TALAS E-newsletter – May 10

Fredericksburg Independent School District’s Board of Trustees named Dr. Joe Rodriguez as the lone finalist for the open superintendent position.

The announcement came during a special 5:30 p.m. meeting Friday, April 30.

Rodriguez is bringing 21 years of public education experience, previously serving as a teacher, principal and district leader, and most recently serving as chief of schools for Fort Bend Independent School District.

Socorro ISD Superintendent Jose Espinoza resigned from his post Wednesday night following a special Board of Trustees meeting to discuss and take action on his contract.

Espinoza’s employment contract was initially effected in 2012 and was amended seven times to extend his time in office. Espinoza’s most recent contract was extended following a “satisfactory” annual evaluation and was set to expire in 2025.

It’s a fact of life.

Girls get their periods.

Periods arrive at unexpected times – quite often at school.

It causes anxiety and embarrassment and nobody likes to talk about it.

Natalia Rojas remembers evenings spent at Victoria school board meetings, watching her mom advocate for equal education for Latino students in the 1980s.

Usually, she and her siblings were the only kids in the audience. The other school board members, all men, didn’t typically bring their kids with them.

Rojas’ mom, Theresa Gutierrez, was the first Mexican American woman elected to Victoria’s school board. In her 12 years on the school board, Gutierrez said she learned repeatedly how important representation was.

The El Paso Independent School District Board of Trustees wants input as it moves forward with the search for a permanent superintendent of schools.

The district launched a survey that will help the Texas Association of School Boards Executive Search Services, the firm trustees hired to help in the search, create an EPISD specific leadership profile.

To access the survey, please log on to www.episd.org/superintendentsearch.

The past 12 months has delivered some huge changes to the modern workplace, and employer attitudes towards remote working have shifted massively in response. In early 2020, it would have seemed ridiculous to question the working pattern of 9-5 Monday to Friday in the office – but now we are seeing numerous global companies shedding office space in major cities across the world, with plans to increase the amount of remote work available.

With some element of remote working looking set to stay with us for the foreseeable future, what effects will this have on today’s job seekers, and how can you adapt to ensure you’re still able to land the best jobs available to you?

Children with special needs are among those whose learning has suffered the most because of the pandemic. But that’s not what Juliana Urtubey sees when she looks at her students at Booker Elementary in Las Vegas.

“Our brains work in slightly different ways. Our job is to find all of our students’ strengths,” she said about special education teachers. That perspective, she said, has given her an advantage over the past year. “I was mining for students’ strengths.”

Nearly 90% of schools offered some type of in-person learning in March, half were fully reopened, and the percentage of schools offering only virtual instruction was cut in half, according to the latest data from the Education Department. But the significant improvements in the reopening landscape overshadow a stubborn racial gap in which more than half of students of color are still receiving remote-only education compared to less than a quarter of their white peers.

A project funded by Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan found housing instability to be the largest predictor of chronic absenteeism, with 15% of that population missing at least 10% of their school days. The Detroit Public Schools Community District, which has a high homeless population, has a 56% chronic absenteeism rate for all students.

Minneapolis Public Schools’ Stable Homes Stable Schools initiative helps families pay rent and maintain consistent housing while also providing wraparound services. The three-year pilot program launched in May 2019 as a partnership between the City of Minneapolis, the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority, Hennepin County and the school district.

Alarms sounded at the University of Maryland when the Class of 2022 arrived at College Park. Seven percent of freshmen in fall 2018 were Black, down from 10 percent the year before and 13 percent in 2014.

It marked a nadir for a metric crucial to the flagship university’s commitment to diversity in a state where about a third of public high school graduates each year are Black.

When Karina Carrillo’s daughter was 2 1/2 years old, staff at her day care center began expressing concerns that little Larrissa wasn’t talking, didn’t maintain eye contact and had a hard time following directions.

They suspected she had autism and advised her mother to get an evaluation. But Carrillo, who had never heard of autism, brushed off the advice.

In her birthplace of Quito, Ecuador, autism is not well-known nor is it discussed. Many are unfamiliar with the signs associated with autism or how services could help a young child. Carrillo had assumed Larrissa was misbehaving when she didn’t respond to directions or when she had emotional meltdowns.

Daniel Aleman always knew that he wanted to write a novel about a Mexican American teen from an immigrant family. That urge, he said, became even stronger as anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant rhetoric ramped up during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“I heard the words, ‘Mexicans are bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,’ and something awakened deep inside of me,” Aleman said of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s 2015 speech. “Donald Trump’s words were heard around the world, and they seem to leave like this resounding echo in the Mexican community that we couldn’t quite run away from.”