TALAS E-newsletter – May 13

The United ISD Board of Trustees approved the employment contract of the district’s next superintendent, David H. Gonzalez, after months of deliberating and from a set of highly qualified local and regional candidates.

Gonzalez is slated to take the helm starting in the summer before the new 2021-22 school year, in which a return to on-campus instruction is expected.

“As United, we will continue moving forward as we have in the past, working together as one unit,” Gonzalez said.

Dallas ISD trustees met in a special called meeting Monday afternoon to discuss two resolutions that address legislation headed to the statehouse floor — including a bill that will bar schools from teaching Critical Race Theory.

“This would gut many of the items that we care so much about in the racial equity policy that the board passed unanimously and a lot of the training that the board has participated in, and we would even be prohibited from hiring external consultants to help do the training,” Dallas ISD superintendent Michael Hinojosa told the board. “I’m concerned that we would have to change some courses and the master schedules would have to be changed for next year.”

The Austin Independent School District has created a brand new department and hired a high-ranking Texas Education Agency official to lead a team tasked with remedying years of declining enrollment.

Alejandro Delgado, the former Deputy Chief of Staff for TEA Commissioner Mike Morath, will oversee enrollment efforts, set direction for recapturing previously departed families, engage with community stakeholders and deliver resources to campuses wishing to extend their reach within the community.

AmplioSpeech (“Amplio”), a developer of a digital platform that connects students, educators and therapists with advanced technologies to help students with special needs, announced today the launch of a digital Spanish-language dyslexia curriculum, Esperanza, developed by Dr. Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan.

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) is offering Amplio’s digital intervention platform with the Esperanza curriculum to all 1,029 school districts at no cost. Earlier this year, Amplio and TEA launched an English-language dyslexia digital intervention platform utilizing the Multisensory Teaching Approach (MTA), developed by Margaret Taylor Smith, which is also available to all Texas school districts at no cost. Esperanza is the first Spanish-language dyslexia curriculum of its kind.

Deprived for years of full recognition for his bravery in World War I, Marcelino Serna, a former Army private, was chosen by a Texas legislative committee on Friday to be posthumously awarded the Texas Legislative Medal of Honor.

Serna, a Mexican immigrant, is often considered Texas’ most decorated WWI veteran. He is credited with singlehandedly charging and capturing 24 soldiers, but further research has found other acts of bravery.

After a year of isolation as the result of COVID-19, I often find myself questioning nearly every move in newly emerging social situations: What do I say? How do I follow up? 

As we all reenter the world of networking events and corporate happy hours and hallway conversation, Harvard has a learning for healthy conversation that’s worth reading.

March marked an all-time monthly high in solo youth crossings at the U.S. southern border. Those children and teenagers could be an unexpected boon for native-born students should they reach American classrooms, a timely new study suggests.

The research, which analyzes a decade’s worth of data from over 1.3 million Florida students, links the presence of immigrant classmates with gains in academic performance for students born in the U.S., especially for Black and low-income youth.

Even without the kind of spending on Latino turnout that some had hoped to see, they registered and voted in record numbers in the 2020 presidential election, according to a City University of New York study.

The election saw a dramatic rise in registration and voting by some 18.7 million Latinos, so that about 1 in 10 voters was Latino.

The Biden administration is reversing a Trump-era policy banning undocumented students from receiving pandemic aid. 

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona announced the new plan on Tuesday, finalizing a regulation that lets universities distribute $36 billion in federal pandemic aid to students, regardless of their immigration status.

The move will help universities expand opportunities to students who are in need of financial aid. It also reflects the department’s goal to provide resources and guidance to institutions, students and communities throughout the pandemic, according to a press release. 

Now that youth aged 12 to 15 have been cleared by the FDA for COVID-19 vaccines, what’s the best way to encourage those nearly 17 million newly eligible students to get vaccinated?

Letting them skip class to receive their shots doesn’t hurt.

That’s the winning approach East Hartford, Connecticut took in late April when the district organized a “student skip day” to help approximately 1,000 eligible students receive their first dose of the coronavirus vaccine. Throughout the day, school buses shuttled students to and from an outdoor clinic complete with staffers in costume as lime green yard goats — the mascot for Hartford’s minor league baseball team — dancing to tunes served up by a DJ over vibrating loudspeakers.

The coronavirus pandemic forced many college students to adapt to a new normal — leaving campus and taking classes remotely. And, while these changes played an important role in limiting the transmission of the virus, many Latino students struggled to keep up during the lockdowns.

The health crisis has pulled out from under the carpet many realities that we had not wanted to see until now, but it has also placed health professionals in a preeminent place, whom we have seen working grueling days stuffed in isolation suits and facing uncertainty and numerous human losses on the front line.