TALAS E-newsletter – May 24

The Round Rock school district Board of Trustees on Friday selected Hafedh Azaiez as the lone finalist for the superintendent position.

Azaiez, the current superintendent of the Donna school district in South Texas, will fill the role vacated by Steve Flores this year.

“My personal philosophy is to always strive to go from good to great,” Azaiez said in a news release. “We should never stop creating more opportunities for all our students. I always enjoy dealing with challenges because I see them as opportunities to grow and make a difference.”

Edgewood ISD’s community engagement team constantly knocks on doors to educate the barrio. On a recent weekday, they went and asked Ernest Garcia to see if he was vaccinated.  

Garcia is the neighborhood handyman, a one-stop shop, so there are multiple reasons why he got vaccinated.

“My family, people around here y todo la escuala tambien [and all of the school as well,]” Garcia says.

Anne Fletcher worries her students won’t succeed.

It’s been more than a year since the coronavirus shut down most college campuses, and many of the problems that emerged at the start of the pandemic still plague Fletcher, who teaches English and developmental writing at Austin Community College.

More students than ever have dropped her courses. They’ve been battered first by the virus and, more recently, by a brutal winter storm and a major power crisis. A student who contracted Covid-19 this semester has fallen behind, but every effort Fletcher has made to reach him has been fruitless. Two of her students have been hospitalized with the virus. Several have family members who died or lost their jobs. Others struggle to remain engaged in their new virtual world.

Twenty-nine years ago, Montserrat Garibay left Mexico City for Texas with her mother and sister. They were undocumented. At a public middle school in Austin, Garibay learned English. Later, she and her sister founded one of the first organizations nationwide of so-called Dreamers, young immigrants pushing for U.S. citizenship. Garibay became a citizen herself in 2012. In Austin, she worked as a pre-K teacher, then as an official in the local teachers union. She then served as the first Latina secretary-treasurer of the Texas AFL-CIO, the state’s major union federation. This spring, she’s on her way to Washington, D.C., where she’ll work for Education Secretary Miguel Cardona as senior adviser for labor relations—a liaison position between unions and the Education Department that was scrapped during the Trump administration and resurrected this year under Joe Biden.

Had this been a non-pandemic year, Christopher Ramirez and Ashly Nicole Molina would have been in Austin on a recent Saturday afternoon. As two of the four finalists for the sixteen-and-under conjunto category in the Big Squeeze—the annual competition of Texas’s best young accordion players—they would’ve played live at the Lone Star Plaza in front of the Bullock Texas State History Museum. They would’ve felt the butterflies in their stomachs that come from standing onstage in front of a crowd, playing in front of judges, family, and other competitors. And as they did, extending and compressing the accordions’ bellows that breathe life into the instruments, moving their bodies to the rhythms and sounds, they would’ve felt that anxiety melt away. 

Your LinkedIn profile has been important to career success for years, but now that we are all WFH and rarely interacting with people in person, it has become more important than ever. Your LinkedIn profile is your first impression, and it’s also the place people go when they want to learn more about you. Focusing a little effort on your profile now will help you make a giant deposit in your personal brand bank for 2021 and beyond.

So you agree that upgrading your profile would be a valuable investment in time, but you’re not sure where to start? Here are five easy enhancements that will make sure your profile demonstrates what makes you differentiated and compelling.

Faced with an ongoing teacher shortage during the coronavirus pandemic, officials in Connecticut announced plans late last year to allow college students to teach in public school classrooms, offering aspiring educators hands-on experience while alleviating the staffing crunch for administrators.

The pilot program, dubbed NextGen Educators, is a partnership between the Connecticut State Department of Education and Central Connecticut State University. It’s already active in Bristol, where 18 education students are working as apprentice teachers in elementary school classrooms. Three additional school districts are in line to participate if the program is expanded.

There is a significant shortage of BIPOC teachers in schools across America. 

College graduations among BIPOC individuals are lower than white people, and while the number is gradually improving, the opportunity to become an educator is slimmer for these aspiring teachers than it is for their white counterparts. 

The lack of teacher diversity in education has been an issue for decades. After the U.S. Census Bureau reported in 2018 that 49.7% of all American children 0-17 years old were nonwhite, the situation became more dire. Most students today will go through public school education without being taught by a Black teacher. 

When I started my career as a fourth grade bilingual teacher, I was given two binders. One included academic standards for my state. The other was filled with the English language development (ELD) standards.

My job was to ensure that my students, all of whom were categorized as English learners (ELs), met these grade-level and proficiency standards by the end of the year.

When students read, do their personal and cultural backgrounds determine how they understand the text, or are the skills and knowledge they pick up in the classroom more important?

That’s a question currently dividing the government body that oversees what is known as The Nation’s Report Card.

The dispute centers around the role of equity in a lengthy document that could determine how the federal government designs future reading tests. The authors filled it with references to “pop-ups” or short videos defining words or terms some students might not recognize, such as a talent show.

In February 2020, Jacqueline Adam-Taylor accepted a new job almost 2,000 miles away from her home in Springfield, Massachusetts. She packed up her desk as a high school principal and moved to Fort Worth, Texas to lead a kindergarten program, just after her new school and others shuttered because of Covid-19.

The turnaround specialist felt turned around herself. So when Adam-Taylor heard about executive coaching from the nonprofit group The Learning Accelerator, she jumped at it.

The Linda Lindas are not your average mostly-teenage group of girls. In fact, they may be at the forefront of the next big social movement in music. Half Latinx and half Asian, The Linda Lindas are made up of 10-year-old drummer Mila, 13-year-old Eloise, 14-year-old Lucia, and Bella, the oldest of the group who is 16. Together, the young ladies make a sound that is part punk, part power-pop, and all raw talented sound.