged students.

But with the new administration already getting a late start on the budget process and Republicans cringing at the size of Biden’s infrastructure and family policy proposals, it’s unclear where the additional funding will come from.

During the 2020-21 school year, 120,000 fewer new high school graduates entered the nation’s colleges and universities than the year before, according to a new analysis by the College Board.

The pandemic has particularly set back students of color, and seems to have set up significantly different education trends in two- and four-year colleges.

When Tulsa, Oklahoma fifth-grade teacher Akela Leach began her lesson this May on the race massacre that took place in the city’s Greenwood District 100 years earlier, her young students knew they were entering contentious curricular territory.

The state of Oklahoma had recently passed a controversial bill that observers described as an “antiracism teaching ban,” part of a wave of legislation from Republican lawmakers across the country to scale back discussion of systemic racism in the classroom.

‘He told our stories,’ actor Edward James Olmos says of the Chicago writer of corridos some called the ‘Chicano Woody Guthrie.’

Jesus “Chuy” Negrete composed hundreds of corridos — Mexican folk ballads.

“Some people used to say he was the Mexican Bob Dylan,” said U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, D-Ill., for whom he once wrote a corrido urging people to vote for him for mayor of Chicago.

Others “called him the Chicano Woody Guthrie,” said actor Edward James Olmos, a friend who said Mr. Negrete “was like a brother” to him.

The cover art for Areli is a Dreamer by Mexican-American author Areli Morales and illustrated by Luisa Uribe features two cities – Mexico and New York with a young Areli straddling the border between the two. The art evokes the lived experience of immigrants who live in between two worlds, never fully belonging to one or the other. In the picture book — out June 8 — Morales tells her story of being a young girl growing up in Puebla, Mexico with her grandma and brother while her parents live in New York City. She eventually moves to New York as an undocumented immigrant experiencing the highs and lows of this new home. In the author’s note she sums up the crux of the book: “I was a child of two worlds — a Mexican citizen by birth but raised as an American.”