TALAS E-newsletter – October 21

If this story had been written 15 years ago, Houston would have been the star. The Houston Independent School District had “it”: effective governance and a supportive community, both of which were leading to impressive innovations and improving outcomes. At the same time, two successful charter networks — KIPP and YES Prep — launched and expanded in the region.

Today, Houston has lost “it.” While the charter sector in Houston remains strong, progress for students in the district has ground to a halt.

The Laraway Community Consolidated School District, west of Chicago, has an ample supply of housing where a family at the poverty line can find an apartment for about $1,000 per month.

But if the family wants to move their child to better schools in the nearby Elwood, Union or Manhattan districts they would be hard-pressed to find housing in that price range. 

Felicia Lozano, a barista at Starbucks and a full-time student at San Antonio College, still had to “step it up” and scramble to work more hours to cover community college and living costs this year.

To enroll in bilingual education in most school districts in California, you have to attend class in person. It’s too difficult to find enough bilingual teachers and too hard to teach a new language online, most districts say.

But one district, Montebello Unified, near Los Angeles, is taking on those challenges and offering bilingual classes to independent study students.

When violent insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 to attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, some of the rioters were members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group prone to street brawling and pro-Western, anti-Muslim, and misogynistic rhetoric. 

The insurrectionists were thwarted, but now extremist groups—including the Proud Boys—are aiming their threats and violence at a new target: public schools.

Raising bilingual children is a unique challenge for parents that speak only English. When the opportunity of a Spanish Dual Language Immersion program opened at Highlands Elementary School, one Saugus parent jumped at the chance.

At the height of the Pandemic, Marie Urquidi had a Kindergartner and a First Grader in the DLI Program when the school went to digital learning. With only a couple of years of high-school-level Spanish, she didn’t feel equipped to help her children with their lessons in Spanish for the remainder of the 2020 school year. “I enjoy doing something together as a family, and I wanted to create something that enabled monolingual families to experience a second language together,” she explains. While her kids are enrolled in bilingual education, she wanted to find a way to keep up with them.